Friedrich Hayek: a Biography.

• Author: Caldwell. Bruce
• Position: Book Reviews

Friedrich Hayek: A Biography

By Alan Ebenstein New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. xiii, 403. $29.95.

Before reviewing Alan Ebenstein's biography of F. A. Hayek, I think it is perhaps appropriate that I provide some background.

The philosopher Bill Bartley (to his readers, W. W. Bartley III) was to have been Hayek's official biographer, as well as that of Karl Popper. No malingerer, Bartley was also the general editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek; we owe the often brilliant but also sometimes idiosyncratic arrangement of pieces in that series to his vision. The ideas of collecting Hayek's works and of writing a biography about him were themselves a natural outgrowth of a series of interviews that Hayek gave in the late 1970s under the auspices of the Oral History Program at UCLA. The interviews yielded a transcript of more than five hundred pages ("F. A. Hayek, Nobel Prize Winning Economist," transcript of an interview conducted in 1978 under the auspices of the Oral History Program, University Library, UCLA, edited by Armen Alchian, copyright 1983, Regents of the University of California) that reveals many aspects of Hayek's professional and personal life, his ideas, his opinions of others, and so on. It was and is a perfect starting place for reconstructing his intellectual and personal journey from Vienna to London to Chicago and beyond.

The first volume to appear in the Collected Works was Hayek's last book, The Fatal Conceit, which Bartley assisted Hayek in putting together. Another volume in the series appeared, but then fate intervened when Bartley died at age fifty-three in 1990. Plans for an authorized biography passed with him. Stephen Kresge succeeded Bartley as the general editor of the Collected Works, and under his direction five more volumes have since appeared. Two biographical works have also come forth, though neither pretends to be a full biography. Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, edited by Kresge and Leif Wenar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), draws on the UCLA interviews as well as on others, among them some that Bartley had conducted with Hayek in the 1980s. John Raybould's Hayek: A Commemorative Album (London: Adam Smith Institute, 1999), produced with the cooperation of Hayek's children, is filled with family photographs and memorabilia from Hayek's personal and academic life.

A final bit of background, in the spirit of full disclosure: I am myself the editor of two of the volumes in the Collected Works, and I will be the editor of two more, once I finish my own biography of Hayek. The latter book will not, I think, compete directly with Ebenstein's because my principal interest is to explain the development of Hayek's thought and in particular his methodological thought, rather than to trace his life story.

Alan Ebenstein's Friedrich Hayek: A Biography is, then, the first English-language biography of F. A. Hayek. The volume clearly represents a massive...