Vinson Centre Annual Conference, 2024: 'Hayek's life and main contributions'. By J. Shearmur.

'Hayek's life and main contributions to economics and political philosophy'. By Jeremy Shearmur (Australian National University).

Vinson Centre Annual Conference, 2024

Opening Lecture Summary (extract from the speaker's paper) Friedrich Hayek was a remarkable man. He was trained initially in economics and law at the University of Vienna. He also had an early interest in issues to do with psychology, and developed his own ideas in this field which inter-relate with his ideas about the methodology of social science and also social theory. His interests, more generally, also included political science and public policy. Over and above all this, he was interested in the history of ideas, and in this connection made, for example, important contributions to the collection, from scattered locations, of the letters of John Stuart Mill. Hayek is, today, probably best known as an important figure in the revival of interest in classical liberalism. He was a key figure in the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, and his The Road to Serfdom attracted considerable attention, not least in the United States. He had a striking influence on politics in the Twentieth Century, at different times. His Road to Serfdom influenced an election speech by Winston Churchill, in which Churchill suggested that the policies of his Labour Party opponents would require a ‘Gestapo’ to implement them. However, Hayek’s immediate political influences included more than that. David Stockman, who was Ronald Reagan’s Director of the Office of Budget and Management, wrote an unpublished study of his work. While Mrs Thatcher is reported as having brought Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty into a meeting, and to have put it with a resounding thump onto a table, saying ‘This is what we believe’. However, there is much, much more about his work from which I think that we can learn.