Friedrich Hayek citations Page 2

“C'est une caractéristique essentielle d'une société libre que la situation d'un individu n'ait pas de rapport nécessaire avec l'opinion de ses concitoyens sur le mérite qu'il s'est acquis.”

La Route de la servitude (The Road to Serfdom), 1943

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté ('), 1960

“Bien des gens qui se considèrent très au-dessus des aberrations du nazisme et qui en haïssent très sincèrement toutes les manifestations, travaillent en même temps pour des idéaux dont la réalisation mènerait tout droit à cette tyrannie abhorrée.”

“Je dirai que, comme institutions pour le long terme, je suis complètement contre les dictatures. Mais une dictature peut être un système nécessaire pour une période transitoire. Parfois il est nécessaire pour un pays d'avoir, pour un temps, une forme ou une autre de pouvoir dictatorial. […] Personnellement je préfère un dictateur libéral plutôt qu'un gouvernement démocratique manquant de libéralisme. Mon impression personnelle est que […] au Chili par exemple, nous assisterons à la transition d'un gouvernement dictatorial vers un gouvernement libéral.”

La Route de la servitude ('), 1943

“Il n'y a rien dans les principes du libéralisme qui permette d'en faire un dogme immuable; il n'y a pas de règles stables, fixées une fois pour toutes. Il y a un principe fondamental : à savoir que dans la conduite de nos affaires nous devons faire le plus grand usage possible des forces sociales spontanées, et recourir le moins possible à la coercition.”

Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. […] Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression […] is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government.
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“[Le libéralisme économique] considère la concurrence comme supérieure non seulement parce qu'elle est dans la plupart des circonstances la méthode la plus efficace qu'on connaisse, mais plus encore parce qu'elle est la seule méthode qui permette d'ajuster nos activités les unes aux autres sans intervention arbitraire ou coercitive de l'autorité.”

La Route de la servitude (The Road to Serfdom), 1943

“La démocratie est avant tout un processus de formation de l'opinion. Son avantage principal ne réside pas dans sa méthode de sélection de ceux qui gouvernent, mais dans le fait que lorsqu'une grande partie de la population prend une part active dans la formation de l'opinion, il y a aussi une plus grande variété de personnes parmi lesquelles choisir de possibles gouvernants.”

La Route de la servitude ('), 1943

Friedrich Hayek Citations

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté ('), 1960

“Bien plutôt, déclarer que quelqu’un est responsable de ce qu’il fait tend à rendre ses actions différentes de ce qu’elles seraient s’il ne croyait pas l’être réellement. Nous assignons à un homme de la responsabilité, non pour dire que tel qu’il était il aurait pu agir autrement, mais afin de le rendre différent.”

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté ('), 1960

“Ambition, impatience, hâte d'agir sont souvent dignes d'admiration chez des individus, mais elles sont pernicieuses quand elles guident l'usage du pouvoir de contraindre et de corriger aux mains de gens qui, une fois investis de l'autorité, supposent que celle-ci s'accompagne d'une sagesse supérieure, et par conséquent du droit d'imposer aux autres leurs convictions.”

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté ('), 1960

“La concurrence est précieuse précisément parce qu’elle constitue une méthode de découverte, dont nous n’aurions pas besoin si ses résultats pouvaient être prédits.”

Friedrich Hayek livre Droit, législation et liberté

Droit, législation et liberté ('), 1973-1979

“Reconnaître l'individu comme juge en dernier ressort de ses propres fins, croire que dans la mesure du possible ses propres opinions doivent gouverner ses actes, telle est l'essence de l'individualisme.”

“La raison humaine ne peut ni prévoir ni modeler délibérément son propre devenir. Ses avancées consistent à déceler les endroits où elle s'est trompée.”

La Route de la servitude ('), 1943

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté ('), 1960

“La liberté individuelle est incompatible avec la suprématie d'un but unique auquel toute la société est subordonnée en permanence.”

“Si les hommes en tant que membres de la société civilisée peuvent poursuivre leurs fins individuelles avec plus de succès que s'ils étaient isolés, c'est largement parce que la civilisation leur permet constamment de tirer parti d'un savoir que personnellement ils n'ont pas; et l'emploi fait par chaque individu de son savoir particulier sert à d'autres qu'il ne connaît pas, en leur facilitant la poursuite de leurs buts respectifs.”

La Route de la servitude ('), 1943

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté (The Constitution of Liberty), 1960

“La philosophie politique n'a jamais autant de raisons de se soupçonner de faillir à son devoir que lorsqu'il constate que ses opinions personnelles sont très populaires.”

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté ('), 1960

“Le libéral considère que les bornes qu'il souhaite que la démocratie s'impose, sont précisément les limites dans lesquelles elle peut fonctionner efficacement et celles dans lesquelles elle peut vraiment diriger et contrôler les actes du gouvernement.”

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté ('), 1960

“En dernier ressort, la société de concurrence recourt à l'huissier, et l'économie dirigée, au bourreau.”

“Existe-t-il une échelle de valeurs que tout homme sensé puisse admettre, capable de justifier un nouvel ordre hiérarchique de la société et à même de satisfaire l'aspiration naturelle des hommes à la justice?”

La Route de la servitude ('), 1943

“Ce n'est pas la source mais la limitation du pouvoir qui l'empêche d'être arbitraire.”

La Route de la servitude (The Road to Serfdom), 1943

“La démocratie est essentiellement un moyen, un procédé utilitaire pour sauvegarder la paix intérieure et la liberté individuelle. En tant que telle, elle n'est nullement infaillible. N'oublions pas non plus qu'il a souvent existé plus de liberté culturelle et spirituelle sous un pouvoir autocratique que sous certaines démocraties, — et qu'il est au moins concevable que sous le gouvernement d'une majorité homogène et doctrinaire, la démocratie soit aussi tyrannique que la pire des dictatures.”

La Route de la servitude ('), 1943

“Aussi paradoxal que cela puisse paraître, il est sans doute vrai qu'une société libre qui réussit est toujours dans une large mesure une société attachée à des traditions.”

La Route de la servitude ('), 1943

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté ('), 1960

“Qu’il fût possible aux hommes de vivre ensemble paisiblement et à leur mutuel avantage, sans avoir à se mettre d’accord sur des objectifs concrets communs, en étant tenus simplement par des règles de conduite abstraites, a été peut-être la plus grande découverte qu’ait jamais faite l’humanité.”

Friedrich Hayek livre Droit, législation et liberté

Droit, législation et liberté ('), 1973-1979

“La principale leçon que le vrai libéral doit retenir du succès des socialistes est que ce fut leur courage d'être des utopistes qui leur a valu le soutien des intellectuels et donc un pouvoir d'influence sur l'opinion publique, laquelle sait rendre tous les jours possible ce qui hier semblait hors d'atteinte. Ceux qui ne s'intéressent qu'à ce qui semble praticable dans l'état présent de l'opinion ont toujours pu constater que même cela devenait impossible à réaliser à mesure que survenaient des changements dans une opinion publique qu'ils n'avaient rien fait pour guider.”

“De même que la propriété de tous n'est en fait la propriété de personne, la responsabilité de tout le monde n'est la responsabilité de personne.”

Essais de philosophie, de science politique et d'économie, 1967

Friedrich Hayek livre La Constitution de la liberté

La Constitution de la liberté ('), 1960

Friedrich Hayek: Citations en anglais

“Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.”

“You cannot successfully use your technical knowledge unless you are a fairly educated person, and, in particular, have some knowledge of the whole field of the social sciences as well as some knowledge of history and philosophy. Of course real competence in some particular field comes first. Unless you really know your economics or whatever your special field is, you will be simply a fraud. But if you know economics and nothing else, you will be a bane to mankind, good, perhaps, for writing articles for other economists to read, but for nothing else.”

Source: 1940s–1950s, The Road to Serfdom (1944), p. xi

“There can be no doubt that our innate moral emotions and instincts were acquired in the hundreds of thousand years—probably half a million years—in which Homo sapiens lived in small hunting and gathering groups and developed a physiological constitution which governed his innate instincts. These instincts are still very strong in us. Yet civilization developed by our gradually learning cultural rules which were transmitted by teaching and which served largely to restrain and suppress some of those natural instincts.”

Friedrich Hayek (1991). "On being an economist." In: W. W. Bartley and S. Kresge (eds.), The Trend of Economic Thinking; Essays on Political Economists and Economic History, Volume III, London. Routledge. p. 38
1980s and later

“Those who suffer from this monopoly should form a libertarian anti-labour union movement of workers directed against what has long become a deceptive farce favouring an elite that has gained dominance in a party wrongly claiming to represent the interest of all workers. Once it is recognized that the unions prevent people from getting jobs, such a movement may readily spread.”

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "Science and Socialism"

“The human groups have been selected for the effects of their habitual practices, effects of which the individuals were not and could not be aware. Customs are mostly group properties, beneficial only if they are common properties of its individual members but referring to reciprocal action.”

"Jobs: the basic truths we have cast aside", The Times (7 August 1984), p. 10
1980s and later

“I did say in print, in February, 1929 that there was no hope for economic recovery in Europe before American interest rates came down. That wouldn’t be until the American boom collapsed — which was likely to happen within the next few months. And this did, in fact, happen in October 1929.
What made me expect this, of course, was one of my main theoretical beliefs — that an inflationary boom cannot be maintained indefinitely. I was sure that a very unstable situation was created by the artificial prolongation of the boom in 1927, when the Federal Reserve tried to stave off a collapse by credit expansion.”

"The Origins and Effects of Our Morals: A Problem for Science", in The Essence of Hayek (1984)
1980s and later

“The social sciences building at the University of Chicago indeed still bears since it was built 40 years ago on its outside an inscription taken from the famous physicist Lord Kelvin: "When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory." I will admit that that may be true, but it is certainly not scientific to insist on measurement where you don't know what your measurements mean. There are cases where measurements are not relevant. What has done much damage to microeconomics is striving for a pseudo-exactness by imitating methods of the physical sciences which have to deal with what are fundamentally much more simple phenomena. And the assumption that it is possible to ascertain all the relevant particular facts still completely dominates the alternative methods of dealing with our constitutional ignorance, which economists have tried to overcome. This of course, is what has come to be called macroeconomics as distinct from microeconomics.”

1980s and later, Interview in Silver & Gold Report (1980)

“A limited democracy might indeed be the best protector of individual liberty and be better than any other form of limited government, but an unlimited democracy is probably worse than any other form of unlimited government, because its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise. If Mrs. Thatcher said that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom, while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot.”

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance"

“The next time I met Ludwig Wittgenstein was in the spring of 1928 when the economist Dennis Robertson, who was taking me for a walk through the Fellows' Gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge, suddenly decided to change course because on the top of a little rise he perceived the form of the philosopher draped over a deckchair. He evidently stood rather in awe of him, and he did not wish to disturb him.”

Letter to The Times http://coreyrobin.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/hayek-letter-to-the-times-july-11-1978.pdf (11 July 1978), p. 15 1960s–1970s

“Life at Cambridge during those war years was to me particularly congenial, and it completed the process of thorough absorption in English life which, from the beginning, I had found very easy. Somehow the whole mood and intellectual atmosphere of the country had at once proved extraordinarily attractive to me, and the conditions of a war in which all my sympathies were with the English greatly speeded up the process of becoming thoroughly at home—much more than in my native Austria from which I had already become somewhat estranged during the conditions of the 1920s. While neither on my early visit to the United States nor during my later stay there or still later in Germany did I feel that I really belonged there, English ways of life seemed so naturally to accord with all my instincts and dispositions that, if it had not been for very special circumstances, I should never have wished to leave the country again. And of all the forms of life, that at one of the colleges of the old universities…still seems to me the most attractive. The evenings at the High Table and the Combinations Room at King's are among the pleasantest recollections of my life, and some of the older men I came then to know well, especially J. H. Clapham, remained, while they lived, dear friends.”

" Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug-00020", Encounter ( August 1977 https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug). Page 21. 1960s–1970s

“Our morality itself is the result of a process of cultural selection. Those things survive which enable the species to multiply.”

Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar (eds.), Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 86
1980s and later

“Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism… There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called ‘liberalism’ was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.”

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "Our Moral Heritage"

“On the scale on which [tax cutting] is being tried, I'm a little apprehensive. I'm all for reduction of government expenditures but to anticipate it by reducing the rate of taxation before you have reduced expenditure is a very risky thing to do.”

"Why I am Not a Conservative" https://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2011/hayek_constitution.html 1960s–1970s, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

“What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.”

in "Business People; A Nobel Winner Assesses Reagan", The New York Times (1 December 1982)
1980s and later

“The sentence, 'stopping the printing presses,' is a figurative expression, because it is being done now by creating credit by the Federal Reserve System. But this is government action — all inflation is ultimately the result of activities which government determines and can control. And all inflations have been stopped in the past by the government stopping creating money, or preventing the central bank from creating more money. May I add just one thing? See, all inflations have been stopped by people who created or believed in a very naive form of the Quantity Theory, and acted on that. It may be wrong, but it is the only adequate theory effective to stop an inflation.”

Source: 1960s–1970s, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), p. 6.

“The attack on economics sprang rather from a dislike of the application of scientific methods to the investigation of social problems. The existence of a body of reasoning which prevented people from following their first impulsive reactions, and which compelled them to balance indirect effects, which could be seen only by exercising the intellect, against intense feeling caused by the direct observation of concrete suffering, then as now, occasioned intense resentment.”

1975 interview https://mises.org/library/hayek-meets-press-1975 on "Meet the Press." 1960s–1970s

“Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.”

"The Trend of Economic Thinking", lecture delivered at LSE on March 1, 1933, published in Economica (May 1933)
1920s–1930s

“I think the basic misconception is to speak of the so-called “best” allocation of resources. What is the best? In common economics it is defined as what would be if we knew everything. Economists operate with the fictitious assumption that all the relevant data is known, but this is totally unrealistic. Nobody knows all the data. What we have is widely dispersed knowledge, which cannot be concentrated in one mind. To call the situation—which would use all the knowledge available—“optimal” is nonsense because it is by definition a non-achievable solution. Our problem is not the full utilization of all knowledge but the best use we can achieve with any known institutional structure. In that sense, some oligopolistic (and even monopolistic situations), represent the best possible utilization of knowledge that we can achieve. Even the action of a monopolist can be extremely beneficial.”

Source: 1960s–1970s, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), p. 83.

“I don’t have many strong dislikes. I admit that as a teacher—I have no racial prejudices in general—but there were certain types, and conspicuous among them the Near Eastern populations, which I still dislike because they are fundamentally dishonest. And I must say dishonesty is a thing I intensely dislike. It was a type which, in my childhood in Austria, was described as Levantine, typical of the people of the eastern Mediterranean. But I encountered it later, and I have a profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type—Bengali moneylender sons. They are to me a detestable type, I admit, but not with any racial feeling. I have found a little of the same amongst the Egyptians —basically a lack of honesty in them. If I advise speaking about honesty, I think honesty is really the best expression of what I call the morals of a civilized society. Primitive man lacks a conception of honesty.”

1960s–1970s, A Conversation with Professor Friedrich A. Hayek (1979)

“I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.”

Conversation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoV-5p88rGU&feature=youtu.be&t=53m31s with Chitester (1978); published in Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: Friedrich A. von Hayek https://archive.org/details/nobelprizewinnin00haye (1983), p. 490 1960s–1970s

“There mere idea that the planning authority could ever possess a complete inventory of the amounts and qualities of all the different materials and instruments of production of which the manager of a particular plant will know or be able to find out makes the whole proposal a somewhat comic fiction. Once this is recognised it becomes obvious that what prices ought to be can never be determined without relying on competitive markets.”

1960s–1970s, Nobel Banquet Speech (1974)

“What the planning authority would have to know would not be the mere totals but the distinct, peculiar conditions prevailing in each enterprise which affect the information about values transmitted through market prices but would be completely lost in any statistical information about quantities that might reach the authority from time to time.”

1980s and later, "Two Pages of Fiction" (1982)

“Since only actions aimed at perceived benefit to others were, to Aristotle's mind, morally approved, actions solely for personal gain must be bad. That commercial considerations may not have affected the daily activities of most people does not mean however that over any prolonged period their very lives did not depend on the functioning of a trade that enabled them to buy essentials. That production for gain which Aristotle denounced as unnatural had -- long before his time -- already become the foundation of an extended order far transcending the known needs of other persons.”

1980s and later, "Two Pages of Fiction" (1982)

“What struck me most in this conversation was a radical passion for truthfulness in everything (which I came to know as a characteristic vogue among the young Viennese intellectuals of the generation immediately preceding mine only in the following university years). This truthfulness became almost a fashion in that border group between the purely Jewish and the purely Gentile parts of the intelligentsia in which I came so much to move. It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to "live" truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others. It sometimes produced outright rudeness and, certainly, unpleasantness. Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud. Wittgenstein merely carried this further in applying it to himself. I sometimes felt that he took a perverse pleasure in discovering falsehood in his own feelings and that he was constantly trying to purge himself of all fraud.”

Source: 1980s and later, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 46

“An evil fate befall German efforts to defend the ideal of liberty in general and in the field of economics in particular, with the result that today I am almost the only survivor of a generation that set out in the wake of the First World War to devote all its energies to the preservation of a civilised society, a generation that set itself the task to build a better society in a systematic fashion and to learn to understand, an to some extent defend, a tradition that had civilised the world.”

“And since any inflation, however modest at first, can help employment only so long as it accelerates, adopted as a means of reducing unemployment, it will do so for any length of time only while it accelerates. "Mild" steady inflation cannot help—it can lead only to outright inflation. That inflation at a constant rate soon ceases to have any stimulating effect, and in the end merely leaves us with a backlog of delayed adaptations, is the conclusive argument against the "mild" inflation represented as beneficial even in standard economics textbooks.”

"The Rediscovery of Freedom: Personal Recollections" (1983), published in The Fortunes of Liberalism (1992)
1980s and later

“The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.
This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence.
But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally.
There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society — as the press tends to treat him till in the end he may himself be persuaded to believe.”

1980s Unemployment and the Unions: Essays on the Impotent Price Structure of Britain and Monopoly in the Labour Market https://books.google.com/books?id=zZu3AAAAIAAJ&q=%22only+while+it+accelerates%22&dq=%22only+while+it+accelerates%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HBhsUYjUGMv34QSW-YDgDg&redir_esc=y (1984) 1980s and later

“I believe that the main lesson which our generation has learnt is that we must find a new limit for the activities of government, a limit which leaves ample scope for sensible experimentation but which secures the freedom of the individual as the mainspring of all social and political activity. The whole purpose of these lectures has been to suggest that we can find such a limit if we are willing to revive and develop the ancient ideal of the Rule of Law.”

1960s–1970s, Nobel Banquet Speech (1974)

“I cannot help but protest in the strongest possible terms against the cartoon on page 3 of your publication of the 30th of December equating the present governments of Poland and Chile. It can only be explained by complete ignorance of the facts or by the systematically promoted socialist calumnies of the present situation in Chile, which I had not expected the F. A. Z. to fall for. I believe that all the participants in the Mont Pelerin Society conference held a few weeks ago in Chile would agree with me that you owe the Chilean government a humble apology for such twisting of the facts. Any Pole lucky enough to escape to Chile could consider himself fortunate.”

Lecture IV. The Decline of the Rule of Law - 25. The Task for Liberty- Loving Statesmen
1940s–1950s, The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law (1955)

“The illiterate expression ‘given data’ constantly recurs in Lange. It appears to have an irresistable attraction to mathematical economists because it doubly assures them that they know what they do not know. It seems to bewitch them into making assertions about the real world for which they have no empirical justification whatever.”

Letter to the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, on a cartoon comparing Pinochet's Chile to Jaruzelski's Poland, which was published on 6 January 1982
1980s and later