Did Hayek Write His Last Book?
Summer 1998
"WHAT'S WRONG WITH LIBERTARIANISM"
Jeffrey Friedman
Critical Review 11,no. 3(Summer 1997), pp. 407-67
At last Jeffrey Friedman has said something interesting! One footnote in this ponderous
mélange
discloses important information. Friedrich Hayek, according to Friedman, did not write his last
book,
The Fatal Conceit. The book was "apparently" written by the book's editor, W.W.
Bartley, III. There
was "little noticeable input from Hayek, who was mortally ill. What Bartley characterized as
confused
and mostly unusable notes and passages by Hayek, some of which ended up in the book's
Appendices,
apparently served as the basis of Bartley's efforts to complete a manuscript: the products of
Bartley's labors were allegedly reviewed by Hayek" (p. 463, n. 9).
Mr. Friedman, who in 1986 worked as Bartley's research assistant, doubts that Hayek
exercised much
supervision. Passages that Friedman composed about Foucault, Marcuse, and Habermas appear
verbatim in
the book's text. Surely Friedman is right that a mentally alert Hayek would not have adopted
Friedman's work unchanged as his own. Friedman suspects that "Hayek may never even have
seen these
words, although they were published under his name" (p. 463).
If Friedman's claim is right--a matter that requires further investigation--it is ironic that
Bartley
himself discounted Karl Marx's Economic Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 on
the grounds that these
were jottings and notes pieced together by editors.