 The meetings have become quite famous. The Montpelerin Society is often, this specific meeting saying, people who are critics of neoliberalism would say, this is where all of that neoliberalism stuff got started. And claims are often made that I think are not accurate about what sorts of things took place at the meeting. So I wanted to, for scholars or anyone else who might be interested, show them what actually took place. What sorts of discussions took place at that 1947 meeting. And it's, in addition to that, it's a lovely meeting because it was all of the people who one would identify as being important in liberalism in the 20th century were there. I'm Bruce Caldwell, from Duke University, I'm the director of the Center for the History of Political Economy there and a research professor of economics. So Friedrich Hayek is an economist. He was born in 1899 and died in 1992 and he was born in Austria but he moved to the London School of Economics in the 30s and 40s and then moved to the University of Chicago on the Committee on Social Thought in the 50s and early 60s and then he moved back to Central Europe, both Germany and Austria. He is an economist who's worked on various areas within economics. His initial work was in monetary theory. Also he had a famous conflict with John Maynard Keynes who later became actually rather a close friend when they spent time together in Cambridge during World War II. He also is famous as a critic of socialism, it's a socialist calculation debate and in the process of developing his ideas in that debate he also talked about the use of a market system or the ability of a market system, a well functioning market system to coordinate behavior in a world of dispersed information or dispersed knowledge. So he's actually made multiple contributions, capital theory as well. So within economics he's done a lot of different stuff. So Hayek had a number of contributions outside of economics. During the war years he turned away from economics to a project that he called the Abusive Reason Project. He was trying to understand why the world was turning towards both totalitarian systems of the left and right fascisms and Soviet communism, but also what the intellectual roots of that were. So he very much drew on the intellectual history of the 19th century into the early 20th century to try to explain that. So intellectual history is one of his contributions. In the process of doing that he wrote what he said this is a political tract was the road to serfdom published in 1944. He was worried then about the way that the world was going after the allies would win in World War II what would be the nature of the political and economic setup subsequently. He also did a book on theoretical psychology, the sensory order. This actually came out of some of the writings that he did in that Abusive Reason Project. The Scientism essay talked about some ideas about limits of approaches to social scientific phenomena and it bred in him an interest in psychology that actually dated back to papers he had written when he was a student in Vienna in the early 1920s. After World War II he was very concerned about the future of liberalism. He wanted to try to articulate the foundations of a liberal society what sorts of criteria could one use to identify a well functioning liberal society. So the Constitution of Liberty and Law of Legislation and Liberty used two contributions in that area. So he made contributions in a lot of different places. That's one reason why I find him such a fascinating figure. In order to study his work you really have to take a deep dive into disciplines outside of economics. I've been working on Hayek since the 1980s but in the 1990s I decided to try to do a book on Hayek's methodological contributions. I found his insights into the limits of economics as a science to be quite important and that's what I wanted to pursue. In the process I did a couple of volumes in a book series that the University of Chicago Press puts out called The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. And when my book Hayek's Challenge was getting ready to be published I was approached by the person who was the editor of that series, the general editor Stephen Kresge. And he said he was getting ready to step down and wondered whether I would be interested in taking over the general editorship of the collected works project. This was in 2002 and I've worked diligently on it since then as the general editor. As general editor I did some volumes myself but I also solicited other people to be volume editors. A volume editor would produce both a text that was a correct reproduction of the text of the originals but also add explanatory footnotes as well as an editor's introduction to try to put the work in context. And that just was completed. The final volume of that, there's 19 volumes, was completed in 2022. So I'm very happy to have that project after 20 years finally completed. It was started actually in 1988, the fatal conceit. Hayek's final book was the first book in The Collected Works. So it's a project that really extends however many years it is from 1988 to 2022. That's how long it took to complete it. If we were trying to gain lessons from Hayek specifically the lessons that I learned doing the book Hayek's Challenge. As I said that book focused on his economic methodology. And what Hayek thought was that when dealing with essentially complex phenomena which is what he thought would be true in the case of the economy and also of the brain which is one reason why he was interested in doing the sensory order that often the best that we can do is offer explanations of the principle by which things happen or make broad pattern predictions but not specific predictions. Under the influence of positivism my first book was on philosophy of science and economics. And it was titled Beyond Positivism. Under the principles articulated by philosophers of science who are in the positivist era the idea is that you must make precise predictions in order to be a science. You must be cumulatively progressive in your ability to do that. And I rejected all of that. He said no there are real limits to the social sciences and we should recognize them. The way to be scientific is not to pursue an image that works for some sciences but not for others. So if we were to try to generalize some of the ideas that come out of that set of insights if we believe them then it really means that we should perhaps be more than just pursuing economics with a vision of trying to come up with for example ever more precise predictions. I don't think economists necessarily are doing that today but certainly having a knowledge of the past of the struggles that economists had during the 20th century in terms of trying to figure out what they were doing and how to do it better. The history of economics actually gives you a pretty good insight into that not just studying specific figures like Friedrich Hayek but a numbers of figures that struggled with how best to do economics as a science during the 20th and now the 21st century. For a while for most of my academic career I've been an intellectual historian and my book Hayek's challenge was was that it was mostly an intellectual history but when I became the general editor of the collected works in order to become the third general editor of the Hayek collected works I had to meet the Hayek family. So I went down to Devon in southwest England and met Christine Hayek his daughter and Larry Hayek his son. They needed to interview me to make sure that I was a person that they accepted as becoming the next journal editor. They were great people fascinating people and very open and sharing had a long conversation with Christine separately and then with Larry I stayed at Larry's house slept in one of their bedrooms. After the interview we had dinner sat around and had long discussions and the next day Larry brought me up to a study and showed me an enormous cache of interesting memorabilia from his father's life everything from his skis to collections of photographs that he took when he was 16 years old going with his father through the mountains photographs of orchids playbills maps I thought these were maps for his skiing they were maps that were from World War one when he was a soldier on the Austrian front and he gave me free reign to look through these things and it it was always the the idea that whoever was going to be the editor of the collected works would also be Hayek's biographer. So he had interviews that Bill Bartley the original editor of the collected works had done with his father he had a summary of some of these interviews that Bartley called the inductive base. Bartley was a philosopher who had studied under Karl Popper and the inductive base was what Popper that was a phrase he used to say here the this is the set of facts from which we're trying to develop a theory so I just said there's a massive amount of material here they're they're willing to to allow me to access it and then as I went along I realized they had family letters all of this stuff so it I was hooked the day that I walked into Larry Hayek's study and that was when I thought I really want to do this now one of the one of the things that Hayek had always required of anyone who wanted to be as biographers is that they're fluent in German which I'm not so I actually took a course a college course for a semester in German just to see if I could pick some things up and I picked some things up but I knew that was not going to work so luckily one of the people who had been a volume editor Hans-Jord Klausinger lives in Vienna so he's Viennese just like Hayek and obviously fluent in German and had done a marvelous job on the two volumes that he had done so I approached him and asked him if he wanted to to collaborate with me on the on the biography and this was about 10 years ago so this was a project that was 10 years in the making it's very different to do a biography because you are talking about the person's life you're getting to know his family I did numerous interviews with Christine Hayek a person who was just a lovely lovely person very sharing very straightforward honest you know doesn't sugarcoat anything and it was it was a really different sort of project that I I think we both warmed to over time so that just came out in November 2022 so 2022 ended up being a very big year in terms of the things that I did on Hayek but the completion of the collected works and may I I think I'd like to mention one other project that I did and as luck would have it I have it right here okay so this is Mont Pelerin 1947 uh one of the important things that Hayek did outside of his intellectual contributions per se was he was very good at building institutions and the Mont Pelerin Society is a society that in 2022 celebrated the 75th anniversary from the 1947 first meeting and this is the at that first meeting Hayek's secretary attended she took notes on what was said not a verbatim transcript but there was a transcript from what took place at the meetings and the meetings have been become quite famous the Mont Pelerin Society is often this specific meeting saying people who are critics of neoliberalism would say this is where all of that neoliberalism stuff got started and they and claims are often made that I think are are not accurate about what sorts of things took place at the meeting so I wanted to for scholars or anyone else who might be interested uh show them what actually took place what sorts of discussions took place at that 1947 meeting and it's in addition to that it's a lovely uh meeting because it was all of the people who one would identify as being important in liberalism in the 20th century were there uh Frank from the Chicago school Frank Knight was there uh George Stigler Milton Friedman Aaron director uh among Order Liberals uh uh Wilhelm Rupke uh Walter Oiken was there were there uh Lionel Robbins his uh colleague at the London School of Economics uh philosophers of science like Michael Polanyi and Carl Popper uh the list goes on and on let's just put that Maurice Halle Nobel Prize winner from France so it was it was a wonderful meeting and of and of course the Austrians uh Ludwig von Mises and Fritz Machlup and they they fought with each other they had disagreements about what they thought the future of liberalism should be so it was really quite a lovely uh lovely set of of uh of transcripts and I another thing that came out in 2022 so 2022 ended up being my a very good year for me as the saying goes Hayek a life which has just come out in 2022 is volume one of two it runs from 1899 to 1950 and whereas before most treatments of Hayek have been of his intellectual contributions when you try to do a biography you're putting together what he was doing at various points of time and what might have been some of the things that took place in his life that may have had an influence so really what we are trying to do in the book is to see the world through Hayek's eyes so it's a person who's raised in Fandesiekla Vienna not he the family was not rich but they were on the other hand von Hayek so they though not wealthy they mixed in an intellectual milieu uh this was very influential he was a bad student in a bad school system but he was a great mind so he was bored by the school system but his father was very good with all of the three sons in terms of kind of giving them education particularly in the natural sciences that go out collecting everything he came educationally of age in a way when he went to the University of Vienna right after World War I where he served at the front in World War I on the on the Italian front and at the University of Vienna it was a time that mass politics of the franchise had been expanded but a lot of the parties that existed were horrible now some of them were there was a Christian socials and they were often quite anti-Semitic they had Aryan clauses the socialists were not anti-Semitic but they had views that he rejected and the third sets of parties all were German oriented because the Austro-Hungarian Empire had lots of different nationalities in it and so a lot of the ones that were that were trying to participate in electoral politics were after World War I when the the Empire had been broken up were emphasizing the German elements and they were two of the three were explicitly anti-Semitic and the third one was was was socialist so I mean it was he actually supported a very tiny party that didn't go anywhere it basically disappeared within a year that was that was secular that was not anti-Semitic it was pro-German but not anti-Semitic and it was liberal kind of reform liberal kind of in his early years he would be closer to someone like Keynes in terms of his views and it wasn't until afterwards when he met Ludwig von Mises that he became much more of a classical liberal and you know a democrat he's the their party supported universal male female suffrage at a time that not all places were doing that so it was uh it was knowing his background actually helps one to understand where his ideas came from and I think that that's important and and the kind of constraints and it's actually also just a fun story because he lived through such intense times just if you think of the European history of the 20th century to see that the second volume will look at 1950 to 1992 so there's lots of things that took place during during that period politically economically stagflation of the of the 70s he got the Nobel Prize at that time so became a public intellectual he increased his connections to various foundations uh in the united states primarily so uh exploring all of those sorts of things that the the the influence of the Montpellery society attempted to tend to increase and we went from the Keynesian era to what might be called a more liberal era under in in the 1980s and he was you know corresponding with Thatcher and so it will it will be fun looking looking at the second uh second phase of his life if we reflect on the on the long arc of of Hayek's life he started out as as an economist although he had interest outside of that um but certainly by the 40s and 50s he started to say if you're going to understand social and economic phenomena you have to understand economics but it's not enough and he always would say that and I think what he meant there was that you know the narrow study of economics without a a broader appreciation of other social sciences of the history of the field of the various approaches that might be taken uh you're not going to be able to do good economics and there's lots of ways to do economic badly um and that has consequences for society so you want to to approach your discipline with a certain amount of humility and I think that that was something that I think one could take away from from Hayek's ideas just speaking personally as as a as a person who's who's been an economist uh for now 40 or 50 years it's 1970s so however however many years that's been um yeah some of the the the best lessons I've learned was simply by teaching something like economics 101 where you're trying to make the ideas about economics quite clear and plain to someone who's not an economist to talk to people who are not economists that's really a an important lesson that young economists might be able to to take away so I one thing I would say to young economists if we were trying to imagine what what kind of lessons might take from this uh this little episode is uh is first of all try to teach when you're in grad school and get some exposure to teaching non-economists uh uh the the principles of economics but I have to also say uh you know I am the director of the center for the history of political economy I have an interest in promoting the history of the discipline I think it's important for economists to know that uh take advantage of of the programs of places like uh our center offer and there's lots of them in other places too Europe has a number of different uh uh possibilities for people to gain uh insights into the history of economics and its methodology various methodological approaches that have been uh uh tried among uh in in economics in the past these are these are good things to uh to at least uh what your what dip your toe into at least see if see if maybe you might find it's something that is uh congenial to your to your tastes