Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:
Mr. P__:
Thanks for forwarding the credulous review of the new book by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison. If the review gives an accurate account of the book – and knowing something of George Monbiot, I’m confident that it does – I’ll not take you up on your suggestion that I “read this book to learn something finally.” Authors whose cases depend upon claims that are either outright lies or reflections of egregious ignorance deserve only to be distrusted and disregarded.
‘What lies or ignorance?’ you’ll ask. Overlooking minor flubs, such as the description of F.A. Hayek as being “a refugee from the Nazis” – Hayek, born of a Catholic family, moved to London in 1931 – here are two.
First, “neoliberalism” is most certainly not “a term popularized by the economist Friedrich Hayek.” Hayek championed liberalism, unprefixed. As reported by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger in their excellent 2022 biography of Hayek, the term “neo-liberalism” was suggested, as a better name for liberalism, in the 1930s by Louis Rougier to a gathering of liberals that included Hayek. This suggestion was rejected. As Caldwell and Klausinger note, “few used this term afterward, until it was revived by critics of liberalism later in the century.”*
Second and worse, it’s manifestly mistaken to write that Hayek in the Road to Serfdom argued that “social safety nets like the American New Deal and Britain’s emerging welfare state would diminish individual rights and inevitably lead to totalitarianism of the Nazi or Soviet kind.” In Chapter 9 of that book, Hayek explicitly acknowledged that the welfare state is compatible with the liberal society that he championed. He there distinguished between two kinds of security. One is “security against severe physical privation, the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance for all.” The second is security against losing one’s relative position in society. He then wrote that “there is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has attained the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom…. Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision.”**
The fact that Monbiot and Hutchison get such straightforward facts wrong drains their work of any claim to credibility.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger, Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), p. 461.
** F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 [1944]), pp. 147-148.
