Introduction

Abstract

Hayek received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1974. In a brief speech made at the Laureates’ banquet, Hayek commented that he would not have recommended the creation of such an award. One of his fears — that it ‘would tend to accentuate the swings of scientific fashion’ — had been assuaged by his own award (‘to one whose views are as unfashionable as mine are’) but he was troubled on a second count: ‘[i]t is that the Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess’ (Hayek, cited from Machlup, 1977a, p. xviii). That comment is consistent with Hayek’s view of the multi-volume series of Keynes’s Collected Writings: a distinction ‘for which Newton, Darwin, and the great British philosophers still have to wait’ and more ‘a token of idolatry … than proportionate to his contribution to the advance of scientific knowledge’ (Hayek, 1983, p. 48). The irony is that the first of the multi-volume series of Hayek’s Collected Works appeared four years before Hayek’s death! Yet, although Hayek’s work has achieved that level of veneration about which he had expressed doubts, when the serious press carried his half-page obituaries, few among those who read them had heard of the man. Even among academic economists, the significance of his work remains lost to a majority:

[w]hen the definitive history of economic analysis comes to be written, a leading character in the drama … will be Professor Hayek. Hayek’s economic writings … are almost unknown to the modern student; it is hardly remembered that there was a time when the new theories of Hayek were the principal rivals of the new theories of Keynes. Which was right, Keynes or Hayek? (Hicks, 1967b, p. 203)

If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations.

(Hayek, 1960, p. 1)

[I]n economics you can never establish a truth once and for all but have always to convince every generation anew.

(Hayek, 1991b, p. 38)