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"[Bruce Caldwell's] Hayek's Challenge should easily gain a reputation as one of the most—and possibly the most—significant contributions to the literature of F.A. Hayek." -- Roger Garrison, author of Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure

Economist Peter Boettke: "I strongly urge readers .. to study Caldwell’s brilliant book on Hayek --- Hayek’s Challenge --- and in particular the first 1/3 of the book where he goes through the historical context within which Mises and Hayek came to intellectual maturation. Of course the book is about Hayek, so Mises while central to the story doesn’t get the focus that he will in his own biography. But Caldwell’s biography is actually an excellent role model for economic biographies --- especially in the way he mixes historical context and doctrinal issues. I would put Caldwell’s work already in the league of Skidelsky’s biographies of Keynes and Hacohen’s biography of Popper".

"The Austrian road to much of Blairism".

Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F A Hayek reviewed by
Richard D North in The Independent:

"F A Hayek's name is often linked with that of Milton Friedman, the other founder of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. That makes Hayek a hate-figure for the many whose "liberalism" was the mirror-image of his own.

Bruce Caldwell's intellectual biography of the great Austrian is a wonderful work, but an odd one. Hayek's best-known work is The Road to Serfdom (1944). Yet this receives scant attention from Caldwell. Perhaps it was too populist to be treated as seriously as Hayek's other books. But it did address his big political idea.

As Caldwell shows, Hayek had cut his economic teeth watching "statism" try to create a kindly society as Germany invented the welfare state (the model for our own Beveridge Report). He believed he had charted how benign interference descended into totalitarianism, but turned out to be wrong. After the Second World War, Western Europe became welfarist. But we arrived merely at stultification.

Was that because we avoided the full-on socialism he hated? The big argument for the past 50 years has been on Hayek's terrain. The Institute of Economic Affairs was founded in 1955 by a young idealist who had read a condensed Serfdom in the Reader's Digest, and its Hayekian agenda is now at least one half of Blairism and will surely unfold further. The state will own and do less in future.

Caldwell shows us how Hayek believed in a welfare safety-net, and was fascinated by how markets depend on institutions.

One of the oddities of Caldwell's book is it is 133 pages before we really meet the subject. Instead, we are taken back to the Austrian and German academic milieus of the 1870s, into whose legacies Hayek was born in 1899. Hayek was a child, like Wittgenstein, of the Viennese fin-de-siècle: the spawning-ground of logical positivism and its enemies.

In economics, he was interested in whether there was a testable way of talking about the many processes of exchange. This amounts to talking about a vast proportion of human interactions. Caldwell concludes with an essay suggesting that economics has never really succeeded in answering these big questions. By that count, it's almost a saving grace that Hayek was sceptical about much economic thinking. But he triumphantly helped to frame a rebellion against the unintended oppressiveness of do-gooders. Most of his brain-work was in a tradition of inconclusiveness: wonderful, then, that he produced one work of dazzling clarity."

Lecture -- "Hayek's Challenge". Speaker: Professor Bruce Caldwell.

Thursday 19 February 2004. 6.30 pm, Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, 6pm, Old Theatre. London School of Economics. London. This event is free and open to all with no ticket required.

"This lecture will explore the development of one of the twentieth century's most important and seminal thinkers, F. A. Hayek. Drawing on his new book Hayek's Challenge: an intellectual biography of FA Hayek, Caldwell will explore the path by which Hayek gradually developed his unique perspective on not only economics but almost the whole range of social and political phenomena, and show how his economic ideas came to inform his view on these wider issues.

Bruce Caldwell is the Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is past president of the History of Economics Society and general editor of The Collected Works of F A Hayek. Caldwell was the recipient of a Lachmann Fellowship at LSE in 2001-02. His new book, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of FA Hayek, will be published [in Great Britian] in 2004."

"The Ideas and Impact of F. A. Hayek" BOOK FORUM Monday, February 2, 2004 4:00 pm The Cato Institute 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20001

Featuring Bruce J. Caldwell, Author, Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (Chicago, 2003); and Alan Ebenstein, Author, Hayek’s Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (Palgrave, 2003); with comments by Dick Armey, Former professor of economics, former House majority leader, and cochairman, Citizens for a Sound Economy.

"It is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the 20th century as the Hayek century,” John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker. Confirming Hayek’s stature, two new books from major publishers explore the development of his thought. Biographer Alan Ebenstein discusses Hayek’s Austrian roots and his relationship to such thinkers as Mill, Marx, Keynes, and Popper. Bruce Caldwell, editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, traces the complex evolution of Hayek’s thought—and the evolution of Austrian economics—and places Hayek in a broader intellectual context. His book has been called “the best book in economics of 2003.” Please join us for a discussion of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.

Cato book forums and receptions are free of charge. To register for this event, please fill out the form below and click submit or call Krystal Brand by 4:00 pm, Friday, January 30, 2004, at (202) 789-5229, fax her at (202) 371-0841, or e-mail to kbrand@cato.org. News media inquiries only, please call 202-789-5200. If you can't make it to the Cato Institute, watch this forum live online.

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