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Biography:
Freidrich A. von Hayek (1899-1992) was an Austrian economist who taught at both
the University of London and the University of Chicago. He can be characterized
as an "economic traditionalist" and in The Road to Serfdom (1944) he
argued that governments should not intervene in the control of inflation or other
economic issues.
Hayek believed that an unregulated market resulted in a spontaneous form of order. No one designed the market as it exists and no one plans where it goes, nevertheless it still manages to satisfies the needs of a great many of those who participate in it. Although the market is not always perfect, the reason for that does lie within any deficiencies in the market itself - instead, the reason for problems lies with government interference.
Hayek fiercely opposed socialism from every angle. He opposed it on economic grounds because he believed that the basic premises of socialism were untenable. According to Hayek, it isn't possible for take the given economic data and allocate resources accordingly because, in fact, the data doesn't really exist. Each individual has knowledge about their needs, their desires, and their potential reactions to economic changes which a centralized planner could never acquire. According to Hayek, however, free markets give peole the ability to use their information on their own. Thus, the relevant and necessary information does get used.
Hayek also criticized socialism on political grounds. He saw how socialism was progressing in Nazi Germany and how the government was slowly taking over people's lives. According to Hayek, socialism necessarily resulted in totalitarianism. In The Road to Serfdom, created to warn a British audience, he wrote:
Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest: it is the control of the means for all our ends.
Hayek also argued that the principle of "social justice" is completely void of meaning. In a command economy under socialism, it may have some significance - but in a free market of free actors, social justice is not only impossible, but also nonsense.
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Related Resources:
What are Political and Legal Philosophy
The Philosophy of Politics and the Philosophy of Law are often studied separately, but they are presented here jointly because they both come back to the same thing: the study of force. Politics is the study of political force in the general community, while jurisprudence is the study of how laws can and should be used to achieve political and social goals.What is Philosophy?
What is philosophy? Is there any point in studying philosophy, or is it a useless subject? What are the different branches of philosophy - what's the difference between aestheitcs and ethics? What's the difference between metaphysics and epistemology?
