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Best known for reviving the tradition of classical liberalism, F. A. Hayek was also a prominent scholar of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. One of his greatest undertakings was a collection of Mill's extensive correspondence with his longstanding friend and later companion and wife, Harriet Taylor-Mill. Hayek first published the Mill-Taylor correspondence in 1951, and his edition soon became required reading for any study of the nineteenth-century foundations of liberalism. This latest addition to the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series showcases the fascinating intersections betw

AbstractThis essay examines the administrative state as a ubiquitous phenomenon that results in part from the mismatch of incentives. Using two dramatic episodes in the history of economics, the essay considers two types of mismatch. It then examines how economists increasingly endorsed the "general good" as a unitary goal for society, even at the expense of private hopes and desires. More than this, their procedures and models gave them warrant to design mechanisms and advocate for legislation and regulations to "fix" the supposedly suboptimal choices of individuals in service to the overarching goal. The rise of New Welfare Economics dealt an additional blow to the sovereignty of individual motivations, notwithstanding that Hayek and Buchanan warned that this engineering approach allowed social goals to override individual preferences. Throughout, the argument is that it is important to recognize that people within or advising the administrative state are influenced by the same sorts of (private) motivations as actors throughout the economy.

The oldest of nine children, John Stuart Mill was born on May 20, 1806; he died in France, where he spent many of his later years, on May 7, 1873. Mill had a very extraordinary, strenuous education, overseen by his ambitious father James, who believed that one becomes improved via education and, once educated, that is the end of the matter. John Mill was reading Greek at age three and Latin at the age of eight. He was at heart always reform-minded, however, and his more mature views allowed that people might come to realize how best to reform, remake, and improve themselves. In fact, reform-mindedness is a major theme in Mill's life. Among the many liberal causes associated with him are the defense of the abolition of slavery, repeal of the Corn Laws, extension of the franchise and property rights to women, reform of Irish property arrangements, and the question of birth control. In the summer of 1830, Mill met and fell headlong in love with the already married Harriet Taylor and began an intense and prolonged relationship with her. The repercussions of his friendship with and eventual marriage to Harriet were profound—and costly—and included isolation from family and friends. The experience formed the backdrop to his strong denunciation in On Liberty of the oppression associated with public opinion. Harriet's influence on Mill's work was significant. Beginning in 1846 in a newspaper article and then recurring frequently thereafter, Mill attributed much of his work as a "joint production" with Taylor. In 1861, Mill completed one of his and Harriet's most influential works, The Subjection of Women, on which he had collaborated closely with Harriet until her sudden death in 1858. Published in 1869, it was filled with many ideas ahead of their time. In 1865, well after Harriet's death, Mill became a member of Parliament. By that point, he had gained a great deal of fame as a logician, philosopher, and political economist. Mill's time in Parliament was relatively brief but his influence did not dwindle in retirement. He spent many of his remaining years in France, living in Avignon until his death in 1873. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1387/thumbnail.jpg

Peter Boettke's F.A. Hayek Economics, Political Economy, and Social Philosophy (Palgrave 2019) is a nuanced treatment that examines the historical context of Hayek's work as well as its contemporary context. Boettke's major argument is worth emphasizing at the outset: Hayek, he argues, is an epistemic institutionalist. To Boettke, I would add that economists moved away from a preoccupation with institutions earlier than Boettke allows. For Hayek, people are fallible but they learn within the context of various institutional arrangements. For the early neoclassical economists, by contrast, the theorists who know better have the authority to ensure that the inferiors optimize.

Best known for reviving the tradition of classical liberalism, F. A. Hayek was also a prominent scholar of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. One of his greatest undertakings was a collection of Mill's extensive correspondence with his longstanding friend and later companion and wife, Harriet Taylor-Mill. Hayek first published the Mill-Taylor correspondence in 1951, and his edition soon became required reading for any study of the nineteenth-century foundations of liberalism. This latest addition to the University of Chicago Press's Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series showcases the fascinating intersections between two of the most prominent thinkers from two successive centuries. Hayek situates Mill within the complex social and intellectual milieu of nineteenth-century Europe—as well as within twentieth-century debates on socialism and planning—and uncovers the influence of Taylor-Mill on Mill's political economy. The volume features the Mill-Taylor correspondence and brings together for the first time Hayek's related writings, which were widely credited with beginning a new era of Mill scholarship. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1158/thumbnail.jpg

My purpose is to paint a broad brush narrative—it will have some visual representations as well—of how nineteenth-century political economists and their critics confronted a set of basic and related questions: Are men and women equally capable of self governance? Are they equally able to decide when and whom to marry and how many children to have? Can they be trusted equally to cast a ballot? Is their right to property inviolate or might new arrangements be designed and adopted for the production and distribution of wealth? This is a story interwoven with extraordinary characters: John Stuart Mill will be featured heavily, though not exclusively. Alongside him frequently was his friend and later his wife, Harriet Taylor. Much of the story related to Mill on socialism will be told through the great critics of socialism in the twentieth century, Ludwig von Mises and (especially) Friedrich A. Hayek. Along the way, we will see that the criticisms in the first instance—in the nineteenth century—were largely about capacity. Critics of political economy made the case that men and women (English and Irish) were differently constituted; women (the Irish) were especially bad at making decisions about the family or voting. Socialism, however, was different. Though he was intensely critical of Mill on socialism, Hayek's treatment had nothing at all to do with the capacity of those who might benefit from a full or partial system of socialism. Instead, Hayek focused on the now-familiar argument that a system in which property was redistributed from rich to poor would result in grave consequences in terms of overall economic well-being and self-reliance, and he was critical of Mill for failing to see that some socialism would lead to more.

Whatever disputes remain about the nature and content of the "canon" of economics, it is widely accepted that the boundary of economic science was narrowed throughout the nineteenth century (Winch 1972). This chapter offers a partial explanation for that narrowing in the methodological developments that occurred during the second half of the century. For reasons of practicality in the face of pronounced "multiplicity of cause," John Stuart Mill called, In his 1836 Essay On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It, and again in his 1843 Logic, for a separate and specialized science of political economy. The problem of multiple cause implied that the science should be substantially deductive in nature. Yet Mill accorded a role to induction, in the establishment of the basic causal framework, and to the process of verifying the accuracy of the theoretical analysis. Revision of the theory in the light of such verification established a key link between theory, and application.

Early neoclassical economists presumed an element of irrationality in the context of intertemporal decision making. W.S. Jevons, Irving Fisher, Alfred Marshall, and A.C. Pigou observed a preference for present over future consumption, and each took this as evidence that consumer 'foresight' or 'will power' was defective. The labouring classes were said to discount future consumption to reflect uncertainty, and such discounting is regarded as 'rational.' But each of these economists focused on an additional, and purportedly 'irrational,' reason for discounting: 'impatience.' Consumers are thus said to make persistent miscalculations when it comes to decisions involving time. Irrationalité et choix intertemporel dans les débuts de la pensée néo‐classique. Les premiers économistes néo‐classiques présumaient qu'il y avait un brin d'irrationalité dans le processus de décision intertemporel. W.S. Jevons, Irving Fisher, Alfred Marshall et A.C. Pigou ont observé une certaine préférence de la consommation présente par rapport à la consommation future et en ont déduit que le consommateur manquait de 'prévoyance' et de 'volonté.' On suggérait que les classes travailleuses escomptaient leur consommation future à cause de l'incertitude ‐ ce qui était considé comme rationnel. Mais chacun de ces économistes faisait aussi appel à une raison additionnelle pour escompter la consommation future ‐ l'impatience ‐ un motif jugé irrationnel. On en concluait que les consommateurs faisaient des erreurs persistantes de calcul quand ils prenaient des décisions intertemporelles.

Abstract. Following Jaffé's 1976 argument, the effort to de‐homogenize Jevons, Walras, and Menger may have obscured some key similarities between Jevons and Menger. The article argues that Jevons's view of human behavior is more complex than has been allowed, and has much in common with Menger's predisposition for process, uncertainty, mistakes, and the significance of time in decision making. Some of the key features of the Mengerian economic being, features that have often been used to portray him as the "odd man out" among the triumvirate, also characterize Jevons's decision makers. For both Menger and Jevons, the decision maker is plagued by error, indecision, and information gaps.

… it must not be forgotten that the tendencies whose order of progression has been sketched, operate upon the broad aggregate of the commercial investing community,–not upon the exceptional Macheaths and Turpins who infest its ranks, and whose predatory instincts know no orderly succession of phases, but are unchangeably vicious and vigilant. A parallel reflection applies to the suggested remedy. Ameliorate the general mental conditions of commerce, and you proportionately limit the sphere and powers of designing knaves. (Mills, 1867, p. 40).