The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition (Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, 17, Band 17) - Softcover

Hayek, F. A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226315398 ISBN 13: 9780226315393

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

From the $700 billion bailout of the banking industry to president Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package to the highly controversial passage of federal health-care reform, conservatives and concerned citizens alike have grown increasingly fearful of big government. Enter Nobel Prize–winning economist and political theorist F. A. Hayek, whose passionate warning against empowering states with greater economic control, The Road to Serfdom, became an overnight sensation last summer when it was endorsed by Glenn Beck. The book has since sold over 150,000 copies.

The latest entry in the University of Chicago Press’s series of newly edited editions of Hayek’s works, The Constitution of Liberty is, like Serfdom, just as relevant to our present moment. The book is considered Hayek’s classic statement on the ideals of freedom and liberty, ideals that he believes have guided—and must continue to guide—the growth of Western civilization. Here Hayek defends the principles of a free society, casting a skeptical eye on the growth of the welfare state and examining the challenges to freedom posed by an ever expanding government—as well as its corrosive effect on the creation, preservation, and utilization of knowledge. In opposition to those who call for the state to play a greater role in society, Hayek puts forward a nuanced argument for prudence. Guided by this quality, he elegantly demonstrates that a free market system in a democratic polity—under the rule of law and with strong constitutional protections of individual rights—represents the best chance for the continuing existence of liberty.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 and cowinner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and a leading proponent of classical liberalism in the twentieth century. Ronald Hamowy is professor of history emeritus at the University of Alberta. He is the editor of The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, among other books.

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THE CONSTITUTION OF LIBERTY

The Definitive EditionBy F. A. Hayek

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2011 University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-31539-3

Contents

Editorial Foreword.......................................................................xiIntroductory Essay.......................................................................1The Constitution of Liberty: Editions and Translations...................................23A Note on the Notes......................................................................26Editor's Acknowledgments.................................................................28Liberty Fund Editions Cited..............................................................30Preface..................................................................................39Acknowledgments..........................................................................41Bibliographical Abbreviations............................................................44Introduction.............................................................................47One Liberty and Liberties................................................................57Two The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization...........................................73Three The Common Sense of Progress.......................................................91Four Freedom, Reason, and Tradition......................................................107Five Responsibility and Freedom..........................................................133Six Equality, Value, and Merit...........................................................148Seven Majority Rule......................................................................166Eight Employment and Independence........................................................184Nine Coercion and the State..............................................................199Ten Law, Commands, and Order.............................................................215Eleven The Origins of the Rule of Law....................................................232Twelve The American Contribution: Constitutionalism......................................261Thirteen Liberalism and Administration: The Rechtsstaat..................................287Fourteen The Safeguards of Individual Liberty............................................308Fifteen Economic Policy and the Rule of Law..............................................329Sixteen The Decline of the Law...........................................................342Seventeen The Decline of Socialism and the Rise of the Welfare State.....................369Eighteen Labor Unions and Employment.....................................................384Nineteen Social Security.................................................................405Twenty Taxation and Redistribution.......................................................430Twenty-one The Monetary Framework........................................................451Twenty-two Housing and Town Planning.....................................................466Twenty-three Agriculture and Natural Resources...........................................482Twenty-four Education and Research.......................................................498Postscript: Why I Am Not a Conservative..................................................519Analytical Table of Contents.............................................................535Index of Authors Cited...................................................................543Index of Subjects........................................................................557

Chapter One

LIBERTY AND LIBERTIES

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word, we do not mean the same thing.... Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. —Abraham Lincoln

1. We are concerned in this book with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society. This state we shall describe throughout as a state of liberty or freedom. These two words have been also used to describe many other good things of life. It would therefore not be very profitable to start by asking what they really mean. It would seem better to state, first, the condition which we shall mean when we use them and then consider the other meanings of the words only in order to define more sharply that which we have adopted.

The state in which a man is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others is often also distinguished as "individual" or "personal" freedom, and whenever we want to remind the reader that it is in this sense that we are using the word "freedom," we shall employ that expression. Sometimes the term "civil liberty" is used in the same sense, but we shall avoid it because it is too liable to be confused with what is called "political liberty"—an inevitable confusion arising from the fact that "civil" and "political" derive, respectively, from Latin and Greek words with the same meaning.

Even our tentative indication of what we shall mean by "freedom" will have shown that it describes a state which man living among his fellows may hope to approach closely but can hardly expect to realize perfectly. The task of a policy of freedom must therefore be to minimize coercion or its harmful effects, even if it cannot eliminate it completely.

It so happens that the meaning of freedom that we have adopted seems to be the original meaning of the word. Man, or at least European man, enters history divided into free and unfree; and this distinction had a very definite meaning. The freedom of the free may have differed widely, but only in the degree of an independence which the slave did not possess at all. It meant always the possibility of a person's acting according to his own decisions and plans, in contrast to the position of one who was irrevocably subject to the will of another, who by arbitrary decision could coerce him to act or not to act in specific ways. The time-honored phrase by which this freedom has often been described is therefore "independence of the arbitrary will of another."

This oldest meaning of "freedom" has sometimes been described as its vulgar meaning; but when we consider all the confusion that philosophers have caused by their attempts to refine or improve it, we may do well to accept this description. More important, however, than that it is the original meaning is that it is a distinct meaning and that it describes one thing and one thing only, a state which is desirable for reasons different from those which make us desire other things also called "freedom." We shall see that, strictly speaking, these various "freedoms" are not different species of the same genus but entirely different conditions, often in conflict with one another, which therefore should be kept clearly distinct. Though in some of the other senses it may be legitimate to speak of different kinds of freedom, "freedoms from" and "freedoms to," in our sense "freedom" is one, varying in degree but not in kind.

In this sense "freedom" refers solely to a relation of men to other men, and the only infringement on it is coercion by men. This means, in particular, that the range of physical possibilities from which a person can choose at a given moment has no direct relevance to freedom. The rock climber...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226315398
• ISBN 13: 9780226315393
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 596
• Herausgeber: Hamowy Ronald
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: The University of Chicago Press; https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html; ; 5801 S. Ellis Avenue; Chicago; IL; 60637; USA
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