F. A Hayek was an Austrian-British economist, political philosopher and an influential contributor to the Austrian School of Economics. His most popular work, The Road to Serfdom, was widely circulated in the United States.

After serving in an artillery regiment in the Austro-Hungarian war, in which he was decorated for bravery, he decided to pursue an academic career. Hayek said of his experience during the war “The decisive influence was really World War I. It’s bound to draw your attention to the problems of political organization.”

We Americans really have no appreciation for the turmoil that wracked Europe during the 20th century. Multiple generations of Europeans were thrust into political and economic disaster during two major world wars. We have no concept of how pressing the issues of politics and economics must have been to young men growing up through these events and being dramatically impacted by the insanity of bad economic and political philosophies.

When you read about Hayek’s education and the people he was taught by and interacted with, you get a sense of how intellectually stimulating it must have been. He studied at the University of Vienna, which at the time was one of the leading universities in the world. Given the dismal state of our universities today, it is amazing to read about the people he interacted with and the discussions they must have had about real-world challenges.

Hayek was initially sympathetic to democratic socialism, but after reading Socialism by Mises, he began attending Mises’ private seminars. Hayek said of the book, Socialism: “It was a work on political economy in the tradition of the great moral philosophers, a Montesquieu or Adam Smith, containing both acute knowledge and profound wisdom…To none of us young men who read the book when it appeared was the world ever the same again.”

What an amazing complement to Mises. I can certainly relate to that sentiment. After discovering the works of the Austrians the world has never appeared to me the same again either. Hayek later attended the London School of Economics, and was thrust right into the middle of characters and ideological battles that would create the current international economic order during and after World War II.

With that little bit of background, I want to share several of Hayek’s most powerful ideas. They were the ideas of spontaneous order, and the use of knowledge in society.

They are discussed here by Richard Ebeling and Jacob Hornberger:

I don’t like to abuse the word profound, and I know I keep using it over and over, but these two ideas are truly profound. The implications of these two ideas are broad ranging and open up an entire world of insights into many other topics that I plan to write about in future posts. It is amazing to me that given how much information we have access to with the internet, Youtube, podcasts, social media, etc., that ideas like this aren’t being discussed in our society.

The impacts of ideas like these on everything from politics, business, economics, education, religion, etc., etc., should be profound. Instead, not only are they not discussed, but hardly anyone I know has even heard of them, much less considered them deeply for their implications. The level of discourse in our society is incredibly shallow and superficial. For years I’ve been amazed at how books and articles written 50-100 years ago are often more relevant and more illuminating than the books that are being written currently on the same topics. Economics, is, of course, one of these topics. The current economics books that are being written and taught don’t even begin to compare to the accuracy and clarity of books written 50 years ago.

I’ve also found that books written about philosophy, business, politics and religion from 50-100 years ago are often more enlightening than books currently being written. Science is probably the one area that has made more progress than the humanities during the past 100 years, but even there, there are lots of scientific books that explain things more clearly from decades ago.

That’s enough for one post, but I’m hoping to follow up with a few more posts about Hayek’s ideas and their impacts during the next several weeks.