This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 19th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As relevant as the work of F.A. Hayek is to our present controversies, that work took place in a particular time and place.

And understanding those circumstances can help us understand some of what motivated the late Nobel Laureate.

Peter Betke's new book is F.A. Hayek, economics, political economy, and social philosophy.

The book is available now.

We spoke last month. It wasn't really until the 1970s that people began to

reconsider Hayek and to think that in you know in the collapse of the Keynesian consensus, we have, there was a gap,

of a void and it seemed that something at least intellectually had to fill that void and Hayek had been speaking for a long time and writing for a long time about how we ought to think about planning, how we ought to think about planning, how we ought to think about institutions.

And you said you point out that he was at least at first blush right then vindicated by history given the breakdown of that consensus.

But is he still vindicated by history or have we seen significant challenges to the project that he put out there?

Well first I think it's important to trace the arc of Hayek's career which kind of follows a youngian archetype because he has a meteoric rise, a crushing defeat, and then a resurrection, which makes him one of the interesting intellectuals that you can imagine.

So you can, in the back of the book I have a citation pattern studies and you can see that in the

70s his citation spike and then in the 1989 1990-1991

period his citation spike again and I imagine that if you follow that out further, you look into 2008, 2009, you'll see the citation

pattern spike again.

And so what does those reflect?

It reflects the breakdown of the Keynesian consensus in the 1970s in the search for a micro foundations of macroeconomics, which Hyac was already practicing in prices and production.

He was the alternative figure to Keynes.

He lost that debate, but in the 1930s he also was engaged in the market socialism debate. And so with the fall of communism,

people return again to Hayek's kind of ideas.

But then they think they have absorbed what he has to say

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