Hayek and the Conditions of Freedom

Abstract

Hayek’s work as a political theorist is both focused and diversified. As an economist, of course, Hayek was preoccupied with such issues as the socialist calculation debate, an issue inherited from von Mises. But his political focus is directly on identifying the character of freedom. One version of this focus argues that many supposed defects of capitalism are often functional to social progress. Thus, wealthy people, abused as privileged parasites in much socialist argument, explore and develop new and better forms of life that will be taken up more widely as the generations pass. Again, market prices ought not to be controlled by states because they are part of a discovery procedure indispensable to entrepreneurs. Markets generate prosperity, and people all over the world want to migrate toward wealth. The selfish striving for gain found among entrepreneurs, Hayek tells us, “enables him to do, precisely what he ought to do in order to improve the chances of any member of his society, taken at random.”¹