1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Where Hayek would let private banks issue competing paper currencies held to value by reputation alone, Hazlitt draws a firm line. Reviewing Choice in Currency and Denationalization of Money, he embraces the assault on legal-tender monopoly, repeal the tender laws, he agrees, and let citizens contract in gold, Swiss francs, or D-marks so that an inflating state punishes itself as users flee its notes. But American free banking, with its worthless Michigan banknotes and recurrent panics, teaches him to distrust irredeemable private paper and Hayek's vague commodity-basket 'ducat.' Sound private money, he counters, must be gold or silver certificates redeemable on demand, treated like warehouse receipts, with overissue prosecuted as fraud. The result he wants is not denationalized fiat but denationalized custody of a full-reserve metallic standard.
If it continued to inflate, its citizens would forsake its money for other currencies. Inflation would no longer pay.
Between 1933 and 1953, economics was reshaped by three visible debates—Keynesian macroeconomics, the theories of imperfect and monopolistic competition, and the new welfare economics of Hicks and Kaldor—but the deeper story, Lachmann contends, is the slow displacement of static equilibrium by problems of time, knowledge, and expectation. Welfare economics he dismisses as ingenious yet politically remote; Keynesian theory as coherent but valid only for extreme situations of depression or wartime inflation, where factors can be treated as homogeneous. Chamberlin, Robinson, and Harrod exposed the unreality of perfect competition yet still classified market forms statically. The constructive alternative is Swedish Process Analysis, which distinguishes the coherence of a single plan from the compatibility of all plans, together with a redefinition of competition not as a market form but as the process by which knowledge spreads and one form turns into another.
In reality, as every newspaper reader knows, politicians pursue power, not welfare.
Never again, Hayek predicts in this 1977 lecture, will reliable money come from government; it must be issued competitively by private enterprises kept honest by the threat of losing customers. He demystifies gold along the way, its value under the gold standard flowing not from the metal but from redeemability, which forced control of quantity. Three episodes carry the point: Austria after Menger's 1879 counsel to end free coinage of depreciating silver, British India's parallel suspension, and Sweden's wartime halt to free gold coinage in 1916, each showing that a currency can hold value above its metallic content through quantity control alone. Competition among distinctly named private currencies, converging on stable purchasing power, is his alternative to a monopoly that breeds either accelerating inflation or price controls and planning.
The gold standard is the only method we have yet found to place a discipline on the government, and government will behave reasonably only if it is forced to do so.
Money, capital, law, psychology, method: Machlup reads more than fifty years of Hayek’s writing as one sustained inquiry into how coordination arises under limited knowledge — an appraisal offered here in Kurt Leube and Alfred Bosch’s German translation of his 1974 English essay, expanded with a biography and Nobel materials. He joins Hayek’s early Austrian-Wicksellian cycle theory, in which credit expansion lengthens production beyond voluntary saving and forces malinvestment, to the neglected Pure Theory of Capital and its intertemporal equilibrium. He follows the path from the Misesian calculation debate to the deeper problem of dispersed knowledge, where prices coordinate by economizing on what no central planner could ever gather. Of all Hayek’s fields, Machlup ranks capital theory first.
Wenn ich das Fachgebiet auszuwählen hätte, auf dem Hayeks Beiträge am fundamentalsten und bahnbrechendsten waren, dann fiele meine Wahl auf die Kapitaltheorie.
English translation: “If I had to select the field in which Hayek's contributions have been most fundamental and pathbreaking, my choice would fall on capital theory.”
What made Adam Smith great, Hayek maintains in this 1976 essay, was not technical originality about value, distribution, or money, much of which had been anticipated before him, but his grasp of how complex cooperation becomes possible without anyone directing it. Recast in modern terms, Smith's division of labour becomes a theory of dispersed knowledge: the individual, guided by prices toward the likely gain of receipts over outlay rather than toward visible wants, serves a great society he cannot survey. Hayek corrects the old libel that Smith preached selfishness, insisting the argument is institutional, not ethical. And he enlists Smith's man of system, who would arrange people like pieces on a chessboard, against the constructivism behind modern demands for social justice and centrally assigned shares.
The great society indeed became possible by the individual directing his own efforts not towards visible wants but towards what the signals of the market represented as the likely gain of receipts over outlay.
The instruments to stop inflation exist; the will does not, and that gap is Hayek's diagnosis in this 1978 lecture. Central banks command the base of the credit pyramid, but democratic commitments to full employment, coupled with unions that push money wages above market-clearing levels, make expansion the path of least resistance. Drawing on Mises, Hume, and Cantillon, he shows that new money enters at particular points and spreads as a price gradient rather than a uniform rise, misleading entrepreneurs and corrupting accounting so that spurious profits are taxed as though real. Because the stimulus works only by surprise, inflation must accelerate to keep its effect, and stop-go policy grows ever more unstable. Durable stability, he concludes, requires restoring flexible wage determination before any international reform can hold.
My main aim tonight is to bring out clearly why we must stop inflation if we are to preserve a viable society of free men.
No genuine reform of the international monetary system emerged from the 1976 Jamaica Agreement — so Machlup argues in this sharp commentary answering Dr. Slighton’s defense, which, read carefully, concedes nearly every charge the prosecution had made. The agreement supplies neither an adequate adjustment mechanism nor an orderly means of controlling international liquidity, and liquidity and adjustment, he insists, hang together: reserve-rich countries postpone correction while intervening ones inflate their money supplies. Against the claim that flexible rates impose their own discipline, he notes that internationally, borrowed reserves can enlarge the effective reserve base. He sketches three routes — rules on intervention, a gold-for-SDR substitution account, a Witteveen-style cap — and dismisses “politically impossible” as a temporary condition of education, recalling that dollar devaluation was once unspeakable.
Nothing of what I have said is well thought out: I have spoken impromptu. But I think we must have the courage of saying foolish things because, eventually, out of foolish things, wise things may be distilled.
Textbook models of perfect competition assume away the very thing real markets accomplish: because they presuppose that all relevant facts are already known, they make rivalry look wasteful and pointless. Hayek turns the objection around, arguing that competition earns its keep precisely as a discovery procedure, a way of eliciting information about scarcities, uses, and capacities that no participant or planner holds in advance. He reframes the market not as an economy governed by a single ranking of ends but as a catallaxy, a self-correcting order steered by negative feedback and price signals, whose value can be judged only by comparing societies rather than by predicting particular outcomes. Along the way he defends pattern prediction, rejects the language of equilibrium, and warns that incomes policy freezes adjustment exactly when circumstances demand movement.
But which goods are scarce goods, or which things are goods, and how scarce or valuable they are – these are precisely the things which competition has to discover.
Thirty years after The Road to Serfdom, Hayek returns to its warning from the vantage of the inflationary 1970s, insisting he never claimed that limited intervention must automatically breed tyranny, only that bad principles corrode the market order on which political freedom rests. His diagnosis is constitutional: representative democracy has been wrongly fused with unlimited parliamentary sovereignty, so that parties bidding for majorities must buy support by granting favours to organized interests. Recovering the classical distinction between law as general rules of just conduct and command aimed at particular groups, he exposes social justice as continual coercive adjustment and sketches a deliberately utopian remedy, two assemblies, one governing and administering, the other confined to general law by long non-renewable terms, with a constitutional court policing the boundary between them.
Although the threat to free institutions now comes from a source different from that with which I was concerned 30 years ago, it has become even more acute than it was then.
Written in Geneva in 1938-39 and left unpublished until 1978, this prewar analysis diagnoses the doctrines that made another European war likely. Its subject is not party guilt but collectivism in all its rival costumes, fascism, National Socialism, Bolshevism, socialism, interventionism, militant nationalism, each of which swells the state into an instrument for directing social life in the name of a collective whole. Mises rejects the ordinary map of right and left, traces how a German liberalism built from Western ideas of rights and self-rule was overrun by Prussian militarism, etatism, and protectionism, and argues that National Socialism was the mass-democratic culmination of these currents rather than a primitive relapse into the old Prussian spirit. Nationalism, on his account, is the imperialist by-product of interventionist economics, which turns tariffs, schools, and borders into prizes to be seized.
Staat ist Gewaltanwendung und Bereitschaft, Gewalt anzuwenden.
English translation: “The state is the application of force and the readiness to apply force.”
Two rival traditions, Hayek argues, have long shared a single name. One is British and evolutionary, defining liberty as protection from arbitrary coercion under known general rules; the other Continental and constructivist, rationalist and democratic, bent on remaking society toward collective purposes. Tracing the first from Greek isonomia through Roman private law, the medieval and common-law struggles against personal rule, and the Scottish moral philosophers, he reconstructs liberalism as a discipline of political humility rooted in human ignorance. Its core is equality before the law, not equality of condition; its safeguards are constitutionalism, separation of powers, and a protected private sphere. From this he refuses to divide political from economic freedom, treats social justice as incompatible with general rules, and confines democracy to a method of changing rulers rather than a source of unlimited power.
High and low alike sought liberty by insisting on enlarging the number of rules under which they lived.
Reviewing C. D. Darlington's sweeping The Evolution of Man and Society, Hayek grants the geneticist his historical range while resisting a single overreach: the habit of treating whatever is not consciously rational as therefore innate. Between biological instinct and deliberate reason he inserts a neglected third category, pre-rational learning, above all the imitation of early childhood, through which durable dispositions pass without passing through the genes. This is his theory of tacit knowledge-how applied to inheritance: humans are biologically fitted to learn and absorb traditions, but the particular practices they acquire are culturally transmitted, and unlike genetic endowment such culture can pass on acquired characters. Culture thus evolves on a pattern parallel to biology, yet faster and more fragile. Citing Ryle, Dobzhansky, and Gavin de Beer, he concludes the old controversy should be allowed to die.
But we must not confuse the inherited capacity to learn a great variety of modes of conduct with an heredity of particular modes of conduct.