ABSTRACT
F. A. Hayek (1899-1992) is known primarily as an economic theorist and dassical liberal political economist. A few scholars have delved deeply into the connection between Hayek's analytical contributions to economics and his visionary political economy of liberalism, but most prefer to divide Hayek's career into two distinct stages: an early stage as an economist primarily concerned with monetary theory and business fluctuations, and a later stage as a social theorist concerned with the critique of socialism and the advocacy of dassicalliberalism. lt is not my purpose to counter this argument in this chapter with an argument for unity in the corpus of Hayek's work. l Instead, what I want to emphasize is not so much his analytical unity (which I do believe is largely present), but an attitudinal unity with regard to the way one makes an argument in politics, philosophy, and economics. Throughout his career, Hayek possessed a profound respect for the intellectual history of the various disciplines within which he chose to write. He read far into the past of the discipline in order to place contemporary disputes in context and to borrow from older ideas in order to make innovative contributions. For Hayek, saying something old often represented saying something extremely fresh and new. Hayek was pan of a generation of economists who believed that knowledge of the history of the discipline was not simply an antiquarian interest, but a vital component of the education and training of any economist.2
