Coordination Problem

Holcombe's _Political Capitalism_

|Peter Boettke|

During the run up to his election as President in 2016, candidate Trump often bragged that he knew full well about the pay to play schemes in politics because he was a master of using them to advance his own business interest.  It was time, he said to clean out the swamp. But no swamp cleaning is going on.

What was unique about Trump was his brazen admission of his own complicity in the entanglement of business and politics that characterizes the rent-seeking society.  Most politicians see the rent-seeking going on, and condemn it, but that is because it is the other side, not their side. Their side does politics right, and keeps business in check.  Politics isn't about profits, but about doing good.  Those other guys though, they do politics for profits.

In the extreme cases we get corruption charges filed against those in office, or formerly in office, but for the most part, pay to play politics is just part of the ordinary business of politics.  Dollars and votes on one side, politics and policy on the other, and rationally ignorant, rationally abstaining, and specially interested voters mediating the process.  The logic of politics is to concentrate benefits on well-organized and well-informed voters (the specially interested ones), and disperse the costs on the unorganized and ill-informed mass of citizens (the rationally ignorant and the rationally abstaining), and to do so in the short-run rather than in the long-run.

So unless this logic is countered, this is how political life is played out.  Trump's depiction of politics as pay to play emerges as bi-partisan and rather ordinary, though his rhetoric was (and remains) of course unusual.  He is politics in the raw.  Imagine Boss Tweed in NYC, Huey Long in Louisianna, James Michael Curley in Boston, and Richard Daley in Chicago rolled into one embodiment and given modern technology and the social media platform.

But the political economy project from Smith and Hume was to find a set of governing rules that would constrain the abuse of power.  Hume argued simply that in designing the institutions of governance we must presume that all men are knaves.  He did not argue that men were knaves -- it was not a description of humanity -- but that in designing robust institutions of governance, we would be wise to presume they were so we could guard against the downside risk of a knave grabbing power.  And, wouldn't the most knavish of us all be really good as convincing us he wasn't the knave, but others were?!

Knavery comes in the form of opportunism and arrogance.  Smith argued that power to dictate economic decisions could not be trusted in the hands of any governor, but also would be nowhere as dangerous as in the hands of a man who thought he could be so trusted.  Arrogance can do us in just as much as opportunism with guile. Let that sink in a bit. And, then think through what that might mean for standard public economic assumptions of stable social welfare functions that are being maximized by benevolent and omniscient planners.  What could possibly go wrong? Again, LET THAT SINK IN.

So we search for constitutional rules that bind the hands of the rulers, while also empowering the rulers to govern effectively.  To translate into more modern times, James Buchanan sought to establish a system of governance that empowered the protective state (law and order) and the productive state (public goods), yet constrained the predatory state (the redistributive and rent-seeking state).  How well does his intellectual effort fare?

Well, Buchanan was an academic and never was a political actor, and his ideas are actually far removed from any practical policy changes one can reasonably connect in any sort of historically responsible account.  John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman are different stories altogether, but even there Keynes was far more directly involved in policy architecture than Friedman.  Even John Kenneth Galbraith would be someone far closer to the role of policy architect than either Friedman (mildly close) or Buchanan (far removed).  BUT, Buchanan asked philosophical and analytical questions that went to the heart of the interaction between positive economics, welfare economics and political economy. So as academic economists trying to understand the world of political capitalism, his ideas are critical.

Among his direct students, Richard Wagner (UVa) and Randy Holcombe (VPI) have probably pursued Buchanan's unique research program in public finance, political economy and social philosophy more thoroughly than others -- at least that would be my judgment call.  I consider Richard Wagner's book on Buchanan to be the most definitive discussion of that research program yet penned.

But Holcombe's understanding the strengths and limits of the constitutional political economy project is right there with Wagner's.  In this new book, Political Capitalism, Holcombe explains how cronyism, corruption, capture all follow from the political economy of the interventionist state. And, he demonstrates how this was tided to an alliance forged due to changes in ideology and the interest groups that formed.  It is required reading for all students of political economy.

A few weeks ago, Mercatus hosted a book panel discussing Holcombe's new book and that is now available for your listening.  I hope you enjoy it and explore more deeply by reading his book.  We live in a world of entangled political economy and political capitalism --- this is true of the military industrial complex as well as the financial industrial complex -- and more careful and critical thought needs to be devoted to thinking through the implications and the possible reform measures that could potentially address the most pressing problems this creates.  The important Buchanan lesson to learn -- institutional problems demand institutional solutions.  Lets get thinking. 

Paul Romer's Nobel Lecture

|Peter Boettke|

The tension between the restraining force of scarce resources and the positive force of discovery and innovation.

 

Economics must shift the balance, I'd argue, from allocation to exchange, from maximization to choice, from equilibrium conditions to processes of adaptation and adjustment, from the constraints given by nature to the constraints we choose in terms of institutions that evolve, that we craft, that we adopt. This is not to deny the intellectual discipline provided by allocation, maximization, equilibrium, and constraints, but it is a question of foreground and background as my brilliant colleague Richard Wagner discusses in his book Mind, Society and Human Action (2010).

Romer's work, I want to argue, can be a fresh gateway into this conversation for the new generation of economists -- a conversation that was forged in our discipline by Adam Smith, and by F. A. Hayek, by James Buchanan, by Elinor Ostrom -- all fellow Nobel Prize winners.  His work exhibits the tension, but his message about the possibility of progress is on the side of discovery and innovation.  David Warsh's Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations provides a great introduction to Romer's work and its emergence out of the allocation, maximization, equilibrium, and the constraints given by nature conversation, but he misses the stream of mainline economics from Adam Smith to F. A. Hayek that was conducting this very conversation as well, let alone how the economics of ideas could be productively married with the economic history work of Deirdre McCloskey and Joel Mokyr to explain the "Great Enrichment" and the "Enlightened Economy".  That GREAT FACT of human existence was a consequence of the positive force of discovery and innovation.

Anyway, Romer by stressing how ideas and in particular the combinatorial innovations in ideas demonstrates the powerful insights of Julian Simons on population and that people are the ultimate resource, and once again Hayek's brilliant insights in The Constitution of Liberty, and the chapter on the creative power of free civilization.

Don't misunderstand me, Romer doesn't make these connections.  But we can, and we should use this moment to stress the message.  As he says, there is a revolution in thinking associated with progress -- from what we have to who we are (sound familiar to any reader of McCloskey) -- and its all about finding rules that enable us to live better together, and allow us to enjoy the company of strangers.  So think about that for a minute and the Enlightenment project of liberalism -- from Smith's analytical egalitarianism as reflected in his street porter and philosopher example to Kant's "strangers nowhere in this world" to Hayek's generality of the rules and the "Great Society" to Buchanan's striving for a political order that exhibits" neither discrimination nor dominion" to Ostrom's emphasis on "constitutional craftsmanship", and "self-governing democratic societies".

As Romer says in his lecture --- the economics profession today is ready for the exploration of the "broader notions of progress, the broader side of human nature." 

 

 

Come Work With Us at Ball State

Steve Horwitz

We have two tenure-track openings at Ball State and we'd love to hire two people with fields in health econ and I-O/Law and Economics. You'll join a department with a long-standing commitment to teaching and research that appreciates the power of markets and that is inclusive of work from Austrian economics, public choice, and other traditions in political economy. And you'll have the opportunity to work with not just 7 or 8 colleagues engaged in that work, but also the BSU Institute for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise and our Center for Business and Economics Research.

Feel free to email me at sghorwitz@bsu.edu with any questions.

Wirth Institute 2018 Conference on the Austrian School of Economics

|Peter Boettke|

For over a decade, the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies has been hosting a biannual conference exploring the history, philosophy, and relevance of the Austrian School of Economics.  The Wirth Institute is located at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and was established in 1998 and serves as an academic and culture center, and is part of a larger network of academic and cultural institutes dedicated to the study of Central European history and thought in the sciences and arts.

The biannual conference has been run over the years by Roger Koppl and more recently Steve Horwitz.  Due to a series of circumstances, I was called off the bench this year to serve in this capacity.  My goal was to mix disciplines, mix age and experiences, and mix perspectives. So we had papers from a historian (Janek Wasserman), from a anthropologist/archeologist (Crystal Dozier), from a political theorist (Liz Hemsley), from a philosopher (Brian Kogelmann), as well as from economists (Mathieu Bedard, Simon Bilo, Nicholas Cachanovsky, Rosolino Candela, Erwin Dekker [unfortunately absent], Stefan Kolev, Jayme Lemke, Shruti Rajagopalan, Audrey Redford, and Vlad Tarko). And we had beginning assistant professors, associate professors, and a few grey haired professors. We were also joined by Janet and Matt Bufton of The Institute for Liberal Studies for the weekend, as well as graduate students at Wirth and various members of the university community.

We had two brilliant keynote addresses -- Robert Leonard delivered a talk on Otto Neurath and Karl Menger as two modernist thinkers during the interwar years, and Bruce Caldwell discussed the reception of The Road to Serfdom in the UK and the US. 

Alf Wirth was in attendance, and his support for scholarship and academic excellence is greatly appreciated. And Wirth Institute director Joseph Patrouch was a most gracious host.  Our days of high quality conversation ended with a wonderful dinner at the Rutherford House, and then experienced a fantastic classical music performance in the concert hall.

Thank you to all for such a wonderful intellectual experience of discussion and learning. As the good folks at Wirth stated after the Saturday evening concert: "We are at our finest when our communities come together to celebrate their shared histories and their love of the arts."  And I would just add, when we remember our love of the quest understanding the human condition, our thirst for knowledge and of the pursuit of scholarship and science.  The weekend was defined, I would say, by the sheer pleasure of trying to figure things out.

 

 

All Things Marx and Socialism at Liberty Fund

Steve Horwitz

A couple of items at the Liberty Fund website that might be of interest to CP readers:

1. This month's "Liberty Matters" is on Marx, with the main essay by Virgil Storr, and responses by me, Dave Prychitko, and Pete Boettke, as well as David Hart of Liberty Fund.  General discussion will follow those responses.
2. I also have an Econlib feature this month discussing Mises's Socialism as it nears its 100th anniversary.

The piece on Socialism focuses on Mises's theory of social evolution, which relies on the centrality of the division of labor to generate peaceful cooperation. This move from violence to contract he later referred to as "The Law of Association," viewing it as an extension of Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage and trade. This point is nicely illustrated in the book's chapter on love and marriage.

This theme of the evolution from violence to contract is nicely illustrated in his chapter on “The Social Order and the Family.” There he contrasts the nature of marriage in “the age of violence” to marriage in “the age of contract.” Where marriage was a reflection of male power and where women were essentially the property of the men they married, marriage was a relationship characterized by both inequality and unhappiness, especially for women. Mises argues that the love and sexual components of marriage that we take for granted in the age of contract were not possible in an age of violence. Romantic love and marriage were largely distinct during this period, and only when marriage became about consent and contract between equals could loved-based marriage become a reality. Mises (page 78) puts it this way:

The characteristic of love, the overvaluing of the object, cannot exist when women occupy the position of contempt which they occupy under the principle of violence. For under this system she is merely a slave, but it is the nature of love to conceive her as a queen.

One of liberalism’s greatest accomplishments was the gradual extension of equal rights to all humans, and in treating women as equals under the law, liberalism advanced the feminist cause. Feminism understood as equality before the law is, he argues, “nothing more than a branch of the great liberal movement, which advocates peaceful and free evolution” (page 87). As women became the legal equals of men, and as marriage became contractual like so much else, love and sexual desire took their modern place in marriage.2 What is most striking about this argument is how far ahead of its time it was. Sociologists into the early 21st century were still making the argument that it was the liberal and market orders that enabled love to conquer marriage as if it were news. Mises saw this point almost a century earlier. This discussion has two purposes in Mises’s larger argument. First, it shows that capitalism and liberalism were responsible for many of the social advances of the modern era, rather than being the cause of any number of social problems. Second, it sets up his fear that socialism will return us to an age of violence and undo all of that progress.

Talking About the Hayek Book

|Peter Boettke|

This was waiting for me yesterday when I returned from Michigan State University where I gave my first book talk on F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy.

I am just starting to give talks, but I have been doing a few podcasts over the last few weeks.  Caleb Brown at Cato was my first podcast, but that hasn't been posted yet.  Soon I understand.  The Economics Detective, The Economic Rockstar, and the Remnant with Jonah Goldberg have all been released. 

2018 SDAE Annual Dinner & Awards Details

Please join us for the 2018 Society for the Development of Austrian Economics annual dinner and business meeting on Monday November 19th, 2018 at the Marriott Marquis, Washington DC (Georgetown Meeting Room).

 

The event will begin with a reception at 7:00 pm and continues with dinner at 8:00 pm.

 

Dinner prices are $140 for regular members and $105 for students, which includes membership dues. 

 

The SDAE is also accepting submissions for the 2018 Prizes for best article and best book published in Austrian economics. Articles and books published since January 1, 2016 are eligible.

 

 

Nominations are due October 15. Self-nominations are not accepted.

 

To register for the dinner or submit an article or book for consideration please visit https://www.sdaeonline.org/conference

 

We hope to see you in Washington D.C. in November.

 

Coming to a Library Near You

|Peter Boettke|

My book on Hayek will be published in The Great Thinkers in Economics series and is priced largely for the university and college library market. So most likely you will have to wait and check this one out when it gets to the library stacks near you.

However, you are able to get the book at a discount for personal use, and if your library subscribes to Palgrave/Macmillan catalogue you might be able to order a version of MyCopy, which I don't really know the details about but it appears to be a sort of print on-demand version.

 

 

The Science War -- And YES I did say WAR, and Its Sad

|Peter Boettke|

Ideally, science is a an exchange of ideas with the goal of tracking truth.  Contestation of viewpoints is critical to this process.  So science is a competitive and cooperative venture.  Personally, the best books I have ever read about science aren't Popper's, but Polanyi's.  Popper's work -- especially post The Logic of Scientific Discovery -- give us great insight. But I think Polanyi's Personal Knowledge is better picture of the internal dynamics of science, and his essay "The Republic of Science" does an outstanding job of explaining how a young scientist/scholar must situate themselves in the scientific/scholarly community if they hope to earn a hearing and thus a place at the conversation table.

Gordon Tullock's The Organization of Inquiry drew from both Popper and Polanyi and added more flesh and blood analysis of the institutions within which science takes place.  This was an important correction to a more naive picture of "truth win out" in science and scholarship.  Truth tracking matters, but the process can get derailed and distorted unless the contestation of claims is open and ongoing.

This morning in doing my routine daily surveying of various media sources for interesting items I came across two items that address what I consider the main sources of derailment and distortion -- the "politicization" of science for personal power and prestige  or for ideological comfort.  This is a "right" and "left" issue, so I am not picking sides here.  But I do think tone matters and smug dismissal of those you disagree with combined with efforts to discredit and delegitimize are, I believe, symptoms that one doesn't have as much argumentative thrust behind your position as the stance being taken is intended to imply.  If you name call in derogatory fashion, you probably do not have much of argument in your favor.  If you have a strong argument, then you should be able to state that position in a clear and convincing manner taking into consideration the strongest form of your intellectual opponents argument. This isn't just confirming a commitment to the scholarly principle of "charitable interpretation", it is a commitment to the basic rules of civil discourse and the spirit of true healthy contestation in science with the goal of producing the sort of social cooperation within the community of scientists that aids in the tracking of truth.

Absent that, science and scholarship can get reduced to a street fight, or a war, and those who are engaged in science and scholarship must be prepared for that if they hope to survive.  Thus, a self-reinforcing equilibrium emerges in which scientists and scholars choose teams (or armies) and line up into battle formation.  Whether this equilibrium results or not is a function of the institutions within which science/scholarship is practiced -- Gordon Tullock's The Organization of Inquiry to the interpretative rescue, but in need of some updating.

So what are the examples that stimulated me to think about this today. First, is the fascinating story of a geographer and paleontologist at Princeton, Gerta Keller, who has spent a career challenging the a giant asteroid killed the dinosaurs theory.  She argues instead that the explanation is to be found in a series of volcanic eruptions.  See Bianca Bosker, "The Nastiest Feud in Science," The Atlantic (September 2018).  As reported in the article: "Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers. “I’ve never come across anything that’s been so acrimonious,” Kerr says. “I’m almost speechless because of it.” Keller keeps a running list of insults that other scientists have hurled at her, either behind her back or to her face. She says she’s been called a “bitch” and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” who “should be stoned and burned at the stake.”"

Sad really, but reality.  In a field where prestige and power are up for grabs and resources are scarce and thus precious to the scientists engaging in field exploration, the competition takes this form.  But think about that a long minute. This is in the field of paleontology, what about fields of more immediate public policy relevance (though of course protecting from catastrophe is pretty significant and urgent).  Enter Simon Wren Lewis -- who you can count on to never disappoint to demonstrate what happens when science is characterized by smug dismissal rather than conscientious engagement (thank you blogosphere!).  Over at Mainly Macro, we are treated once more to his insistence on his mainstream elite status, and then his dismissal of anyone who disagrees with his Keynesian outlook.  He also believes that public policy over the last decades have been influenced by right wing hacks as opposed to the folks who actually were in positions of policy making authority, such as Ben Bernanke, or Larry Summers, or Janet Yellen, etc., etc.  He doesn't consider any alternative empirical measures, and he doesn't consider the different time elements in the discussion -- such as the policies to provide temporary relief result in vulnerability in the future.  Where is the discussion of (1) the fiscal gap, (2) end game strategy for the Fed to return to ordinary monetary policy, and how (1) and (2) along with other factors may impact the economic environment in such a way that (3) inequality issues become structural rather than transitory.  In other words, where is the adult economic conversation that weighs contested claims judiciously (without an effort to discredit and delegitimize) and thus truth tracking about macro volatility and economic growth and development?  Instead, we get team side choosing -- us brilliant Keynesians, them stupid austerians, and those corrupt politicians.

Go back and read The Atlantic story again.  Science WAR unfortunately is going on in the natural and in the social sciences.  We can do better, and in fact, we must do better. But that doing better will only result from a change in the organization of inquiry.

Chapter Abstracts from book on Hayek

|Peter Boettke|

Word from Palgrave/Macmillan is that my book, F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy, and Social Philosophy will be published next week. In the process of preparing the book for final publication I was asked to provide chapter abstracts. Here they are:

 

Chapter 1

Friedrich Hayek’s ideas played a fundamental role in all major debates over economic policy-making throughout his lifetime and beyond. They were developed in a precise historical context and were the result of the intellectual influence of his teachers and colleagues. Unfortunately, they are surrounded by the following misconceptions: his economics was atomistic; he believed markets to be perfectly efficient and government plays no role in a market economy; and he thought any government intervention will lead to totalitarianism. Due to their importance, these ideas demand careful consideration to go beyond the misconceptions in order to engage them fully and employ them to make sense of Hayek’s ideas and how they apply to our world today.

Chapter 2

Hayek was born in Vienna, Austria in the last year of the 19^th century. His academic career would take him first to London, then to Chicago, Salzburg, and finally Freiburg. In Vienna, he studied under Friedrich Wieser, one of the leading economists of his generation, and then began research under the direction of his intellectual mentor, Ludwig von Mises. Recruited in 1931 by the London School of Economics, he rapidly became a major academic and policy figure. During his time in London, Hayek became, alongside his colleague Lionel Robbins, engaged in debates in macroeconomics simultaneously with his debate on the problems of economic planning and economic calculation under socialism.  Hayek’s vision of the price system and the liberal market order emerged from these debates, after which, for the rest of his career, he sought to rearticulate the epistemic role of institutions that underpin a liberal market order.

Chapter 3

What would Hayek have to say about financial crises and the Great Recession? In the mind of the public policy makers, the Great Recession constituted the most serious challenge to free market ideas since the Great Depression. The bust of the housing bubble led to a financial market crash, which in turn led to a severe economic downturn. Markets seemed to have failed. Our analysis of the causes of the crisis and the policy response must rely on some theoretical framework. The consensus of policy makers around the world converged on a Keynesian understanding of the macroeconomy while the Hayekian alternative was unfortunately ignored. Hayek developed a theory of the trade cycle in which loose monetary policy generates a boom, followed by a bust caused by the economic reality of scarce resources.

Chapter 4

Hayek’s economics is fundamentally price theoretic. Economy-wide dynamics can only be understood as the result of individual agents, each endowed with dispersed, subjective, and often contradictory knowledge, carrying out their plans according to the information conveyed by the price system. This insight has been extremely influential to the development of economics since the Second World War, especially in the fields of information economics and mechanism design theory. This appropriation of Hayek’s ideas has fallen short of truly incorporating the radical challenge to our understanding of the economic system due to the profession’s focus on formalism, equilibrium analysis, and logical validity. A fully Hayekian economics must put the limits of human knowledge and the coordinating role of institutions at its core.

Chapter 5

Hayek’s understanding of the nature of the market process developed as a critique of the economic theory of market socialism. These market socialists believed that a centrally planned economy, organized around the rational economic order described by neoclassical economics, would outperform the anarchy of the free enterprise system. To Hayek, this position badly misunderstood both the nature of the knowledge that economists have about the economy and that economic agents possess. Hayek saw change as the ultimate cause of the economic problem of society. This led him to conclude that alternative economic systems must be compared and evaluated on their ability to utilize the local knowledge of individuals to adapt to unexpected change in economic circumstances.

Chapter 6

The Road to Serfdom is by far Hayek’s most successful work. It is also deeply misunderstood. Critics and advocates of his position alike interpret Hayek as saying that any step towards the concentration of economic power into the hands of the government must necessarily lead to totalitarianism. In short, Hayek’s argument is seen as a slippery slope one. Hayek actually argued that the members of a society must choose to continue on the path of centralization, and if consistently pursued, must ultimately substitute political discretion under central planning with democracy under the rule of law, a tragic outcome that is undesired by those who advocate central planning. The alternative is to impose constraints on the ability of the state to substitute individual planning for central planning, as was happening in some countries while Hayek was writing his book.

Chapter 7

Hayek belongs to a long tradition of social scientists who saw themselves as contributing to the “invisible hand theorizing” of Adam Smith. In this, he was influenced by other Austrian economists, particularly Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises. Menger was the first economist to develop an evolutionary theory of institutional formation, which he used to make sense of the emergence of money. Mises extended Menger’s argument on money and elaborated the methodological foundations of the study of institutions. In turn, Hayek himself influenced the development of a new, genuine institutional economics during the emergence of the law and economics approach pioneered by Aaron Director, Ronald Coase, and Bruno Leoni in the second half of the twentieth century.

Chapter 8

Hayek spent much of his intellectual life trying to identify the institutional foundations of a society of free individuals. In doing so, he ended up investigating topics beyond the scope of economics proper and entered into the realm of legal and political theory. During this time, he came to realize that a society that optimizes both on the degree of social order and that of recourse to violence must rely on the rule of law as its fundamental principle: equality before the law; stable and universal rules of conduct; and freedom to pursue one’s ends within the boundaries of the law. In devising public policy, the government of a free society must take these principles as its guiding principles.

Chapter 9

In order to understand Hayek’s intellectual journey, one must appreciate his formation in Vienna during the early 20^th century, one of the most vibrant intellectual centers of the time. Hayek was familiar with the debates on the role of epistemology in the natural sciences, and these arguments influenced his own understanding of the scope and method of economics. What the social scientist is always studying is the result of the interaction of the minds of a multitude of individuals. The context within which these minds interact is fundamentally important to trace the basis for the unintended consequences of human action. Hence, epistemic considerations must be front and center in our study of economic, political, and social phenomena.

Chapter 10

Hayek was a major player in the rebirth of the classical liberal project. His The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973-1979) served as the foundations for the following work of other classical liberal thinkers. Hayek developed a liberal (as opposed to illiberal) view of classical liberalism in which the end goal is the freeing of the creative energies of individuals. In order to be as productive, inventive, and creative as they possibly can, individuals must be left free to use their knowledge and property according to their independently devised plans. Hence, Hayek’s view of liberty is neither merely “negative” nor “positive.” His liberalism is a truly progressive, universalist, cosmopolitan political philosophy.

Chapter 11

Hayek’s project is a challenge to the scientistic understanding of economics and political economy, and a rejection of constructivist rationalism in social philosophy. It is a project full of tensions, but also of great promise. As a social scientist, he emphasized the limits of our knowledge in devising institutions. As a political economist, he made policy recommendations, with the specifics of those recommendations evolving over time. Nonetheless, his ideas remain important and anyone with an interest in the study of society must wrestle with them. Doing so requires going beyond the many misconceptions about Hayek’s work and taking him as the serious and influential thinker he was and still is.