Writing for the New Statesman, John Gray considers the question of what made Friedrich Hayek such a unique figure in conservative political thought. The answer, he concludes, was Hayek’s “independence of mind, which enabled him to swim against some of the most powerful currents of the age.” Gray writes:
In the 1980s, when F A Hayek was one of the intellectual icons of the New Right, some of the more doctrinaire members of that complicated and fractious movement used to say that for him a minimal government was one that provided three things: national defence, law and order, and a state opera. It was an observation made only partly in jest. The Austrian-born economist and philosopher may have been the thinker who, more than anyone else, articulated the free-market ideology that came to power along with Margaret Thatcher; but his view of politics was formed not in Britain, his adopted country, but in the Habsburg empire, where the Vienna Court Opera was a department of government whose existence no one would dream of questioning.
Born in that city in 1899, Hayek came from an upper-middle-class background – his father was a medical doctor with a passion for botany who always wanted to be a professor, while his mother came from a wealthy land-owning family. The Hayeks enjoyed the prosperity of the closing decades of what the Austrian author Stefan Zweig described as “ the age of security”: the long period of stability provided by the 68-year reign of its last-but-one emperor, Franz Joseph. Hayek witnessed the collapse of an imperial regime that for generations had been more civilised and more liberal than most of the nation states that replaced it in interwar Europe. It was this Habsburg realm, as he experienced it in its final years, which shaped Hayek’s thinking about freedom and government.
My interest in Hayek, which began in the early 1970s, was as much to do with intellectual life in the Vienna of his youth as with the condition of British politics at the time. One of the first questions I asked after we had met through one of the right-wing think tanks that were proliferating around the end of that decade was whether he had known Karl Kraus, the incomparable Viennese satirist, who in 1909 had written, with some prescience: “Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin.” Hayek replied that he had not talked with Kraus, though he remembered seeing him crossing the road to enter a coffee house some time during the First World War. Hayek had little in common with Kraus. Cool and reserved, he had nothing of Kraus’s wit. Although he was academic in his manner, Hayek’s most striking intellectual trait was one that is uncommon in academic life – independence of mind, which enabled him to swim against some of the most powerful currents of the age.
For the full essay, see here.