Anthony de Jasay: a life in the service of liberty.

• Author: Radnitzky, Gerard
• Position: Tribute

Anthony de Jasay is one of the most significant social philosophers of our age. He began his scholarship in economics, and in his writings he has focused on the relationships among the economy, the state, and the individual. He has never been identified with any distinct school of thought, and that independence of mind, along with his originality, may explain his relative lack of a following. In my opinion, he is the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century because his oeuvre permits us to make decisive cognitive progress and for the first time to discern the essential features of an alternative to the modern state. In the intellectual field, very few have done more for the cause of liberty than de Jasay.

In his adult life, he has passed through two major stages: a refugee from Soviet-occupied Hungary, he spent the first half of his life establishing a position of personal independence; then, during the second half, he has used the personal liberty he acquired earlier to serve the cause of liberty in general.

Much of de Jasay's individualism springs from what is a characteristic life history in twentieth-century central Europe. Born in Hungary in 1925, he escaped over the closed border to the (relatively) Free World in 1948. After two years in Austria, he emigrated to Australia. He completed his studies in Perth while working in small jobs. A scholarship took him to Oxford. For a number of years he taught at Nuffield College and published articles in learned journals. In 1962, he switched from academia to finance, settling in Paris and working first as an executive and then on his own account. He speculated so successfully that in 1979 he could retire to the country in Normandy and devote himself wholly to scholarship, having become a Privatgelebrter. He comments on the subsequent near-total loss of his considerable fortune without bitterness--"I have made fortunes, I have lost fortunes"--accepting it as one more of the many accidents that have shaped his life.

His objective throughout has been twofold: first, to fight with the weapons of logic the socialist and soft-left ideologies that represent submission to the state as the result of a voluntarily accepted social contract and that justify the imposed redistribution of income and wealth as a means of enhancing the "common good"; and second, to develop a coherent, closely reasoned modern version of liberal doctrine possessing the intellectual force to match and eventually to prevail over the hybrid currents of thought...