ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to address the question of who had the greater influence on the other, the polymath philosopher of science Karl Popper, or the polymath social theorist Friedrich A. Hayek. It considers Hayek’s paper, ‘Economics and Knowledge’, which was apparently written in the late summer or early fall of 1936, that is, soon after Hayek had met Popper. Concerning Hayek’s commitment to apriorism: When Mises claimed that the fundamental postulates or axioms of the science of human action were a priori true, he was discussing what might be called today the assumptions of microeconomic theory. In 1950 Hayek moved to the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Beginning in the fall of 1952 he ran a seminar there in which The Sensory Order and the ‘Scientism’ essay were the major readings.
