F A Hayek’s Road to Serfdom

Thomas W. Hazlett interviewed Professor F A Hayek in 1992.

“Sometimes you have to live a long time just to be proved right. When Friedrich August von Hayek, born in 1899, died March 23 in Freiberg, Germany, he had outlived both Keynes and Marx. Happily for the human race, so have his ideas.

[Contributing Editor Thomas W. Hazlett interviewed Hayek in 1977, shortly before starting graduate school in economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.]

Reason: Of your bestselling The Road to Serfdom, John Maynard Keynes wrote: "In my opinion it is a grand book.... Morally and philosophically I find myself in agree- ment with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement." Why would Keynes say this about a volume that was deeply critical of the Keynesian viewpoint?

 

Hayek: Because he believed that he was fundamentally still a classical English liberal and wasn't quite aware of how far he had moved away from it. His basic ideas were still those of individual freedom. He did not think systematically enough to see the conflicts. He was, in a sense, corrupted by political necessity. His famous phrase about, "in the long run we're all dead," is a verv good illustration of being constrained by what is now politicallv possible. He stopped thinking about what, in the long run, is desirable. For that reason, I think it will turn out that he will not be a maker of long-run opinion, and his ideas were of a fashion which, fortunately, is now passing away”.

 

One has to have an open mind to accept honestly other side of thinking like one by J M Keynes! But not his followers at least as of now.