You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest today is the philosopher and historian Jonathan Ray, whose books include proletarian philosophers and

witchcraft, the invention of philosophy in English. He's been writing for the LRB since 1997,

and has a piece in the current issue on the neoliberal economist, although we're going to talk

about both those terms, Friedrich Hayek. It's a review of Hayek, A Life, 1899 to 1950 by Bruce Caldwell and Hansiurg Klausinger.

Hello, Jonathan, and thank you very much for joining me. Good afternoon.

So we have this new biography of Hayek covering slightly more than half of his life. It's over 800 pages

long. If you had to describe him in two words, you'd probably call him a neoliberal

economist as I did when introducing him. But those are contested words, he died 30 years ago. Why should

people still be interested in in Hayek? Well, I think that's a good question. I mean, in some ways,

he's the kind of person you might not want to bother with at all. He was a right-wing thinker,

in some ways rather a petty right-wing thinker, born at the end of the 19th century, and born and

died in 1992, originally Austrian, but he became a British citizen in the 1930s and in some

ways a bit of an English patriot, a snobbish English

patriot.

He was a professional economist and his interest was in the theory of markets of how capitalist

free trade is a brilliant way for a society to allocate its resources where they're needed.

And his legacy tends to get wrapped up in the word neoliberalism. And that word must be the word of the 21st century. And one of the

things that became clear to me was that it's actually a very, very ambiguous word. I think a lot of us on the left have got used to

using neoliberalism as a word for everything that's gone wrong in the last two or three decades,

or the reason for all our disappointments that things haven't turned out. You know, we might have thought ages ago that the world was going to become more equal

and more just and more peaceful.

And the fact that it hasn't, we put down to this thing called neoliberalism, which we equate

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