Hayek's Challenge

Caldwell, general editor of Hayek’s Collected Works, writes the intellectual rather than the personal biography. He starts with the Vienna of Mach and Wieser and Hayek’s early work in theoretical psychology, moves through the technical business-cycle economics of the 1930s and the defeat by Keynes, and organizes the book around what he calls Hayek’s transformation — the turn away from equilibrium analysis toward knowledge, competition as a discovery procedure, evolved rules, and a standing argument about the limits of what social science can know about its own subject. The “challenge” of the title is that last item: a methodological objection aimed as much at economists as at planners.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s Austrian school section, where four Hayek titles and three books about him run together; Caldwell is the list’s guide to how the parts of Hayek fit, and to why the psychology and the economics are the same project.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Austrian School Economics. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Epistemology — the methodological core of Hayek’s challenge.
• Knowledge — the problem the whole body of work is organized around.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.