The long Hayek Week continues, a full two weeks after Cato’s all-star panel on The Constitution of Liberty. The Washington Post today features George Mason University professor Russell Roberts and his Hayek-Keynes rap videos.
And by reading the actual print edition of the New York Times Book Review, I discovered that the same issue that included Francis Fukuyama’s review of the The Constitution of Liberty last Sunday also included a letter from one David Beffert of Washington, D.C., coincidentally responding to a review of Fukuyama’s own new book. Beffert wrote:
I enjoyed Michael Lind’s April 17 review of Francis Fukuyama’s important new book, “The Origins of Political Order.” But even as someone who prefers John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi to F. A. Hayek, I still feel compelled to defend Hayek from Lind’s mischaracterization. While I agree with Fukuyama’s argument that, as Lind puts it, “a strong and capable state has always been a precondition for a flourishing capitalist economy,” Hayek can hardly be accused of trying “to explain society in terms of Homo economicus.” A doctor of law and political science, Hayek afforded the state a central role in his philosophy — specifically, he saw the Rechtsstaat, constitutional government enforcing the rule of law, as a guarantor of liberty and a functioning capitalist order. In that sense he, like Fukuyama, is closer to the 19th-century sociological tradition than to neoclassical economists, who would appear to be Lind’s real target.
Speaking of misconceptions about Hayek, if you Google “soros hayek,” the first item that comes up is a page of letters in the Atlantic Monthly taking Soros to task for misunderstanding Hayek — in 1997. Tadd Wilson argues:
Soros cites Hayek as an advocate of laissez-faire and then goes on to reject laissez-faire economics on the grounds that it is a dogmatic system at once claiming and demanding perfect knowledge and equilibrium. Of course, Hayek’s major contribution to economics was his critique of scientific assumptions in equilibrium-based economics. In a nutshell, Hayek argues that the market process relies on contextual, personal knowledge to coordinate the activities of millions of individual participants — a vaguely Popperian notion. Soros misses Hayek’s crucial point.
This is much the same criticism that Bruce Caldwell made of Soros’s understanding of Hayek two weeks ago. Considering the many complaints that were raised about Fukuyama’s understanding of Hayek, we can only ask: Why can’t the Times get someone like, say, David Beffert or Tadd Wilson to review Hayek?
By the way, if you Google Hayek, you’ll discover that it’s a big week for Salma Hayek, too. They’re not related, but you can find a slightly dated comparison here.
