ABSTRACT
The anti-historicists [Popper, Berlin, Hayek, and Von Mises] made a deliberate attempt to associate historicism and its inductive methods with totalitarianism of both the fascist and communist kind. Its success owed much to its coincidence with the half century that saw the costly defeat of fascism in Europe and the global cold-war struggle between democracy and communism. Exciting support against one’s methodological enemies by charging them with complicity in the rise of totalitarianism and the suppression of liberty and democracy was an easy matter in this environment. (Graeme Snook, Longrun Dynamics)
This chapter reviews the work of the Viennese-born thinker, Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992), perhaps one of the twentieth century’s most infl uential economic theorists and social philosophers. Hayek was a prolifi c scholar who, in the words of one of his biographers, ‘wrote so much and in so many different areas’ (Caldwell 2004: 13). Indeed, a hallmark of Hayek’s erudite style was to ground the lengthy argumentation in these extensive writings in a huge corpus of scholarship, encompassing a vast sweep of (mostly) European thinking, from mediaeval times right through to the modern period, the details of which were often crammed into numerous and copious footnotes. An assessment of Hayek’s contribution and legacy that does full justice to this extraordinary capaciousness, therefore, is a far from easy task. For the purposes of this brief discussion, I have necessarily had to be selective in my appraisal of Hayek and have restricted myself to the signifi cance of his work for readers with an interest in organisational leadership and, to a lesser extent, learning. My nomination of this particular focus, however, has created an additional diffi culty. Hayek’s writings include numerous passing usages of terms commonly associated with leadership, such as control, hierarchy, managers, entrepreneurs, rulers, elites, great men, oligarchies, and dictatorships, and even ‘Caesaristic paternalism’ (1960: 406). Despite this practice, Hayek never really dwelt to any great extent on leadership itself and, apart from the few specifi c sections of his writings, which I discuss shortly, his mentions of leaders were mostly intensely negative and concerned movements and parties of Nazis, fascists, communists,
and socialists (e.g., 1979: 180)—with the latter typically being characterised dismissively by him as scientistically-minded intellectual authoritarians (1997: 190)—movements that were the precursors of socialism, such as the Saint-Simonians, headed (he claimed) by ‘new popes with a college of apostles and various other grades of members below them’ (1979: 284) or occasional examples of such European dictators as Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Lenin (1978: 134). On the other hand, the major preoccupations of much of his writing for the last half century or so of his life were concepts and themes that are closely associated with leadership and sometimes fi gure prominently in discussions of it, such as coercion, power, and planning.
