The road from serfdom: F.A. Hayek spent years in the wilderness for arguing that socialism was the road, not to prosperity and justice, but to tyranny

Though it has this scientistic aspect, Hayek's thought remains deeply instructive for conservatives. Hayek recognized that individual liberty presupposes an undergirding framework of traditions and practices that are accepted, not because they satisfy some rationalistic standard of justification, but simply because they are acknowledged to be authoritative. Hayek's version of classical liberalism may be unique in that, unlike virtually all others, it recognizes the hubris of reason to be an enemy of freedom. The lesson for conservatives, especially in America, is clear: a free society, if it is also to be stable and successful in renewing itself across the generations, must be in considerable measure tradition-bound. Or, to put the same point in another, Burkean way, assured progress depends upon strong traditions. The importance of these insights to American conservatives is profound, in that the implication of Hayek's thought is that the antinomian tradition of radical libertarianism, with its rationalistic conception of man and society, is inimical to individual liberty over the long run. Accordingly, despite his resistance to being considered a conservative, Hayek's thought counsels us against doctrinal classical liberalism and in favor of a much more traditionalist position.

Even though his system of ideas does not fully cohere, Hayek's thought remains extraordinary in its vitality and cross-disciplinary versatility. He made many contributions to the life of the mind--to intellectual history, for example--which space prevents my discussing. His case for limited government and economic liberty has a certain moral emptiness that in the end disables it. Yet his insight into the nature of market institutions as bearers of knowledge otherwise unavailable to us, and his prediction that attempts at comprehensive central planning would yield only chaos and poverty, illuminates and renders intelligible, as nothing else has, one of the great dramas of the age--the demise of socialism. It is Hayek's achievement, virtually alone, to have anticipated the collapse of socialist institutions, during a period when the spirit of the age cast out into the wilderness any who doubted the superiority of central planning over personal liberty.

FRIEDRICH August von Hayek is no longer among us, and I have lost a friend with whom I met every summer for twenty years in Obergurgl, a Tyrolean Alpine village. This most remarkable man descended from a family ennobled at the end of the eighteenth century by the Holy Roman Emperor. Born in Vienna in 1899, he originally wanted to become a biologist (two of his brothers were noted professors of anatomy and chemistry). But, having served as a lieutenant on the Italian front in 1918, he decided not to spend his life and microscopes and test tubes but to concern himself directly with people--and thus he became an economist.

He became associated with Ludwig von Mises (18 years his senior), who imbued him with an aversion to anything resembling Marxism. Seeing Austria menaced by both forms of socialism--national and international--Hayek went to England, where fom 1931 to 1950 he taught at the London School of Economics. His classic The Road to Serfdom made him world famous (and widely hated) and brought him a call to the University of Chicago, where for years he worked with the Committee on Social Thought. Together with Wilhelm Ropke he profoundly influenced Ludwig Erhard; for his share in Germany's "Economic Miracle," he was made a professor at Freiburg University. In 1974 he received the Nobel Prize.