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Friedrich Hayek
A Biography
By Alan Ebenstein Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2001 Alan Ebenstein
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8676-6
CHAPTER 1
Family
The Vienna into which Friedrich August von Hayek was born on May 8, 1899 was cacophonous. The Viennese held divergent views about the future of almost everything. Theodor Herzl, founder of the political Zionist movement, was from Vienna, as was Hitler.
Vienna had long been capital of the Holy Roman Empire and then the Austrian Empire. In 1867, it became capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Vienna was the cultural center of the Germanic world. It was the musical center of the entire world—Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert all lived and worked there.
Hayek's father, August (from whom he received his middle name), was born in Vienna in 1871. August became a medical doctor employed by the municipal ministry of health, but his true passion was botany, in which he wrote a number of monographs. August von Hayek was also a part-time botany lecturer at the University of Vienna.
Hayek's mother, Felicitas (nee) von Juraschek, was born in 1875. Her mother was from a wealthy, conservative, land-owning family. When Felicitas' mother died some years before Friedrich was born, Felicitas received a considerable inheritance that provided as much as half of her and August's income during the early years of their marriage. Hayek was the oldest of three boys. Heinrich and Erich came one-and-a-half and five years after him.
Once, discussing his father and his influence on his career, Hayek said, "I suppose the one thing which might have changed my own development would have been if there didn't exist that esteem for intellectual work. My determination to become a scholar was certainly affected by the unsatisfied ambition of my father to become a university professor. Behind the scenes it wasn't much talked about, but I was very much aware that in my father the great ambition of his life was to be a university professor. So I grew up with the idea that there was nothing higher in life than becoming a university professor, without any clear conception of which subject I wanted to do."
In addition to his father's scholarly pursuits, both of his grandfathers—who lived long enough for Hayek to know them—were scholars. Franz von Juraschek was a leading economist in Austria and close friend of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, one of the three key originators of the historical Austrian school of economics (the others were Carl Menger and Friedrich von Wieser, the latter of whom von Juraschek also knew). Von Juraschek was a statistician and later became employed by the Austrian national government. As a result of his own inheritance from his first wife (Felicitas' mother), he became wealthy.
Hayek's paternal grandfather, Gustav Edler von Hayek, taught natural science at the Imperial Realobergymnasium (secondary school) in Vienna for thirty years. He wrote systematic works in biology, some of which became relatively well known. One monograph of his at the University of Vienna library is titled (in German), A Deep Sea Investigation on Board the British Warship "Porcupine" 1869; other titles include Compendium of the Geography of Vienna and Atlas of Medical and Pharmaceutical Plant Powers.
The Germanic world at the turn of the twentieth century was different from the present in myriad ways. As an example of the changes in technology that occurred during his lifetime, Hayek described a scene from his youth, before the time of the automobile, when he observed a fireman's horse "standing in its stable ready to be put on the carriage with everything hanging over it; so it required only two or three pressings of buttons and the horse was finished to go out."
Differences between the Germanic world at the turn of the twentieth century and the world just after the turn of the twenty-first go beyond technology. The Germanic world in 1899 was thoroughly prejudiced and anti-Semitism was rampant, particularly in Vienna. Hayek did not share the anti-Semitic views of many, perhaps most, of his Christian contemporaries.
Vienna before World War I has been celebrated and condemned. For some, it was a glittering intellectual paradise in which some of the greatest minds lived. For others, it was a phony city in which superficiality prevailed over substance. Historians of Vienna Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, following Viennese author Robert Musil, call Austrian society "Kakania," a name combining two "senses on different levels. On the surface, it is a coinage from the initials K. K. or K. u. K., standing for 'Imperial-Royal' or 'Imperial and Royal.' But to anyone familiar with German nursery language, it carries also the secondary sense of 'Excrementia.'"
Musil himself wrote, "All in all, how many remarkable things might be said about that vanished Kakania! On paper it called itself the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; in speaking, however, one referred to it as 'Austria'—that is to say, it was known by a name that it had, as a State, solemnly renounced by oath. By its constitution it was liberal, but its system of government was clerical. Before the law all citizens were equal, but not everyone, of course, was a citizen. There was a parliament, which made such vigorous use of its liberty that it was usually kept shut; but there was also an emergency powers act by means of which it was possible to manage without Parliament, and every time when everyone was just beginning to rejoice in absolutism, the Crown decreed that there must now again be a return to parliamentary government."
Viennese author Hilde Spiel called the time between 1898 and World War I the "magical" years in Vienna, when a "seemingly sudden flowering of talent came about—especially in the fields of literature and philosophy." The decades following Austria's defeat by Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 were relatively free from war and bloodshed. During these years, Vienna prospered and the middle class expanded.
Vienna was one of the largest cities in the world in 1900. There were two separate eras in its history that are sometimes called golden. The first was the musical golden age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The second was the decades on either side of World War I.
Friedrich—or "Fritz," as his mother and most friends called him throughout life (to his dislike)—displayed an incredibly intellectual and academic bent from a very young age. In unpublished autobiographical notes, he recounts that he read fluently and frequently before going to school.
As a result of his father's serving different neighborhoods as a health officer in the municipal ministry of health, Hayek lived in four apartments while growing up. He recalled in his unpublished autobiographical notes a division within the family between himself and his younger brothers. Although they were only a few years younger than him, he believed that they were somehow of a different generation. Hayek preferred to associate with adults.
After receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974, he wrote a semiautobiographical essay, "Two Types of Mind," where he commented that in his "private language" he described "the recognised standard type of scientists as the memory type. It is the kind of mind who can retain the particular things he has read or heard, often the particular words in which an idea has been expressed." This type of mind is the "master of his subject." Hayek was, by way of contrast, a "rather extreme instance of the more unconventional type," the "puzzler," whose "constant difficulties, which in rare instances may be rewarded by a new insight, are due to the fact that they cannot avail themselves of the established verbal formulae or arguments which lead others smoothly and quickly to the result. People whose minds work that way seem to rely in some measure on a process of wordless thought. To 'see' certain connections distinctly does not yet mean for them that they know how to describe them in words."
The issue of "explicit" versus "tacit" knowledge—or the difference between "knowing that" and "knowing how," or between verbal and intuitive knowledge—is one that he explored later in his career, and was vital in his conception of spontaneous order. The "master of his subject" has verbal knowledge; the "puzzler" has intuitive knowledge. Knowledge is not, or may not initially be, verbal. To assume that all knowledge can be verbally expressed at a point in time is false. Knowledge can exist although the words to express it have not been discovered yet. One of the errors of classical socialism was that it relied too much on verbal knowledge.
Hayek characterized his teacher von Wieser at the University of Vienna as in "many respects rather a puzzler," and recalled an intellectual description of Wieser by Joseph Schumpeter, presumably therefore also giving some idea of Hayek's conception of himself. The "fellow economist who enters Wieser's intellectual world at once finds himself in a new atmosphere. It is as if one entered a house which nowhere resembles the houses of our time and the plan and furniture of which is strange and not at once intelligible. There is hardly another author who owes as little to other authors as Wieser, fundamentally to none except Menger and to him only a suggestion—with the result that for a long time many fellow economists did not know what to do with Wieser's work. Of his edifice everything is his intellectual property, even where what he says has already been said before him."
Hayek described characteristics of the Germanic culture in which he was raised. He wrote in The Road to Serfdom (though he made a distinction between Germans and Austrians) that "few people will deny that the Germans on the whole are industrious and disciplined, thorough and energetic to the degree of ruthlessness, conscientious and single-minded in any tasks they undertake, that they possess a strong sense of order, duty, and strict obedience to authority, and that they often show great readiness to make personal sacrifices and great courage in physical danger. Deficient they seem in most of those little yet so important qualities which facilitate the intercourse between men in a free society: kindliness and a sense of humour, personal modesty, and respect for the privacy and belief in the good intentions of one's neighbour."
He made these comments about his distant cousin, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, that shed further light on the society in which he grew to maturity. "What struck me most," Hayek remembered, "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). This truthfulness became almost a fashion in that border group between the 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."
Hayek was personally as well as politically a thorough-going individualist. He said in a 1945 lecture that in the "rationalist sense of the term, in their insistence on the development of 'original' personalities which in every respect are the product of the conscious choice of the individual, the German intellectual tradition indeed favors a kind of 'individualism' little known elsewhere. I remember well how surprised and even shocked I was myself when as a young student, on my first contact with English and American contemporaries, I discovered how much they were disposed to conform in all externals to common usage rather than, as seemed natural to me, to be proud to be different and original in most respects."
The focus of the von Hayek household as Hayek grew up was his father's botanical collections. Wherever his family lived, their premises were filled to overflowing with dried plants, prints, and photos of plants. In addition to their own residence, the family, particularly Felicitas and the children, visited the villa of Felicitas' father and his second wife and their children. Hayek's family today remember their father's first family as extended and close-knit. He himself recalled that get-togethers at his maternal grandfather's home were large and extended across ages.
By comparison to his maternal grandparents, his paternal grandparents' circumstances were modest. The von Hayeks had been ennobled over a generation before the von Jurascheks, however, and were "proud of their gentility and ancestry." By way of comparison, the von Jurascheks were "definitely upper-class bourgeoisie and wealthier by far." Hayek remembered that his maternal grandparents' home was "magnificent, even grandiose ... undoubtedly one of the most beautiful flats in Vienna." They had several servants.
"Von" was the fourth and lowest, as well as most common, of the second of two ranks of nobility in imperial Austria. The higher rank was composed of the royal families who ruled the Germanic world's principalities for centuries, and the lesser rank were those—such as the von Hayeks and von Jurascheks—whose forebears were ennobled during the previous century or so. The English approximation of "von" is "sir."
An "ek" ending on a surname is typically Czech. Hayek traced his ancestry to a "Hagek" from Prague, who was an associate of the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe. Hayek liked to note that on some old maps of the moon there is a crater named "Hagetsius," after his probable ancestor. He observed that families with the name "Hayek" or "Hagek" can be traced in Bohemia (now principally the Czech Republic) from the 1500s, and that—although his family spoke German for as long as he could ascertain—"Hayek" is probably derived from the Czech word "Hajek," meaning "small wood."
He also had ancestors, as did his second wife, from the Salzburg region. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Salzburg, he commenced that in the "course of my life I always introduced myself as a foreigner at the beginning of my lectures. But this time I may permit myself to start with the statement that I am a native. It is now 370 years since a common ancestor of my wife and myself as Duke Archbishop court registry writer received a heraldic letter" to perform a building project. A number of Hayek's ancestors from the Salzburg region were government officials or salt producers. The family later moved to Vienna.
Josef Hayek, the administrator of an aristocrat, was ennobled in 1789 for developing the first Austrian textile factories, through which he became wealthy. His son Heinrich, Friedrich's great-grandfather, became a civil servant in Vienna and, in his great-grandson's words, "spent a long, dignified, and comfortable life as a gentleman." Gustav, Heinrich's son, was originally educated by private tutors and attended an upper-class school reserved for the nobility. Hayek recalled that Gustav became a "naval officer, and indeed seems to have been a bit of a naval dandy." Late in life, by the 1860s, Heinrich lost the family fortune, and Gustav was required to become a schoolmaster. Gustav was August's father.
Hayek told an anecdote about how he recognized Wittgenstein at a railway station in 1918 when both were officers in the Austrian Army that sheds a little light on his childhood. "Very likely Wittgenstein had been one of the handsome and elegant young men whom I remembered around 1910," Hayek recalled, "when my [maternal] grandparents rented for the spring and summer a Swiss cottage on a property adjoining the park of the Wittgensteins in the suburb of Neuwaldegg, having frequently called from their much more grandiose villa for the much younger sisters of my mother to take them to tennis." His relationship with Wittgenstein was not close.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Friedrich Hayek by Alan Ebenstein. Copyright © 2001 Alan Ebenstein. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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