Hayek, Co-ordination, and Evolution: His Legacy in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas.

• Author: Horwitz, Steven

This volume of essays (which grew out of a small conference quickly arranged after Hayek's death in 1992) offers a variety of assessments, mostly by European academics, of the entire range of Hayek's work across a number of disciplines. The variety of contributions prevents any short review from dealing with specific papers in any great detail, but does allow one to take stock of what might best be called "the Hayek project." What emerges from this volume, along with several other similar ones published since Hayek's passing, is a sense of the generally well-integrated inter-disciplinary (or perhaps trans-disciplinary) project in social theory that Hayek's life's work lays out. The Hayekian themes of dispersed knowledge, social evolution, coordination and the limits of intentional political direction pervade the book. Jack Birner captures this "project" well in his informative introduction: "All of these elements lead to an explanation of social institutions as undesigned, spontaneously grown mechanisms that by discovering and coordinating dispersed knowledge reduce the complexity facing individuals with limited knowledge and thus allow their actions to be coordinated" [pp. 7-8].

Although Hayek's contributions to economics have still yet to be fully digested and have had only a fairly superficial effect on mainstream neoclassical thought, they have been much more influential in the other disciplines represented in the five discipline-oriented sections of this book. One recurring theme of the economics papers is that it is time to bring Hayek's broader intellectual themes, and the economics he developed along with them, back into the economics mainstream.

This point is made very well by the papers by Peter Rosner, Rudy van Zijp and Hans Visser, and Harry Garretsen who attempt to assess the relationship between Hayek's work and mainstream economics, specifically the New Classical school. The first two papers argue quite cogently that there are very essential differences between Hayek's macroeconomics and that of the New Classicals, despite the latter's claim to an Austrian heritage. Both papers point out that notions of disequilibrium and genuine discovery, which are central to Hayek's work, are ruled out by assuming rational expectations. Van Zijp and Visser explicitly argue that the New Classical preference for highly stylized mathematical models forces them to overlook many of the ideas (in particular the non-neutrality of money) that were...