Hayek on the Market
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
Talking Politics
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2020
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) was written during the Second World War but Hayek was really worried about what would come next. He feared that wartime planning would spill over into the peacetime economy and destroy hard won freedoms. David explores where Hayek’s fears came from and asks why he worried that democracy would only make the problem worse. He also considers what makes Hayek such a politically influential and divisive figure to this day.
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Going Deeper:
- Geoffrey Hawthorn on Hayek and his overcoat for the LRB
- F.A. Hayek, ‘Individualism: True and False’
- Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The iron cage of liberty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996)
- Stephen Metcalf in The Guardian, ‘Neoliberalism: The Idea that Swallowed the World’
- Hayek vs. Keynes
- Matt Ridley, The rational optimist: how prosperity evolves (London: Fourth Estate 2011)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of talking politics. |
| 0:10.0 | Today's talk in our... Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of talking politics. |
| 0:13.6 | Today's talk in our series, History of Ideas, is about Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Surfdom, |
| 0:19.3 | which made the case for the power of the free market. |
| 0:22.3 | Hayek thought democracy was on a slippery slope to oppressive |
| 0:25.7 | government control. What exactly was he so worried about? Talking Politics, History of Ideas, is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of |
| 0:39.4 | Books, Europe's leading literary magazine. |
| 0:43.0 | After each episode, continue your exploration of the history of ideas |
| 0:47.0 | in their unrivaled archive of essays and reviews, films and podcasts, and find out more about how a support. and |
| 0:53.0 | find out more about how a subscription to the L.R. B can be an indispensable |
| 0:58.0 | home learning and student resource |
| 1:00.0 | by heading over to their website |
| 1:02.0 | L.R.b. me |
| 1:04.0 | forward slash ideas. |
| 1:06.0 | That's L.r. |
| 1:08.0 | me forward slash ideas. This talk is about an economist and it's the first one I've given about an economist. |
| 1:22.1 | Yes, Karl Marx was a kind of economist, but economics |
| 1:26.5 | as a separate academic discipline and profession didn't really exist. In 1848, what Marx did was usually called political economy and it included |
| 1:35.9 | politics, economics, philosophy, history, everything. Hayek was an economist in something more like the sense we tend to use the term in the 21st century. |
| 1:47.0 | He belonged to an academic discipline and profession and he was enough of an economist that he won the Nobel Prize for economics. |
| 1:55.5 | You kind of have to be an economist to do that though one or two have snuck under the |
| 1:59.8 | wire without being won. But Hyac was a really unusual sort of economist because he didn't |
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