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Friedrich A. Hayek: Friedrich Hayek
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In this work Hayek emphasized that the division of labor has a counterpart: the division of knowledge. Each individual comes to possess specialized and local knowledge in his corner of the division of labor that he alone may fully understand and appreciate how to use. Yet if all of these bits of specialized knowledge are to serve everyone in society, some method must exist to coordinate the activities of all these interdependent participants in the market. The market’s solution to this problem, Hayek argued, was the competitive price system. Prices not only served as an incentive to stimulate work and effort, they ... informed individuals about opportunities worth pursuing. Hayek clearly and concisely explained this in “The Use of Knowledge in Society”:
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Hayek enhanced this argument with considerations of "spontaneous order" - the idea that a harmonious, evolving order arises from the interaction of a decentralized, heterogeneous group of self-seeking agents with limited knowledge. This order, he claimed, was not "designed" nor could be "designed" by a social planner, even a very wise one, but merely "emerged" or evolved spontaneously from a seemingly complex network of interaction among agents with limited knowledge. Hayek's elaborations on this complex, evolving spontaneous order are found in various places (e.g. 1952, 1964). Hayek continued with his work on "evolving order", linking it with his work on political and legal theory (e.g. 1960, 1973).
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Rules of conduct can be legislated, Hayek writes, but statues passed by legislatures do not have to become rules of conduct. Modern governments tend to have organizations within a larger bureaucracy that make its rules of conduct different from that of private organizations. These differences are designated by the application of public and private laws. Public law applies to organizations and can be made, Hayek argues, while private law is determined by the spontaneous order principle. They are not, the author emphasizes, the same as public and private welfare. Spontaneous order creates laws that govern the general welfare, and is more important in determining general welfare than the services and benefits some citizens receive associated with government organizations.
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Friedrich Hayek naît à Vienne sous l'empire austro-hongrois dans une famille d'intellectuels. Son père avait ainsi écrit un ouvrage réputé de botanique, tandis qu'il était cousin de Ludwig Wittgenstein par sa mère. Il fait des études de droit et de sciences politiques à l'Université de Vienne dont il est diplômé en 1921 (doctorat de droit) et 1923 (doctorat de sciences politiques). Touchant à nombre de domaines de la connaissance, il étudia également la psychologie et l'économie. Il considérait en effet qu'un bon économiste devait s'intéresser à tous les champs de la connaissance
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Hayek's article is a positive thrill to read. Hayek relentlessly scrutinizes and exposes the weak and patchwork structure of Keynes's theoretical arguments and then dismantles it brick by brick, leaving nothing standing. Keynes's reaction reveals just how deeply Hayek's review cut…. FULL ARTICLE
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Hayek blames Marxism for the totalitarian trend but his knowledge of this dangerous doctrine is apparently less than scanty. He understands Marx’s concept of the accumulation of capital, for instance, only in the restricted technological sense of the “concentration of industry.” This concentration... is for Marx just one aspect of the accumulation process. Moreover, Hayek assumes that Marxism fosters industrial concentration in the interest of the emerging totalitarian state. He, himself, thinks it preferable that the means of production should be in “many hands.” But for the Marxist, the problem is not one of transferring control over the means of production from many into fewer and eventually into one hand, but doing away with control over the means of production by “hands” as such, whether single or plural.
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Friedrich Hayek