Individualism and Economic Order

ALTHOUGH the essays collected in this volume may at first appear to be concerned with a great variety of topics, I hope that the reader will soon discover that most of them treat of closely connected problems. While they range from discussions of moral philosophy to the methods of the social sciences and from problems of economic policy to pure economic theory, these questions are treated in most of the essays as different aspects of the same central issue. This connection will be seen most readily in the first six essays, yet in some measure the three on the problem of socialist calculation which follow them may be regarded as an application of the same ideas to a particular problem, although when I wrote these I did not yet quite see it in that light. Only the last three essays deal with somewhat different points of theory or policy; but, since I believe that the problems with which they are concerned will be discussed even more in the future than they have been in the past, I have taken this opportunity to make them available in a more convenient form.

Since I published not long ago a more popular book on problems related to some of those discussed here, I should in fairness warn the reader that the present volume is not intended for popular consumption. Only a few of the essays collected here (chaps, i and vi, and possibly iv and v) may in a sense be regarded as supplementary to that advance sketch of certain practical conclusions which a sense of urgency has tempted me to publish under the title The Road to Serfdom. The rest are definitely addressed to fellow-students and are fairly technical in character. All are admittedly fragments, products which have emerged in the pursuit of a distant goal, which for the time being must serve in place of the finished product. I should perhaps add that from my recent publications in the field with which most of the essays in this volume deal I have not included two series of articles on “Scientism and the Study of Society” and the “Counterrevolution of Science” because they are intended to form part of a larger and more systematic work; in the meantime they can be found in the volumes of Economica for 1941–45 and 1940, respectively.

My thanks are due to the editors of the American Economic Review, Economica, the Economic Journal, Ethics, and the New Commonwealth Quarterly for permission to reprint articles which first appeared in these journals, and to Messrs. George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., London, for permission to reproduce the two essays originally contributed to the volume on Collectivist Economic Planning published by them in 1935.

F. A. Hayek

London School of Economics

June 1947