The archive.

For a century, Mill's exalted tributes to Harriet Taylor were dismissed as the delusion of a besotted logician. Assembling letters, family testimony, and a scrupulous chronology, Hayek sets out to replace legend with evidence, tracing the friendship from Harriet's radical circle around W. J. Fox through scandal, chronic illness, concealed journeys to Italy, the 1851 marriage, and her death at Avignon in 1858. The documents present the bond as moral and intellectual discipline rather than romance: Harriet emerges as collaborator on the Principles of Political Economy and on the essays toward On Liberty, a judgment that reshaped Mill's rationalism. Hayek's method is his argument, letting dates and manuscripts do the work where gossip once ruled. What begins as archival restraint ends in bereavement, the edition closing on the widower's grief.

The spring of my life is broken.

By the end of the First World War, Hayek recalls, liberalism had all but ceased to be a living tradition for the young, kept alive only in the rhetoric of aging statesmen who no longer stirred the imagination. This short tribute to Ludwig von Mises, given here in the 1967 translation of the 1951 original, traces how economic freedom survived that eclipse through scattered teachers rather than parties: Edwin Cannan and his London pupils, Mises and the Austrian circle, Frank Knight and the Chicago school, and the German neoliberals Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke. Mises holds the centre as the one thinker who rebuilt liberal doctrine most systematically. Liberalism, Hayek concludes, is less a policy preference than an inherited discipline that must be taught, translated and renewed before it can again become a living body of thought.

Gone is the day when the few remaining liberals each went his own way in solitude and derision; gone the day when they found no response among the young.

Can measures that accelerate mobilization today weaken the capacity to fight an unforeseen war tomorrow? In these statements at the 1951 Conference on the Economics of Mobilization, Hayek treats market adaptability as a military resource. His concern is not only that controls misallocate production, but that they create dependencies and habits of authority that outlast the emergency. European rent regulation supplies a concrete example; business leaders’ attraction to directing whole industries complicates any easy opposition between business and government. The article offers a focused encounter with Hayek’s argument that wartime efficiency requires room for relative prices to change—including prices to fall—and for entrepreneurs to discover economies that planners cannot anticipate. Preparedness, on this account, must be judged by its capacity for readjustment, not merely its immediate output.

Democracy can endanger liberty—but does that make monarchy a safer alternative? In this review of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality, Friedrich August von Hayek welcomes a Catholic monarchist’s challenge to democratic assumptions while resisting his conclusions. Hayek’s decisive question is whether threats to freedom arise from democratic institutions or from governmental aims, especially expanding control of economic life, that could prove equally destructive under autocracy. His measured disagreement shows how one can value an opponent’s historical learning without accepting his political prescription. The review also weighs religious explanations of Europe’s uneven experience with parliamentary government against the different democratic traditions those societies inherited. Its compact argument distinguishes peaceful political change from the protection of personal liberty, refusing to assume that either guarantees the other.

Can a tax intended to reduce inequality instead protect established wealth against new competitors? In this review essay, presented in its 1953 English translation, Friedrich August von Hayek uses Walter J. Blum and Harry Kalven Jr.’s examination of progressive taxation to challenge its claims to justice. His distinctive objection concerns the treatment of identical services: annual progression can leave two people with different net rewards for the same work because their earlier earnings differ. He also argues that restricting new fortunes can obstruct upward mobility. Yet his position is not an unconditional demand for flat income-tax rates: he allows progression where it offsets indirect taxes borne by poorer people. The essay makes that distinction central, exposing the tension between redistribution, equal treatment, and political power over a taxpaying minority.

When the prestige of physics and biology tempts social thinkers to borrow their methods wholesale, the result, Hayek argues, is not science but scientism: a prejudiced approach that decides how to study society before examining it. This volume gathers his studies on that abuse of reason, first defending a subjectivist, compositive method in which institutions such as money, law, and markets exist only as the beliefs and purposes of those who use them, and collective terms like 'society' name patterns of individual conduct rather than agents. It then narrates the counter-revolution historically, from the École Polytechnique and Saint-Simon's engineers through Comtean sociology and its convergence with Hegel, tracing how impatience with evolved orders turned science into a model for social command. The through-line is epistemic: planning fails because dispersed knowledge exceeds any single directing mind.

So far as human actions are concerned the things are what the acting people think they are.

A government can act with full legislative authority and still exercise arbitrary power. This distinction drives Hayek’s two-installment essay, which asks what laws must be like if they are to protect freedom rather than merely authorize officials. His historical perspective connects English resistance to royal monopolies with the demand for general, predictable rules, making economic regulation a constitutional question. Yet his argument is not a blanket rejection of administrative judgment: measures against disease, fire, and unsafe buildings help him distinguish applying a rule from pursuing a government’s changing preferences. Readers can discover both the substance of that distinction and Hayek’s contentious case that economic planning and legal positivism erode it—even when power is democratically granted.

That the law should be an instrument to be used by the individuals for their ends and not an instrument used upon the people by the legislators is the ultimate meaning of the Rule of Law.

Can government help capital cross borders without deciding where it should be invested? In this 1953 article, Hayek proposes replacing American intergovernmental aid to Europe with temporary guarantees for private investment against political risks such as blocked transfers, discriminatory taxation, and expropriation. Investors would still choose borrowers and bear commercial losses. His objection to continued aid is not simply its cost: he argues that making recipient governments the chief suppliers of capital strengthens their control over business. The proposal exposes a tension within his preference for limited government: political uncertainty may require public protection if private investment is to resume. Readers can examine the precise boundary he draws between insuring against state action and directing economic activity.

How could Lord Acton praise the American Revolution yet condemn the French? In this 1953 review of studies by Gertrude Himmelfarb and G. E. Fasnacht, Hayek treats that contrast as a clue to competing understandings of liberty, not simply a contradiction in Acton’s thought. He locates Acton within an English Whig inheritance that he sharply distinguishes from French intellectualist democracy. His political commitments shape his critical judgments: he welcomes Himmelfarb’s reconstruction of Acton’s intellectual development but questions her account of his distance from Burke, while valuing Fasnacht’s systematic use of fragmentary writings. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek as a reader of liberal history, showing what he believed was at stake in recovering Acton’s unfinished philosophy of liberty.

No purely factual history is possible in any politically relevant sense, Hayek maintains, because citizens judge their institutions through inherited stories about what those institutions have done. Introducing a wider inquiry into capitalism and industrialization, he takes aim at one such story: the legend that the Industrial Revolution impoverished and degraded the working classes. Drawing on Clapham and on concessions later made by the Hammonds, he argues that real wages and living standards generally rose, and that capital accumulation let a vastly larger proletarian population survive at all. Visible urban misery, Corn Law-era Tory propaganda against manufacturers, and socialist historicism from Marx to Sombart and the Webbs together fixed the darker picture as common sense. Hardship, he counters, more often flowed from monopoly, state action, and precapitalist restrictions than from the competitive order itself.

Political opinion and views about historical events ever have been and always must be closely connected.

Technical sophistication can narrow an economist’s understanding as well as sharpen it. In this review of Joseph Schumpeter’s posthumous History of Economic Analysis, later collected as “Schumpeter on the History of Economics,” Hayek asks what historical scholarship contributes to professional judgment. He admires Schumpeter’s command of original sources and willingness to unsettle familiar rankings, giving neglected thinkers their due while questioning the standing of canonical figures. Yet admiration does not erase disagreement: Hayek distinguishes Marx’s historical influence from his analytical achievement and objects to Schumpeter’s contemptuous treatment of nineteenth-century liberalism. This brief review offers a revealing encounter between two economists’ judgments—and a concrete account of why knowing older arguments matters when applying modern technical knowledge.

A functioning market, this revised Cologne lecture insists, demands not an absent state but a deliberately maintained legal framework — general, predictable rules applied equally to all, sharply distinguished from the discretionary administrative commands that corrode economic coordination. Speaking into the German debate over the soziale Marktwirtschaft and alongside Walter Eucken's ordoliberalism, Hayek presses the case in strict rule-of-law terms and dismantles the textbook ideal of 'perfect competition,' which mistakes an imagined final state for the discovery process by which markets actually work. He defends even the distressed, overinvested industry's right to fail against demands for cartels and protection, holding that competition's painful verdicts perform an accounting no administrative body can replace. The decisive task, he concludes, is educating opinion to accept competition consistently rather than licensing exceptions whenever it turns temporarily harmful.

Was wir wollen, ist nicht universelle Konkurrenz, sondern universelle Möglichkeit der Konkurrenz.

English translation: “What we want is not universal competition, but the universal possibility of competition.”