Last year the History of Economic Thought Society of Australia (HETSA) held a conference with a main theme on Austrian economics. The other main theme was the history of economics in Western Australia, presumably because the conference was at the Notre Dame University, Fremantle campus. Actually I didn’t even know we had a Notre Dame University.
The abstracts are on line and the papers can be downloaded.
Jeremy Shearmur talked about The Road to Serfdom, both to explain the context of the writing and what it really meant – was it a warning or did Hayek really think we are destined to go all the way down the road. It is almost certainly a warning to mend our ways, and not a prediction. To the extent that we have mended our ways, serfdom is still a distant prospect.
Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is often (and understandably) seen as a piece of popular war work, or (and I believe mistakenly) seen as written against a ‘Keynesian’ welfare state. In this paper, I will sketch what I will argue to be a more adequate picture of its contexts, and will say a little about its character in the light of these. The three themes that I will highlight are: (a) Hayek’s concerns about ‘planning’; (b) a wider intellectual enterprise, the significance of which has been stressed by Bruce Caldwell in recent work. Parts of this were published as his ‘Scientism and the Study of Society’, ‘The Counter-Revolution of Science’ and ‘Individualism True and False’ – while The Road to Serfdom was a popular account of what was intended to be a final part of this project; (c) Hayek’s reflections on the character of the Nazi regime in Germany (e.g. as formulated by way of a memo and book reviews concerning Germany in the Nazi period, but prior to the Second World War.)
Steve Kates has a paper on the subversion of Say’s Law by Keynes and others.
Japanese students are prominent on the list, possibly reflecting the work being done on the contents of Menger’s library, the economics section of which ended up in Japan.
Interesting paper. The one on Schumpeter looks useful too.
The recent popularity of TRS in the US is surprising given it is (as Shearmur said) a critique of centrally planned production.
It has nothing to do with the welfare state – the only mention of that is Hayek’s brief reference in the preface to the 1976 edition. The book is incidentally a scathing critique of laissez-faire and argues in favour of extensive government provision of medical, disability and other insurance.
The book is also not a critique of Keynesianism. Hayek makes it clear that he prefers monetary policy to remedy mass unemployment but says Keynesian policies “do not lead to the kind of planning which is such a threat to our freedom”. Keynes in fact wrote an admiring review of the book.
Hundreds of thousands of readers in the US are apparently completely misunderstanding this work. Hayek perhaps had in mind something like the German social market economy when writing the book. Hopefully some good will come of its popularity, though not in the way intended by its right-wing promoters.
Taylor
15 Aug 10 at 8:03 am
I missed it, damn!
Eric Crampton
15 Aug 10 at 4:19 pm
@Taylor: Do check Farrant and McPhail’s rather lengthy counterargument. He’ll agree with you that the Americans are currently reading Hayek that way; but, he argues further that their reading of Hayek isn’t entirely out of line with what Hayek argued in many places.
Eric Crampton
15 Aug 10 at 4:20 pm
“Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is often (and understandably) seen as a piece of popular war work, or (and I believe mistakenly) seen as written against a ‘Keynesian’ welfare state.”
They have a draft paper (I saw an early version) where they argue that Shearmur is incorrect about this.
Ian
19 Aug 10 at 6:21 am
The paper is online it seems:
http://mesharpe.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,7,9;journal,1,58;linkingpublicationresults,1:106043,1
Ian
19 Aug 10 at 6:24 am