Rating: 
Summary: Friedrich Hayek: A Giant Among the Intellectual Pygmies
Review: Alan Ebenstein is to be congratulated for writing a biography of perhaps the most distinguished economic philosopher of the past century. Friedrich Hayek took to task the inane extremes of both the Socialists and anarchical Libertarians. The German born scholar embittered the former for committing the unpardonable offense of inhibiting their grab for power. These arrogant intellectuals subtly implied that their statist theories deserved adulation---and yes, inevitably, unhesitating obedience. Hayek argued that an increasingly complex society significantly lessens the likelihood of these alleged benevolent and brilliant elitists to productively manage economic events for the masses. It is impossible, Hayek added, for a central authority to even begin masterminding the enormous and minutely diverse judgments required to perform the everyday economic chores of a large community. The radical Libertarian Ayn Rand despised Hayek and regarded him as an enemy. Hayek's writings concerning the mandatory need for laws to underpin all viable societies probably did much to enrage the intellectually immature Rand. She ideologically refused to accept the empirical evidence that business people are naturally inclined toward avaricious behavior; that the at least metaphorical reality of Original Sin is alive and well within the human soul of even the most saintly among us. Hayek had no problem agreeing with the earlier moralist, Adam Smith, who warned that businessmen innately join together in order to conspire against the consumer.Hayek clearly understood the hopeless dilemma of a statist economy in confronting the issues of pricing. Only the essentially "invisible hand" free decision making of individual buyers and sellers is capable of realistically pricing goods and services. One doesn't need to completely agree with all of Sigmund Freud's views to concede the extraordinary influence the subconscious has upon our overall thinking processes. Rarely do individuals spend a lot time and effort when purchasing an item such as a candy bar. Usually this is an impulsive buying decision comprising a fraction of a second. Even more significant purchases like an automobile or a house involve motivations that are hidden from our conscious mind. Thus, only we are able to somewhat haphazardly conclude on what constitutes an acceptable price regarding our own particular economic transactions. Democratic Capitalism deserves two cheers, and not three. It does not promise a utopian world. On the contrary, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, this most most efficient and beneficial economic system is brutish, awful, and sometimes downright disgusting, but it far surpasses any other economic system in human history. You owe it to yourself to learn more about Friedrich Hayek, a giant of a man who so profoundly influenced our world for the better. Ebenstein's book is a great place to start.
Rating:
Summary: Friedrich Hayak: A Biography by Alan Ebenstein
Review: As a student of Hayak, I was often troubled by my inability to fully grasp the nature of some of his theories. After reading Mr. Ebentein's magnificent work I now have a richer understanding of this master's contributions. I found Mr. Ebenstein's book illuminating and comprehensive. He has a crisp writing style and I was impressed with the easy flow of the material. An excellent read; I highly recommend this book!
Rating:
Summary: Essential Biography -- balanced, thorough and well written
Review: Ebenstein has written a fantastic book about the man who may go down as the greatest thinker of the 20th century. While it is obvious the Ebenstein greatly admires Hayek it does not prevent him from giving a very accurate assement of the man and his ideas. In several places in the book he points out mistakes and logically issues with several of Hayek's ideas. It seems to be all to rare these days to get such a fair and accurate view. The biography sheds light on all the key periods and influence on Hayeks intellectual life. Its greatest service is the ability to explain many of Hayek's most complicated thoughts in terms that are both easy to understand but not over simplistic. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Essential Biography -- balanced, thorough and well written
Review: Ebenstein has written a fantastic book about the man who may go down as the greatest thinker of the 20th century. While it is obvious the Ebenstein greatly admires Hayek it does not prevent him from giving a very accurate assement of the man and his ideas. In several places in the book he points out mistakes and logically issues with several of Hayek's ideas. It seems to be all to rare these days to get such a fair and accurate view. The biography sheds light on all the key periods and influence on Hayeks intellectual life. Its greatest service is the ability to explain many of Hayek's most complicated thoughts in terms that are both easy to understand but not over simplistic. Highly recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: overrated
Review: Ebenstein's biography of Hayek is well received, as the other reviews testify. It's informative, readable, and generally fair-minded. Nevertheless I feel that the merits of this book do not deserve such high praise as was given, even by such outstanding men as Friedman. Ebenstein's understanding of Hayek's ideas is narrow and derivative, his portrayal of the man is flat. Above all, the most fundamental aspect of Hayek's thought, namely his elucidation of a complex spontaneous order (independent of the properties of the elements), is neglected. Ebenstein also completely misunderstood Hayek's criticism of Mill, which is characterized as unfair in this book. This is no minor misunderstanding, as what's at stake is Hayek's attack on the concept of social justice, again one of the most important parts of his political philosophy. Reading this book, one gets the impression that Ebenstein is a hard-working, sincere, and intelligent fellow. But as the author of the first substantial biography of Hayek, he simply does not possess enough learning or insight to carry out this task adequately.
Rating: 
Summary: Biography of Great Economist Thoughtful, Thorough
Review: Excerpted from book review by Bruce Caldwell in The Independent Review (Fall 2001) Alan Ebenstein's Frederick Hayek: A Biography is the first English-language biography of FA Hayek. The volume clearly represents a massive amount of investigative work. It has much to recommend it, not least that it offers up the facts of Hayek's life in clear prose and with considerable detail. He has gathered into one place virtually everything that has been written about Hayek's life and personal relationships. The book represents a truly imperssive amount of investigative work. Ebenstein has done a superb job of collecting and putting into usable form what already existed in print about Hayek's life and of filling in most of the remaining holes by his own investigative effort. Diminishing this considerable accomplishment is Eberstein's insistence on offering at various places throughout the book his own assessments of Hayek's substantive work. Too often summaries compress an entire literature or debate into a few pages. Those who wish to know about Hayek's life should get this book and study it carefully, for it contains more information than any other source available on that subject. It is also, in my opinion, quite solid on certain aspects of Hayek's political thought. But it is not a particularly good guide to Hayek's intellectual development or to his legacy in other areas. The book would have been far stronger had Ebenstein stuck to reporting and left out his own responses to Hayek.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty good overview of a deep thinker.
Review: Hayek is my favorite author not because I agree with all of his ideas, but because his books have taught me so much. I write this review as an experienced fan of Hayek, but those who have read few or none of Hayek's writings will benefit the most from reading this well-researched biography. Never before has any writing put together so complete a picture of Hayek's life and background. If you admire Hayek as much as I do, you'll find it very satisfying to read Ebenstein's largely fruitful efforts to understand the man behind the distant - but kind - demeanor that he wore. Frankly, much of the value I got from this book came from the satisfaction of my curiosity. Those who haven't yet read much of Hayek, however, will find far more of value in Ebenstein's excellent summaries and analyses of Hayek's ideas. Ebenstein has a knack for condensing Hayek's ideas in a concise and highly readable form, which Hayek himself could not do very well. Mostly Ebenstein saw it as his function to simply summarize and explain Hayek's ideas, but he also entered into some interesting discussions about the intellectual controversies Hayek was involved in. Obviously the socialist calculation debate is one such controversy, but Ebenstein also picks out a few nits from Hayek's books, such as an inconsistent interpretation of J.S. Mill and the inspiration Hayek may have taken from a misunderstanding of Karl Popper. I was most disappointed with the author's treatment of Hayek's strictly economic work in capital and trade cycle theory. In short, Ebenstein informs us that Hayek's views on these subjects are very far from being the accepted wisdom among economists, and that students of Hayek consider his economic work to be greatly overshadowed by his achievements in political philosophy. Both points are true, but neither goes any distance toward refuting Hayek's somewhat unique ideas about capital, business cycles, and inflation. Ebenstein nearly dismisses these theories out of hand. Readers will probably either be left unconvinced that Hayek was wrong, or they will be left with the impression that Hayek was not a very successful economist. I feel that if Ebenstein is going to reject the Austrian Business Cycle theory (ABC), he has no excuse not to provide his readers with an adequate summary of the arguments against it. First of all, a good, nontechnical argument against it could be made within the space of a few pages. Secondly, the mainstream arguments against ABC aren't usually a complete rejection of it: many mainstream economists only differ from ABC by degrees. For instance, Hayek thought that the most serious side effect of inflation was, by far, its distortion of capital investments. Some mainstream economists would agree that this distortion can take place, but they would argue that it isn't nearly as important as the other costs of inflation, such as the deadweight loss resulting from individuals' efforts to avoid having their wealth depreciated away. On the other hand, I think Ebenstein slightly understated the enormity of the chasm between the mainstream and Hayek (along with the other Austrian economists) when it comes to methodological issues. The slight mistreatments of Hayek's economics constitute my only complaints against this book. It is excellent in every other regard.
Rating: 
Summary: An Important Man, A Poor Biography -1.8 on a scale of 1 to 5
Review: Hayek's life deserves-no demands- a biography of the highest order. I read Hayek in my studies in college and I was fascinated by his theories. He was a man who thought and wrote on profound economic issues.
This biography, while seemingly well researched, does a disservice to the man. I (and a book club for an ivy league college) found it poorly written and structured. Sentences, paragraphs and thoughts collide.
I would only recommend this book to diehard Hayek groupies (though it may cause pain). Individuals who want to learn more about him might benefit from skimming through the book. However, I would caution those individuals who seek out intelligent biographies of interesting people-that despite Hayek's very interesting life, this is not an intelligent biography worthy of him.
Rating:
Summary: A middle class economics hero's life.
Review: This biography has many short chapters, and displays a considerable balance. The structure of the book reflects the nature of Hayek's thoughts. "Hayek put forward the difficult idea of spontaneous order. In a spontaneous order, individuals may exchange and interact with one another as they desire. There is no central management of individual decision making." (p. 3). The fame of Friedrich Hayek is associated mainly with the political views needed to maintain a thriving economy as much as with the idea that no one person knows everything that is going on in an economy which functions as Adam Smith pictured, with each person acting in his own interest in order to produce the mix of goods and services that best provides the needs of all. Adam Smith is listed in the index, but not quite as much as Milton Friedman, who is occasionally mentioned as being more popular than Hayek, as well as more correct in the analysis of monetary policy in the United States at the start of the great depression. Hayek finished a law degree and a second degree in political science from the University of Vienna before he lived in the United States from March 1923 to May 1924. (p. 31). One of his first economic articles in 1924 was "on American monetary policy suggesting that an expansionist credit policy leads to an overdevelopment of capital goods industries and ultimately to a crisis. . . . So I put in that article a long footnote sketching an outline of what ultimately became my explanation of industrial fluctuations. . . . A rate of interest which is inappropriately low offers to the individual sectors of the economy an advantage which is greater the more remote is their product from the consumption stage." (p. 41). The Federal Reserve Bank had been designed to keep the economy moving by offering great deals to capitalists, but when Hayek noted the tendency to produce instability, he became the head "of the evolution of Austrian business cycle theory." (p. 41). When the depression became the lowest point reached by the American economy in the 20th century, Hayek continued to think that low interest rates in the 1920s had produced the instability which produced it, while Milton Friedman produced a monetary explanation which is more widely accepted. Public opinion is often a matter of simplifications which avoid the complexity that real problems present. Chapter 8, on Keynes, quotes Keynes attacking Marxism as if Marxism were nothing but a public opinion. "How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?" (p. 68). German was a problem for Keynes, who wrote "in German I can only understand what I know already!" (p. 70). Hayek tried to review Keynes' TREATISE ON MONEY for an English journal, "Economica," when he was about to start teaching at the London School of Economics. Keynes seemed to think that his criticism could be characterized as "The wild duck has dived down to the bottom--as deep as she can get--and bitten fast hold of the weed and tangle and all the rubbish that is down there, and it would need an extraordinarily clever dog to dive after and fish her up again." (pp. 357-358). Hayek was allowed to publish a reply in the "Economic Journal" edited by Keynes "to an article by Piero Sraffa attacking him, and concluded his reply, `I venture to believe that Mr. Keynes would fully agree with me in ... that he [Sraffa] has understood Mr. Keynes' theory even less than he has my own.' Keynes then footnoted, `I should like to say that, to the best of my comprehension, Mr. Sraffa has understood my theory accurately.' " (p. 72). The finishing touches on this argument are complex. Keynes wrote that his footnote was appended to Hayek's reply "with Prof. Hayek's permission," (p. 72), a sure sign that Keynes was amused at agreeing far more with Sraffa, however Hayek might feel about it, and that he had done everything he could to force Hayek to see it his way. Hayek was admired most for his popular book, THE ROAD TO SERFDOM, which considered central planning in control of an economy as a major step on the way to totalitarianism. He expected his book, THE CONSTITUTION OF LIBERTY, to appeal to the same readers, but when it was published on February 9, 1960, people had other concerns. In "The New York Times Book Review," Sydney Hook presented the mainstream economic opposition to Hayek's major concerns. "He is an intellectual tonic. But in our present time of troubles, his economic philosophy points the road to disaster." (p. 203). Considering disasters in the area of economics, it is difficult to counter the idea that any government program offers the kind of deviation from stability that anyone would expect from a drunken bat. One idea that was almost popular at the end of the 20th century was a lockbox, where workers' money could be kept until it was time for them to retire. Hayek followed John Locke in thinking that civil government can maintain an impartial liberty through "certain basic rules on everybody." (p. 224). LAW, LEGISLATION AND LIBERTY was supposed to provide some guidelines, but there was no lockbox in the title, or in the title of any of Hayek's books. Now tax law has changed, as a basic incentive for a rise in the price of common stock, without safeguards to see that income is taxed even once. Speculation seems to be the common assumption upon which everyone is now to be satisfied. Actually, I suppose the government might never stop flying around like a drunken bat. For all the complexity in this book, it is much less like a drunken bat than the opinions I find in any newspaper.
Rating:
Summary: A middle class economics hero's life.
Review: This biography has many short chapters, and displays a considerable balance. The structure of the book reflects the nature of Hayek's thoughts. "Hayek put forward the difficult idea of spontaneous order. In a spontaneous order, individuals may exchange and interact with one another as they desire. There is no central management of individual decision making." (p. 3). The fame of Friedrich Hayek is associated mainly with the political views needed to maintain a thriving economy as much as with the idea that no one person knows everything that is going on in an economy which functions as Adam Smith pictured, with each person acting in his own interest in order to produce the mix of goods and services that best provides the needs of all. Adam Smith is listed in the index, but not quite as much as Milton Friedman, who is occasionally mentioned as being more popular than Hayek, as well as more correct in the analysis of monetary policy in the United States at the start of the great depression. Hayek finished a law degree and a second degree in political science from the University of Vienna before he lived in the United States from March 1923 to May 1924. (p. 31). One of his first economic articles in 1924 was "on American monetary policy suggesting that an expansionist credit policy leads to an overdevelopment of capital goods industries and ultimately to a crisis. . . . So I put in that article a long footnote sketching an outline of what ultimately became my explanation of industrial fluctuations. . . . A rate of interest which is inappropriately low offers to the individual sectors of the economy an advantage which is greater the more remote is their product from the consumption stage." (p. 41). The Federal Reserve Bank had been designed to keep the economy moving by offering great deals to capitalists, but when Hayek noted the tendency to produce instability, he became the head "of the evolution of Austrian business cycle theory." (p. 41). When the depression became the lowest point reached by the American economy in the 20th century, Hayek continued to think that low interest rates in the 1920s had produced the instability which produced it, while Milton Friedman produced a monetary explanation which is more widely accepted. Public opinion is often a matter of simplifications which avoid the complexity that real problems present. Chapter 8, on Keynes, quotes Keynes attacking Marxism as if Marxism were nothing but a public opinion. "How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?" (p. 68). German was a problem for Keynes, who wrote "in German I can only understand what I know already!" (p. 70). Hayek tried to review Keynes' TREATISE ON MONEY for an English journal, "Economica," when he was about to start teaching at the London School of Economics. Keynes seemed to think that his criticism could be characterized as "The wild duck has dived down to the bottom--as deep as she can get--and bitten fast hold of the weed and tangle and all the rubbish that is down there, and it would need an extraordinarily clever dog to dive after and fish her up again." (pp. 357-358). Hayek was allowed to publish a reply in the "Economic Journal" edited by Keynes "to an article by Piero Sraffa attacking him, and concluded his reply, `I venture to believe that Mr. Keynes would fully agree with me in ... that he [Sraffa] has understood Mr. Keynes' theory even less than he has my own.' Keynes then footnoted, `I should like to say that, to the best of my comprehension, Mr. Sraffa has understood my theory accurately.' " (p. 72). The finishing touches on this argument are complex. Keynes wrote that his footnote was appended to Hayek's reply "with Prof. Hayek's permission," (p. 72), a sure sign that Keynes was amused at agreeing far more with Sraffa, however Hayek might feel about it, and that he had done everything he could to force Hayek to see it his way. Hayek was admired most for his popular book, THE ROAD TO SERFDOM, which considered central planning in control of an economy as a major step on the way to totalitarianism. He expected his book, THE CONSTITUTION OF LIBERTY, to appeal to the same readers, but when it was published on February 9, 1960, people had other concerns. In "The New York Times Book Review," Sydney Hook presented the mainstream economic opposition to Hayek's major concerns. "He is an intellectual tonic. But in our present time of troubles, his economic philosophy points the road to disaster." (p. 203). Considering disasters in the area of economics, it is difficult to counter the idea that any government program offers the kind of deviation from stability that anyone would expect from a drunken bat. One idea that was almost popular at the end of the 20th century was a lockbox, where workers' money could be kept until it was time for them to retire. Hayek followed John Locke in thinking that civil government can maintain an impartial liberty through "certain basic rules on everybody." (p. 224). LAW, LEGISLATION AND LIBERTY was supposed to provide some guidelines, but there was no lockbox in the title, or in the title of any of Hayek's books. Now tax law has changed, as a basic incentive for a rise in the price of common stock, without safeguards to see that income is taxed even once. Speculation seems to be the common assumption upon which everyone is now to be satisfied. Actually, I suppose the government might never stop flying around like a drunken bat. For all the complexity in this book, it is much less like a drunken bat than the opinions I find in any newspaper.
|
