Friedrich Hayek
No single mind holds all the knowledge a society needs: it is scattered among millions of people.
Life
Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), born in Vienna, was an Austrian-British economist and philosopher who taught in London (LSE), Chicago and Freiburg. He received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. He shows that the knowledge a society needs is scattered among millions of people, that no central planner can gather it, and that prices carry that information. He also wrote on liberty, law, psychology and the method of the social sciences.
Main works
Warns against central economic planning and its effects on liberties.
The economic problem is the use of dispersed knowledge, which prices help to coordinate.
Defends individual liberty under the rule of law and examines the institutions that protect it.
Studies spontaneous order and the evolution of rules (three volumes, 1973-1979).
In his own words
« Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. »
« What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. »
« Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceKnowledge is dispersed among many people and never fully held by one mind, so claims to total rational planning are mistaken.
Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945)
He explains mind as the nervous system classifying stimuli, a physical order with no separate substance, while holding that we can never fully explain mind in physical terms and must keep a 'practical dualism'.
Hayek, The Sensory Order (1952)
Individual freedom under general rules and the rule of law should limit coercion, and order grows spontaneously rather than being designed.
Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)