Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [20]
Hayek would have offered his immediate assent, adding, perhaps, that Keynes’s passage carries with it the implication that those who fail to understand the origins of the ideas do so at their peril. Given the many years of his life that he spent diligently toiling, the perennial advocate of causes that most of his contemporaries thought of as lost, anachronistic, or a return to reaction, perhaps no person better represents the notion of the power of ideas in the twentieth century than does F. A. Hayek.
Bruce Caldwell
1 Wendell Wilkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943).
2 In his “Note on Publishing History” prepared for the fiftieth anniversary edition of the book, Milton Friedman noted that by 1994 Chicago had sold approximately 250,000 copies, and that nearly twenty authorized translations had been published. The 350,000 figure is an estimate provided by the Press in 2005. Friedman’s introduction and note may be found in the appendix.
3 Letter, Isaiah Berlin to Elizabeth Morrow, April 4, 1945, reprinted in Isaiah Berlin: Letters, 1928– 46, ed. Henry Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 540.
4 Letter, Gardiner Means to William Benton, December 28, 1944, in the University of Chicago Press collection, box 230, folder 2, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Ill.
5 Letter, Rudolf Carnap to Karl Popper, February 9, 1946, quoted in Mark Notturno, “Popper’s Critique of Scientific Socialism, or Carnap and His Co-Workers,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 29, March 1999, p. 41. Given his comment, Carnap may have read A. R. Sweezy’s review in the November 5, 1944, issue of PM, a leftist outlet, where Hayek’s book was dubbed a “textbook for reactionaries.”
6 Readers of his preface to the 1976 edition, in this volume, will see that he amended some of these views in his later years.
7 This last task, evidently, is of necessity always specific to a time and place, with each new generation of readers taking away from it different lessons. As such, I will simply alert the reader that this introduction was written by an American historian of economic thought, and was last modified in late 2005.
8 F. A. Hayek, Prices and Production (London: Routledge and Sons, 1931). A Collected Works edition of the book is anticipated.
9 John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, 2 vols. [1930], reprinted as volumes 5 and 6 (1971) of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, ed. Austin Robinson and Donald Moggridge, 30 vols. (London: Macmillan [for the Royal Economic Society], 1971–89). Hayek’s exchanges with Keynes and Sraffa, including correspondence, is reproduced in Contra Keynes and Cambridge: Essays, Correspondence, ed. Bruce Caldwell, vol. 9 (1995) of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and London: Routledge).
10 F. A. Hayek, “The Trend of Economic Thinking,” Economica, vol. 13, May 1933, pp. 121–37; reprinted as chapter 1 of The Trend of Economic Thinking: Essays on Political Economists and Economic History, ed. W. W. Bartley III and Stephen Kresge, vol. 3 (1991) of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, op. cit., pp. 17–34.
11 For more on the history of the two schools, see Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chapters 1–4.
12 This reminiscence is taken from a file card that was among a number that Hayek had written to provide information for Bill Bartley, who was to be Hayek’s biographer. (Bartley died in 1990 before getting very far along with the biography.) Transcriptions of the file cards are included in an unpublished document that Bartley playfully titled “Hayek Biography: ‘Inductive Basis.’” Bartley was a philosopher trained in the Popperian tradition, and the “inductive basis” is a term in that tradition for the body of facts against which theories are tested. The quotation may be found on p. 78.
13 F. A. Hayek, Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, ed. Stephen Kresge and