Related:
- Tariffs and Legal Uncertainty
- Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society, in Legal Foundations of a Free Society
- On the Non Liquet in Libertarian Theory and Armchair Theorizing
- Hoppe on Hayek
- Hoppe, “The Hayek Myth” (PFS 2012);
- F.A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique (Vol. 7 Num. 1) (also in The Great Fiction)
- Hoppe, Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty
- Hoppe, Why Mises (and not Hayek)?
- Walter Block, “Hayek’s Road to Serfdom”
- Knowledge vs. Calculation
- The Great Mises-Hayek Dehomogenization/Economic Calculation Debate
Someone snarkily suggested I read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. As if I hadn’t. Just because I’m not a Hayek fan. In my view, other than his Capital theory (Pure Theory of Capital, which I hear is good but have never read; I think Hoppe said maybe only 3 people have read and… pic.twitter.com/nkqHuMLDWV
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) September 30, 2025
Someone snarkily suggested I read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. As if I hadn’t. Just because I’m not a Hayek fan. In my view—other than his Pure Theory of Capital, which I hear is good but have never read; Hoppe: “I venture the guess that there exist no more than 10 people alive today who have studied, from cover to cover, his Pure Theory of Capital.” 1—his original work is wrong or socialist or dilettantish, and his good stuff (e.g. Austrian Business Cycle Theory) is warmed over and somewhat confused Mises. 2
I actually read Road to Serfdom in Sep. 1989 with my girlfriend (now wife) on a vacation to Destin. I recall reading it drinking a few beers in the sun by the pool and finally I had enough. I stopped at about ch. XII. “Why the worst Get on Top” was okay. But meh. I also read his 3 volume Law Legislation and Liberty, Constitution of Liberty, and others.
Unlike some poseurs, when I read a book I actually read it, I don’t just skim it. I devoured his stuff. I have read enough to have an opinion about it which is that I am not impressed. The good stuff is inferior Mises, and the original stuff is dilettantish and unsystematic and not liberal. Sure, when you revisit old books, you might find new meaning in them but for Hayek I find I am even more negative on him now. Now I realize how statist he was, back then I was willing to overlook it. See Hoppe: The Libertarian Search for a Grand Historical Narrative, Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty, The Great Fiction, pp. 403-08; The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, pp. 310-12; Economic Science and the Austrian Method , pp. 177-78.
He has this ridiculous view that state regulations are fine as long as they are of general applicability—as long as they are general, predictable, and known in advance, it’s fine. See On the Non Liquet in Libertarian Theory and Armchair Theorizing and Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society, Part III.B.1, n.34:
The “other” fundamental requisite of law is that law be based on rules of general application, a requisite that special statutes tend to undermine. I am grateful to Leonard Liggio for calling Sartori’s works to my attention. But having statutory, artificial law be predictable, known ahead of time, and of “general applicability” is not sufficient for law to be just. If this is your only criteria, you can support all manner of statist laws, as Hayek does.
See, e.g., Hoppe on Hayek, “The Hayek Myth” (PFS 2012), F.A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique (also in The Great Fiction); Block, “Hayek’s Road to Serfdom”, and others linked above.
I find him long winded like Yarvin and a dilettante like Nozick. I’ve also slogged through some Voegelin. Jesus. Another unsystematic but brilliant dilettante, like Nozick. These area all people you get some random and good assorted nuggets from but nothing systematic.
Re Nozick: Hoppe does great job comparing and contrasting the approaches of Nozick and Rothbard in Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty:
Nozick’s method rather made for interest and excitement of a particular kind. Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty consisted essentially of one successively and systematically drawn out and elaborated argument, and thus required the long sustained attention of its reader. However, a reader of Rothbard’s book could possibly get so excited that he would not want to put it down until he had finished it. The excitement caused by Anarchy, State, and Utopia was of a very different kind. The book was a series of dozens of disparate or loosely jointed arguments, conjectures, puzzles, counterexamples, experiments, paradoxes, surprising turns, startling twists, intellectual flashes, and razzle-dazzle, and thus required only short and intermittent attention of its reader. At the same time, few if any readers of book likely will have felt the urge to read it straight through. Instead, reading Nozick was characteristically done unsystematically and intermittently, in bits and pieces. The excitement stirred by Nozick was intense, short, and fleeting; and the success of Anarchy, State, and Utopia was due to the fact that at all times, and especially under democratic conditions, there are far more high time-preference intellectuals—intellectual thrill seekers—than patient and disciplined thinkers. 3
- Why Mises (and not Hayek)? [↩]
- The Great Mises-Hayek Dehomogenization/Economic Calculation Debate; Knowledge vs. Calculation. [↩]
- Slate’s Metcalf on Libertarianism and Nozick; see also Kinsella, Afterword to Hoppe’s The Great Fiction, Second Expanded Edition, n.6. [↩]
