Hayek: A Commemorative Album.

• Author: Vaughn, Karne I.
• Position: Review

By John Raybould.

London: Adam Smith Institute, 1998. Pp. 120. $25 (paperback).

For most economists, interest in their work peaks during their productive middle years and trails off relentlessly once they retire from academic life. For Friedrich Hayek, however, professional recognition has followed a very different path. He was first a star during his early career at the London School of Economics (LSE); then he was relatively neglected during what should have been the peak of his career. Interest in his work picked up after he received the Nobel prize in 1974 at age 75 and has continued to gather a momentum that shows no signs of abating even now, eight years after his death. Indeed, the last decade has been marked by a growing tide of scholarly assessments, critiques, and analyses of his work. During this time, at least two dozen books and over 100 articles have appeared, all overtly concerned with what is increasingly recognized as the deeply complex ideas that Hayek produced over the seven decades of his active professional life. He was once scorned as a "dinosaur" among economists ( p. 78), but his work has now given rise to a mini-industry of Hayek scholarship. Even more remarkable, he is also enjoying an unprecedented amount of favorable attention in more popular publications, such as the New Yorker magazine (Cassidy 2000) and the Times Literary Supplement (Miogue 2000).

Why all this belated attention to Hayek now, in the 10th decade after his birth? One likely answer is that the recent failure of central planning has caused academic economists to take another look at Hayek's earlier criticisms of the economics of socialism, many of which seem to have been vindicated by actual events. Additionally, Hayek's political argument that market economies and democracy are inextricably linked resonates more in the postcommunist world than it did in the days of enthusiasm for government as the solution rather than as the problem. One might also point out that Hayek's psychology and social dynamics are increasingly being recognized as prescient harbingers of recent developments in such areas as cognitive psychology, complexity theory, or the new institutional economics. These reasons surely help explain why so many people went out of their way last year to celebrate Hayek's 100th birthday with conferences, articles, and volumes dedicated to his thought. Hayek: A Commemorative Album in some respects is both a symptom of the rising tide of...