Hayek on Hayek

An Autobiographical Dialogue

Stephen Kresge, Leif Wenar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429637933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book traces the life's work of a man now widely regarded as one of the greatest economists, political philosophers and social theorists of the century. The result is the most alive and accessible introduction to Hayek to date.

PART ONE

Vienna–New York–Vienna

The earliest paternal ancestor of whom more than the bare name is known is my great-great-grandfather, Josef Hayek (1750–1830), who in 1789 obtained the minor title of nobility (the “von”), which the family since bears. His father Laurenz Hayek had served one of the great aristocratic landowners of Moravia at his estate near Brünn (Brno), but had died when his son Josef was not yet five years old. Josef Hayek followed the landowner to Vienna as secretary when he was appointed to high government office, and after returning with him to Moravia became steward of the estate. In this capacity Josef Hayek developed two new textile factories in Moravia and Lower Austria, which, in turn, led to the formation of two new villages. He eventually also became a partner in these factories and acquired a substantial fortune. This was a significant achievement in the Austria of 1789, and it was this that led Kaiser Josef II to ennoble him at the early age of thirty-nine. Josef von Hayek had it inserted into his patent of nobility that both his father and grandfather had served in the Silesian wars. Apart from this, alas, I know nothing of these earlier ancestors.

Josef’s son, Heinrich, used his substantial inheritance to study law, then married a gifted singer, Franziska Zwierzina; became a civil servant in one of the ministries in Vienna, where he probably had to work for only two or three hours each morning; and spent a long, dignified, and comfortable life as a gentleman. His son, my grandfather Gustav von Hayek, born in Brünn, was first educated by private tutors and later attended an elegant and fashionable school in Vienna, the Theresianum, at that time still reserved to members of the nobility. But he left school prematurely, several months before he would have obtained the matura necessary to enter university. He became a naval officer, and indeed seems to have been a bit of a young naval dandy. The earliest photograph that is preserved shows him thus as a naval cadet in Venice, then a base of the Austrian fleet.

To the misfortune of Gustav, his expectations of a career in the navy were dashed. His father Heinrich somehow, late in life, while his son was in the navy, lost the fortune on which the family’s comfortable existence depended. I do not know the details of this disaster, but much of the money appears to have been lost already in the 1860s, long before the crisis of 1873 when so many of the upper-middle class in Austria lost their fortunes; and the situation was later made worse for the son (after he had already married and started a family) in that he also failed to inherit, as he had expected, that portion of the original fortune which had gone to his maiden aunts. Thus my grandfather, whether from simple dissatisfaction with navy life or to afford to marry (something not easy to accomplish on the tiny salary of a junior naval officer), or for some other reason, decided, by the time he had reached his late twenties, also to quit the navy. I say “or for some other reason” because he seems to have led a rather flashy life in the navy, which would hardly have been possible to continue without a fortune, and because there was a story that I only dimly remember of how the young cadet had once appeared on the promenade with some irregular adornment to his uniform and was saved from a seemingly inevitable punishment only by the commanding admiral’s appearing the next day with the same modification to his own uniform.

Gustav returned to his studies after some difficulties arising from his premature departure from Gymnasium, studied natural history and biology, and eventually became a schoolmaster, a professor at a Gymnasium. Some of his systematic works on biology became fairly well known. Very briefly he enjoyed hopes of higher prospects when as an ornithologist he engaged the interest of Crown Prince Rudolf and was charged by him with organizing the first international ornithological exhibition at Vienna in 1881. But these hopes were disappointed when the Crown Prince committed suicide in 1889. This biological interest was continued by my father August Edler von Hayek, my two younger brothers (one an anatomist and the other a chemist), and reappeared in my daughter (an entomologist).

If my father’s parents, however proud of their gentility and ancestry, lived in modest circumstances, my mother’s parents, the von Jurascheks—although from a “younger” family and ennobled over a generation later—were definitely upper-class bourgeoisie and wealthier by far. My grandfather Franz von Juraschek had been a university professor and later a top-ranking civil servant, with a scholarly background and international reputation as a statistician. He was able to support an appropriate standard of life by what must have been a nice fortune of his wife.

The von Jurascheks were housed in a magnificent, even grandiose, top-floor flat of ten rooms at Kärtnerstrasse 55, where they kept at least three servants. This was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful flats in Vienna, across the Kärtnerstrasse from the opera and facing the Ringstrasse, in a building that was later, in 1914, after my grandfather’s death, torn down and replaced by the new Hotel Bristol. My grandparents’ flat was a second home to me where I spent, apart from at least every other Sunday afternoon, longer periods when my parents were away on occasional journeys or after my father’s serious illness in the autumn of 1912 or so. Since the youngest child of my grandfather’s second marriage, my uncle Franz, was only four or five years my senior, the family present at those Sunday gatherings was large and would include a continuous range of ages from my grandparents themselves to my youngest cousins.

My parents were exceedingly well suited to each other, and their married life seemed (not only to me) one of unclouded happiness. Although in the early years money must have been scarce (the small salary of my father, just appointed Armenarzt [municipal physician for the poor, the lowest rank of the Medical Office of Health], was at first just about equalled by the income from my mother’s small fortune, the total amounting, I believe, to something like $2,000 in 1898), they were, during most of their life, fairly comfortably situated.

As soon as the earning of some extra money had ceased to be a matter of great urgency, my father seems to have given up any serious attempts to build up a private practice, and, content to rise gradually in the hierarchy of the ministry of health, devoted all his spare time to his beloved botany. He always hoped someday to be able to give up medicine altogether for a full university chair in botany, but that day never came, and the “Professor” was never more than the honorary title usually conferred on a Privatdozent of several years’ standing. But while this unfulfilled ambition was a grief to him (and probably did much to make me regard a university chair as the most desirable of all positions I might attain), his scientific output was considerable, and in his particular field, plant geography (which today would be called ecology), he was highly respected by his fellows. His remarkable memory enabled him to acquire a quite exceptional knowledge of plants, and he himself used to remark, rather regretfully, that he was more or less the last botanist who regarded it as his business to recognize most plants on inspection.

During the last years of his life, my father had become a kind of social center for the botanists of Vienna, who met at regular intervals at our flat. He died relatively early, in his fifty-seventh year, of a kidney disease resulting from a severe blood poisoning (the result of a blister on his foot during a botanical excursion in Oststeiermarkt), of which he had nearly died some fifteen years earlier. My mother [Felicitas] died in 1967 in her ninetythird year.

My parents, though they had never formally left the ancestral Roman Catholic church, held no religious beliefs. Though they were no longer fiercely anti-religious (as I suspect my paternal grandfather was, along with so many of the scientists of his generation), all positive dogma was for them a superstition of the past. They never took me to church. And though as part of my general education I was, soon after I had begun to read for pleasure, given a child’s Bible, it disappeared mysteriously when I got too interested in it.

There was of course religious instruction at school, and in the Gymnasium there was semi-compulsory attendance at mass on Sunday. The legitimacy of this pressure was always doubtful, and whenever a Sunday excursion (quite regular in the family on fine days in spring and summer) interfered, we boys just did not attend, which led to frequent friction with the school authorities. Only for a short time during the first two years of the Gymnasium, that is, at about the age of ten or eleven, did I develop strong religious feeling under the influence of a persuasive teacher. And I remember distinctly the anguish of the belief of having sinned between confession and first communion next morning. But this phase lasted only briefly. By the age of fifteen, I had convinced myself that nobody could give a reasonable explanation of what he meant by the word “God” and that it was therefore as meaningless to assert a belief as to assert a disbelief in God.

Though this, in a general way, has remained my position ever since, I have always avoided unnecessarily to offend other people holding religious belief by displaying my lack of such belief or even stating my lack of belief, if I was not challenged. On the other hand, my position vis-à-vis the different Christian churches was somewhat ambivalent. I felt that if somebody really wanted religion, he had better stick to what seemed to me the “true article,” that is, Roman Catholicism. Protestantism always appeared to me a step in the process of emancipation from a superstition—a step which, once taken, must lead to complete unbelief. Yet its apparent reasonableness might keep a person within the fold of Christianity who could not accept all of the doctrines of Catholicism. In other words, I felt that only the two extremes were tolerably stable positions; but since I had found my resting place in one of these extreme positions, I did not particularly worry, but I may often have seemed inconsistent by intellectually sympathizing more with Protestantism yet admitting that, if one must have a religion, Catholicism seemed to me more consistent.

Q₁: Doesn’t your thinking in terms of a moral structure—the concept of ‘just conduct’—at least get at some very fundamental part of religious precepts?

HAYEK: I think it does go to the question which people try to answer by religion: that there are in the surrounding world a great many orderly phenomena which we cannot understand and which we have to accept. In a way, I’ve recently discovered that the polytheistic religions of Buddhism appeal rather more to me than the monotheistic religions of the West. If they confine themselves, as some Buddhists do, to a profound respect for the existence of other orderly structures in the world, which they admit they cannot fully understand and interpret, I think it’s an admirable attitude.

So far as I do feel hostile to religion, it’s against monotheistic religions, because they are so frightfully intolerant. All monotheistic religions are intolerant and try to enforce their particular creed. I’ve just been looking a little into the Japanese position, where you don’t even have to belong to one religion. Almost every Japanese is Shintoist in one respect and Buddhist in the other, and this is recognized as reconcilable. Every Japanese is born, married, and buried as a Shintoist, but all his beliefs are Buddhist. I think that’s an admirable state of affairs.

I passed through a variety of schools, changing the Volkschule [elementary school] once because of a move and Gymnasium twice because I ran into difficulties with my teachers, who were irritated by the combination of obvious ability and laziness and lack of interest I showed. Except for biology, few of the school subjects interested me, and I consistently neglected my homework, counting on picking up enough during lessons to scrape through. Normally I succeeded in swotting up enough at the end of the year, when doubtful candidates were allowed a critical test called a Forsetzungsprüfung. But once, in the fourth year, when I had failed in all three critical subjects—Latin, Greek, and mathematics—even this opportunity was denied to me, and I had to repeat the form. One good effect of this was that I became really familiar with Homer, and got to know and like Homeric Greek, for in that particular year they were reading Homer in the Greek classes. In 1916, when my form was to get again the leading master with whom I ran foul in 1913, I changed once more to another Gymnasium, where I remained, however, little more than five months before going into the army.

My first scientific interest was, following my father, in botany. He had early interested me in the collection of natural specimens of various sorts—minerals, insects, and flowers—and as he owned a remarkably large herbarium and for many years edited a “flora Exicata” [the organized supply and exchange of rare specimens of pressed plants], I had much opportunity to help him, first as a collector and later as photographer—the hobby which from about age thirteen to sixteen engaged much of my spare time. I also started my own herbarium and even began a monograph on Orchis condigera, an effort from which I was discouraged mainly by my persistent failure to find a live specimen of this rare species (or, probably, only a variety). Systematic botany with its puzzle of the existence of clearly defined classes proved a useful education. But my interest gradually shifted from botany to paleontology and the theory of evolution. I must have been about sixteen when I began to find man more interesting, and for a time played with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist. Also public life and certain aspects of social organization—such as education, the press, political parties—began to interest me, not so much as subjects for systematic study but from a desire to comprehend the world in which I was living.

I sometimes regret that I was too young when my father, recognizing my intellectual dissatisfaction with the taxonomic aspects of biology and my longing for theory, put the two heavy volumes of Weismann’s Vorträge über Deszendenztheorie in my hands. They were still entirely beyond my comprehension and my power of persistent work. I believe that if I had returned to them a few years later, at the time when external circumstances drew my interests to social phenomena, I would have become a biologist. The subject has retained for me an unceasing fascination, and work in that field would have satisfied my inclination for patient search for significant facts, an inclination which by the nature of the subject is permanently frustrated in economic theory and had to find its outlets in occasional dabbling in biographical, genealogical, and similar amusements.

Q₆: Was your training in biology primarily in the Gymnasium?

HAYEK: No, not what I learned at school, but at home. Most of the influence comes from my father, and the family tradition, collecting everything. I started keeping my own herbarium and—my first attempt at a piece of scientific work—began to do a study of a supposed species of orchid. It was a question of whether it was a separate species or only a variety. Thus I was introduced into taxonomy; then Father was perceptive enough to see that my mind was more theoretical than it was in taxonomy. He put into my hands two volumes on the theory of evolution, just a year too early. If he had put Weismann and DeVries into my hands a year later, I would probably have stuck with biology. But I got dissatisfied with the taxonomic work and gradually withdrew.

The great disturbances of war got me more interested in economics. While I was at the university, I was still in doubt between economics and psychology. Law and economics gave one a chance of an occupation. After the death of Stöhr, there wasn’t even anyone teaching psychology. What psychology I knew, I got myself from books. There was no opportunity for learning anything else.

Although at school commonly regarded as intelligent but lazy and always a voracious reader, I do not think I was then of the “intellectual” type, and my ambition was directed more to becoming efficient in handling the practical details of life than in scholarship as such. Whether it was photography or skiing, the use of books or various kinds of collecting, I used my intelligence largely to acquire techniques or to master the theoretical foundations of practical activities rather than intellectual problems as such which occupied me. I had a strong desire to e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editorial Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One Vienna-New York-Vienna
• Part Two London
• Part Three A Parting in the Road
• Part Four Chicago-Freiburg
• Publications and Letters Mentioned in Text
• Index of Persons and Places