Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue.

• Author: Prychitko, David L.

This book is a supplement to The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. It is not a piece of scholarship. Rather, Hayek on Hayek is a combination of personal, autobiographical notes Hayek had written since 1945, and several interviews (most under the auspices of UCLA's Oral History Program). The book also includes the full transcript of a 1945 NBC Radio broadcast of a roundtable discussion among Hayek and two other University of Chicago professors. The book, divided into four parts, also includes an able introduction by Stephen Kresge.(1)

In Part One Hayek discusses his upbringing and his intellectual development in Vienna. We learn that his early interests in physiological psychology were overtaken by economics after Hayek's service in World War I, where he experienced first hand the nationalist problem and its implications for political organization. Finding, after the War, that the University of Vienna did not offer a formal degree in psychology, and having been thoroughly impressed with Menger's Grundsatze, Hayek eventually decided to study economics. This would later take him to the United States for several months (in the early 1920s) to study at New York University, recalling tales of living at a local YMCA and "gate-crashing" W.C. Mitchell's lectures and J.B. Clark's seminar at Columbia.

Part Two offers Hayek's account of his London years (during the 1930s and 40s), where he became occupied with Austrian business cycle (and capital) theory, and especially the development of his theory that the market is a system that uses knowledge on the basis of abstract signals such as prices and profit-loss accounts. Hayek recalls his close friendships with Lionel Robbins, and especially J. M. Keynes (of whom he "had in many respects the greatest admiration and liking for him as a man" [p. 88]). His words for some of his other colleagues, such as Harold Laski and William Beveridge, on the other hand, are contemptuous, and it is somewhat surprising to see them surface in print.

In Part Three Hayek discusses his most notorious work, The Road to Serfdom. A wildly popular work (and now considered prescient and a classic in contemporary political economy), Hayek nevertheless laments how The Road to Serfdom "went so far as to completely discredit me professionally." Hayek observed that "In the middle of the 1940s - I suppose I sound very conceited - I think I was known as one of the two main disputing economists: there was Keynes and there was I. Now, Keynes...