Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 9780226816838

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Hayek

Hayek A L if e , 1899– 1950

Bruce Caldwell & Hansjoerg Klausinger The UniversiTy of ChiCAgo Press ChiCAgo And London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

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isBn-13: 978-0-226-81682-1 (cloth) isBn-13: 978-0-226-81683-8 (e-book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226816838.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Caldwell, Bruce, 1952– author. | Klausinger, Hansjörg, author. Title: Hayek : a life, 1899–1950 / Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCn 2022009835 | isBn 9780226816821 (cloth) | isBn 9780226816838 (ebook) Subjects: LCsh: Hayek, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August), 1899– 1992. | Economists—Biography. | Sociologists—Biography. Classification: LCC hB101.h39 C37 2022 | ddC 330.092 [B]—dc23/ eng/20220304 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009835 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of Ansi/niso Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To our families, with gratitude

Contents

Introduction · 1

PArT i A viennese yoUTh · 17 1 · A Fin-de-Siècle Wedding · 21 2 · Family Life · 30 3 · At School · 45 4 · Austrian Politics and Anti-Semitism · 57 5 · At War · 69

PArT ii A BroAdening of horiZons · 85 6 · Back at Home in Postwar Austria · 89 7 · The University of Vienna · 103 8 · The Peripatetic Student: Fritz at University · 117 9 · Mises and the Geistkreis · 140 10 · Changes of Scene · 156 11 · The Trip to America · 167

PArT iii The MAking of An eConoMis T · 193 12 · Return to Vienna · 197 13 · Hella Joins the Family · 216 14 · At the Institute for Business Cycle Research · 226 15 · The Young Academic · 241

PArT iv hAyek in 1930s engLAnd · 269 16 · Hayek Comes to LSE · 273 17 · The Encounter with Keynes · 291 18 · Defending Economic Theory and Interpreting Hitler · 307 19 · Socialism and Knowledge · 318 20 · Academic Life at LSE · 334 21 · The Battle for Young LSE Minds · 364 22 · Hayek and Austria · 382 23 · Domestic Affairs · 399 24 · The Hayek Family Debates Politics · 414

PArT v fighTing The sPiriT of The Age · 433 25 · Liberalism: Its Adversaries and Allies · 437 26 · Hayek and London Go to War: The Abuse and Decline of Reason · 464 27 · Cambridge · 493 28 · A Sixpence Penguin Volume: The Road to The Road to Serfdom · 516 29 · Scientism and Popper · 542 30 · The Publication(s) of The Road to Serfdom · 563

PArT vi ChAnging WorLds · 585 31 · War’s End · 591 32 · Postwar Austria · 615 33 · Mont Pèlerin 1947 · 642 34 · Hayek Looks for a Job · 675 35 · 1949—Hayek’s Annus Horribilis · 696 36 · Hayek versus Hayek · 710 A C k n o W L e d g M e n T s · 731 r e f e r e n C e s · 735 i n d e x · 807 Illustrations follow page 268.

Introduction

Some Background: The Biography and the Collected Works In the last decade of his life the Austrian-born British economist and social theorist Friedrich August Hayek accepted an invitation to participate in two interrelated projects, a full biography and a book series that would collect all of his major writings, some lesser-known pieces, and some unpublished materials.1 The American philosopher W. W. (Bill) Bartley III was to serve as both Hayek’s biographer and the General Editor of the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. Bartley had trained under Hayek’s friend Karl Popper (he was to be Popper’s biographer as well) and had written a biography of Hayek’s cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein, so he was well positioned to undertake the tasks. Bartley did several interviews of Hayek and of his friends in preparation for the biography and edited the first volume in the Collected Works, Hayek’s final book, The Fatal Conceit (Hayek 1988). Then fate intervened: Bartley fell ill, dying of cancer in February 1990 at the age of fifty-three. After Bartley’s death the biography languished, but the Collected Works continued under the editorship of Bartley’s friend and partner Stephen Kresge. Kresge commissioned several scholars to take responsibility for individual volumes, and under his editorship four were published. Bruce Caldwell, an American historian of economic thought, edited two of them, and in 2002 was invited by Kresge to take over the project as the third General Editor. Caldwell was pleased to receive and to accept the offer, not quite realizing all that it entailed. A mere twenty years later (in 2022), the final volume of the planned nineteen was published.2 From start to finish the Collected Works took three General Editors and thirty-four years to conclude. 1. A fuller account of how the two projects came about will be provided in the second volume of the biography. 2. Another volume is underway, one that will reproduce the Hayek-Popper correspondence, but it and any others that may appear were not part of the original plan.

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Knowing the history recounted above, Caldwell was keen to complete the original Bartleyan vision by taking on the role of Hayek’s biographer. He was supported in this both by Kresge, who provided him with transcripts of Bartley’s interviews of Hayek as well as other materials, and by Hayek’s two children, his son Larry (as well as Larry’s wife Esca) and daughter Christine. Larry provided Caldwell with an annotated timeline that Bartley had created and gave him access to his own study, allowing him to rummage through the numerous documents and memorabilia he had accumulated there. Christine provided more materials and sat for several interviews. When it was clear that the biography was going forward, the family kindly provided access to all the existing family correspondence and other materials. Though a small portion was later sold at auction, most of these items have since been deposited at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where the rest of Hayek’s professional papers are housed.3 There was one problem with the choice of Caldwell as Hayek’s biographer. Hayek had always insisted that his biographer be fluent in German. Bartley had been so qualified, but Caldwell was not. Caldwell accordingly sought out a co-author who knew both Hayek’s work and the language. Hansjoerg Klausinger, a historian of economic thought from Vienna who had edited two volumes in the Collected Works, was an obvious choice. An invitation was tendered and accepted, and we began work on this book. It has been an amicable, seamless, and we believe fruitful collaboration. This book, then, is the first of a planned two-volume biography of Friedrich A. Hayek. It will cover his life from his birth in 1899 through 1950, when he moved from the London School of Economics to the University of Chicago. The second volume will cover the period from 1950 until his death in 1992. In the rest of this introduction we will talk about how this book differs from others on Hayek, drawing special attention to the sources we used. We will also describe how we went about writing the book and decisions we made in the process. We will conclude by offering a brief introduction to Hayek himself, to whet the reader’s appetite for what is to come. 3. Some of the material had only recently been deposited at the Hoover as we finished this manuscript, so had not been fully processed and assigned box numbers. Other documents having to do with more sensitive issues were in closed boxes. As a result some of our citations for the family items were incomplete at the time of publication, but should be easily found afterward. For the register of the Hayek holdings at the Hoover Institution, consult https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030 /kt3v19n8zw/.

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Our Goals and Our Sources The extant secondary literature on Hayek is vast. Most books emphasize his intellectual contributions and, because he wrote in so many different areas, usually deal only with a portion of them (e.g., Boettke 2018, Caldwell 2004, Kukathas 1989, Shearmur 1996). There are also a handful of books that focus more closely on his life (e.g., Cubitt 2006, Ebenstein 2003a, 2003b, Hayek 1994, Henneke 2000, Hoover 2003, and Raybould 1998). Finally, there are literally hundreds of articles in collections and in professional journals that explicate and assess his ideas. Despite the history recounted above, it is fair to ask: why write another book on Hayek? Our goal, an ambitious one, was to provide what we hoped will be considered, for this generation anyway, the definitive full biography of F. A. Hayek. We felt that this was a reasonable aim because of our access to sources that were hitherto unavailable to others. The new material that the Hayek family and Bartley and Kresge provided to us and the interviews we undertook gave us the ability to tell Hayek’s story in a way that had never been done before. We sought to combine the new information with what we gleaned from a thorough review of other primary sources—documents and interviews held in archives and other depositories—to try to tell as complete a story as possible. Our book seeks to situate Hayek in place and time and to integrate his life and his work, with “work” including his intellectual contributions, his organization-building, and his efforts to reach a wider public as a defender of liberal ideas. In addition to being complete, we also wanted our biography to be accurate. As anyone who has done biographical work knows, there are many ways that false stories can get embedded in a subject’s narrative.4 Memories are notoriously fallible, but they can also be manipulated, with culprits ranging from the subject to friends and acquaintances to enemies. There have been many stories told about Hayek, by himself and by others, and though it was not always possible, whenever we could we checked them against documentary and other kinds of evidence to confirm or to correct them. This may seem like pedantry, but such care is particularly important when one’s subject is someone like Friedrich Hayek, who was, is, and will remain a controversial figure. We wanted to get his story right. 4. For an earlier example involving Hayek, see Caldwell 1998. The essays in Weintraub and Forget, eds. 2007 explore the problems that surround biographical and autobiographical accounts of economists, and Hacohen 2000, 8–22 provides an extended discussion of those he encountered in writing his biography of Karl Popper.

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Given these ambitions, we should describe how we went about trying to achieve them. When we began this project about a decade ago our first task was to go through the extant primary source materials. The starting point was the Hayek Collection at the Hoover Institution. Currently that collection consists of nearly two hundred boxes that have been deposited in increments over the past thirty-odd years. The initial increments were exceedingly rich, containing all manner of professional (and some personal) correspondence, drafts and final versions of papers he had written, notes (often on 3×5 cards) for projects he completed and those he never started, reviews of his work, newspaper clippings, lectures and lecture notes, photographs, audio files of interviews and lectures, and on and on. More recent increments included the materials we had been given access to by the family, including correspondence but also other treasures: documents, photographs, and objects relating to his early life, his university education, his military service, and his divorce. One can learn a lot from professional correspondence, and we used it extensively, though of course (as is always the case) a good portion of that written by Hayek had to be searched for in the archives of his correspondents, which we did. Our bigger challenge was to learn more about Hayek’s personal life. Hayek helped to some extent by providing autobiographical material of his own, some of which was discovered in unprepossessing places in the Hayek family materials. For example, Hayek’s mother, Felicitas, started a strange “diary” (“Fritzerls Tagebuch”) for her son when he was born, strange because it was written as if baby Fritz were the author. This would provide just an amusing look into late nineteenth-century Viennese cultural practices, except that if one goes to the back of “Fritzerls Tagebuch” one discovers another short diary, this one actually written by Fritz, begun just as the First World War was starting. We have called it his “juvenile war diary” (JWD), and though it is all too brief, it gives a glimpse of the thinking of a fifteen-year-old boy as the world turned toward war, and its discovery was pure serendipity. This is to be differentiated from the “war diary” (WD) he kept after deploying to the Italian front in 1917–18. Another example: As a student at the University of Vienna Fritz kept a list of books he read or planned to read. But a careful perusal of the list shows that he sometimes mixed in comments on classes he was taking and the professors who ran them, as well as, occasionally, personal matters. So we have still another “diary,” of sorts, by Fritz the university student, preserved in his papers (“Diary 1920”). Finally, starting in 1911 and running nearly until the end of his life, Hayek kept a datebook in which he listed the times of appointments, periods when he would be in particular places, departure

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and arrival times when on trips, and the like, invaluable for biographers trying to get times and places right. Later in his life Hayek began to compose more complete accounts. After he was elected to the British Academy in 1944, he knew that someday they would want an autobiographical statement from him, so in 1945 he began writing up some of his memories in an unpublished piece he titled “Autobiographical Fragments” (AF). He added to it in 1961 and again in 1967, and yet again in 1970. When his son Larry married Esca Drury in 1961, Hayek presented the couple with a “Family History” (FH), a serious piece of genealogical work that reached back several generations on both sides of his family. After winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 he sat for many interviews, and in them he sometimes spoke about his own personal or academic history. The most extensive collection of interviews—there were nine interviewers, among them James Buchanan and Robert Bork—took place in late 1978 and gave rise to a transcript of almost five hundred pages (Hayek 1983a). We should mention another prior biographical account that is in a category all its own. Charlotte Cubitt was Hayek’s secretary from the time he and his second wife, Helene (whom Hayek always referred to using the affectionate Austrian diminutive Lenerl), moved back to Freiburg in 1977 until his death in 1992. Mrs. Cubitt, as she was always called by them, kept diaries of her conversations and interactions with him and his wife, and after his death wrote a book that drew on them (Cubitt 2006). Because she did not know Hayek in his early days, she sometimes got details wrong in the stories she recounted. The great strength of her account is to reveal, in sometimes depressing detail, what everyday life was like in the Hayeks’ household toward the end of their days. Hayek was in poor health for most of his last seven years, and the particulars make for grim reading. But the level of intimacy she reached with both him and Lenerl also offers insights into both people that are unavailable elsewhere. She was privy to private conversations, to arguments, and to “explanations” offered by each party when justifying past and present behavior. Cubitt’s book provides the main source of information about Lenerl as an adult, the other source being Hayek’s daughter Christine, whose reminiscences are colored by the fact that they did not like one another. As to our other sources, Hayek preserved many letters written to him by members of his own family. These include letters from his parents dating back to World War I, from his first wife, Hella, throughout their marriage, from his mother and brothers in the 1930s (when he was in England and they were in Austria and Germany, respectively, and holding very different

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political views), and from his mother and his children after he moved to America in 1950. All except those from his children are in German, and his mother wrote in a no longer used form of cursive writing called Kurrent.5 These provide insights into his family life, but there is one gaping hole: he kept their letters to him, but they, for various reasons and with few exceptions, did not keep his letters to them.6 As a result, for certain episodes we had to extrapolate his side of the conversation. A final family document, also deposited at the Hoover, is a set of reminiscences composed in 1983 by Hayek’s brother Erich, “Erinnerungen aus dem Hause Hayek” (EHH). There is more. There are two vital caches of letters that are in the possession of Hayek’s brother Heinz’s grandson, Richard Zundritsch. The first are from Fritz to his parents during the First World War; the second are letters home when he spent fifteen months in the United States from March 1923 to May 1924. These documents reveal him to be a humorous, perceptive, and entertaining correspondent, as he chronicled and reacted to the strange and interesting experiences he was having. It makes one wish that his family had preserved more of his private correspondence, but it may be that the special circumstances surrounding these letters made them more interesting than would be the case for the more standard family exchanges.7 Final sources of information were the interviews done by Bartley with Hayek in the early 1980s, and those done by Caldwell, chiefly with Christine Hayek, for this one. In preparing for the Bartley interviews Hayek wrote up notes concerning important reminiscences on file cards. Bartley integrated information from these into the timeline that he gave Larry Hayek, which he then passed on to Caldwell. Having trained with the philosopher of science Karl Popper, Bartley playfully titled the timeline the “Inductive 5. All final translations of German into English of family letters and other correspondence were done by Klausinger. The transcriptions from Kurrent were kindly provided by Karl Pechter. Initial translations of some material for Caldwell was done by Alexandra Hecker, assisted by her stepfather, who could read Kurrent. 6. There are postcards from him to Hella and the family in the Hayek Collection in box 184, folders 6 and 7 (FAHP 184.6–7). The reasons that letters were not saved vary. His first wife, Hella, evidently had little interest in keeping any after he left her, and his children may have felt similarly, though often children simply do not care to keep letters from their parents. As for his mother and brothers in the 1930s, after a certain point it may have been dangerous to have his letters around, particularly if, as one supposes, he failed to be discreet about his opposition to the Nazi regime in them. 7. Richard also gave us access to a diary that Lenerl had kept as a child. We thank him and his wife, Caroline, for sharing these family heirlooms with us.

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Base” (IB), an allusion to the Popperian phrase for a set of facts that are taken provisionally as “given” when formulating a theory, because the document contained the “facts” on which the biography would be built. Though reminiscences and memory are always tricky things, we feel that the information contained in the Inductive Base and on the file cards is probably more reliable than, for example, Hayek’s extemporaneous interviews done earlier in life. It appears that in preparing the file cards Hayek when possible checked his memories against appointment books, student records, and other contemporaneous documents. In any event, whenever possible we have noted when differing sources provide conflicting accounts and tried to reconcile them by checking the documents ourselves. Very few people had ever seen the file cards. There were rumors that a copy of them had been made and was sitting in Australia, but further inquiries proved fruitless. Caldwell had asked Kresge about them on a couple of occasions, and he responded, vaguely, that they might be in some boxes he had kept in a storage locker in Berkeley. But as we prepared this volume we did not make use of them, relying instead on Bartley’s interviews and his Inductive Base. Stephen Kresge died on November 12, 2018, and when the storage locker was finally opened in late 2019, inside was found a meticulously documented collection of Bartley’s papers, including interviews and transcripts of interviews with Popper, Hayek, and others, Bartley’s own work on the biographies of both men, and much, much more. One of the entries in the list of contents reads, tantalizingly, “Hayek Original Notecards for Biography.” Bartley’s niece Kathryn Troyan generously agreed to donate the contents of the storage locker to the Hoover Institution, but this took place during the Covid pandemic and the materials at the time of this writing had still not yet made it to the Hoover. Given we have Bartley’s summaries of what the file cards contained, we decided not to delay our project any longer to check his claims against them. It may be that someday some of Hayek’s letters to his family are similarly discovered. If so we wish the next generation of Hayek biographers well in correcting any errors we have made and in bringing the story we have told up to date. The sources of biographical material and the location of the letters cited are collected in a separate section, “Archival Sources,” at the end of the book. The first two chapters of this book deal with Hayek’s familial predecessors and with the various circles in which his family moved in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Those who wish to explore such genealogical details and social networks even further are invited to visit the appendixes to these chapters, which have been placed online (see Caldwell and Klausinger 2021a, b).

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Some Decisions We Made in Writing This Biography As we moved from doing the research to preparing the text, we had some additional decisions to make. We had a tremendous amount of material. What to leave in, and what to leave out, in telling Hayek’s story? Our initial drafts included everything, a necessary first step, for only if one can see the whole field does one start to see the narrative threads emerge. In April 2019 we attended a two-day manuscript conference organized by Peter Boettke at George Mason University in which we received invaluable feedback on ways to improve our first completed draft. We then began the long process of editing and reshaping the manuscript to bring it to final form. We cut certain things we deemed inessential and put other materials in appendixes (Caldwell and Klausinger 2021a, b). Another part of the effort was to try to blend our two different writing styles: Klausinger is the more austere stylist, while Caldwell tends to the breezy. We also decided to end this volume in 1950 rather than 1946, so five more chapters had to be written and integrated into what we had done so far. A final cause for delay was that we kept stumbling across new documents in the material provided by the Hayek family that we felt should be included. Hayek was a controversial figure, so another decision was whether to engage with the existing critical literature.8 By and large we decided not to do so. In presenting his intellectual contributions, our goal as historians was to show the context in which he developed his ideas, to identify to whom he was responding, and to suggest why he embraced some projects and abandoned others. Simply stated, we sought to reveal what he did and said, and to explain what motivated him. To accomplish that, we had to enter his mind, to see the world as Hayek did, and invariably that shapes the sort of narrative one produces. In particular it means that, with few exceptions, we did not attempt to provide a critical assessment of his thought or to respond to his critics. It may be noted that if we had, this already long volume could easily have grown to twice its current length. But it led one of the readers for the Press to say of our book that it “indirectly (but intentionally) . . . offers a contemporary liberal critique of neoliberalism scholarship” and that it is “more of an authorized biography than a critical one.” Though we think that both comments are broadly fair, in our own minds our goal was simply to tell Hayek’s story as best we could. As historians of economic thought, we both are comfortable with ex8. That literature is diverse, but most of it targets his ideas and his role as a defender of “neoliberalism.” Some representative examples are Mirowski and Plehwe, eds. 2009; Peck 2010; Stedman Jones 2012; and Mirowski and Nik-Khah 2017.

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plaining the evolution of a person’s thought and placing ideas within the context of the times in which they developed. By definition, though, a biography deals with a subject’s life, not just his ideas, and explaining people is a different ball of wax. Though we were well familiar with his intellectual contributions, neither of us had ever given much thought to Hayek as a person, and it was only slowly that he began to come into view, as we studied his relationships with his family, friends, and colleagues, as revealed through professional and personal correspondence, interviews, and the like. Lives are sometimes messy, and Hayek’s was no exception. Though we received much help from the Hayek family, they did not vet the manuscript before its publication. We had to decide about how deeply to go into certain sensitive personal and familial matters, always a tricky thing when one has developed a relationship with the people the details of whose family life one is revealing to the world. In the end, we decided to hold very little back. We show, for example, that both of Hayek’s parents participated in different ways in the antiSemitism that was commonplace in the Vienna of their day. We also tell the story of the divergence of his political views from those of other family members during the critical decade of the 1930s, when he lived in England and they in Germany and Austria. All this is relevant for understanding the milieu in which Hayek came of age, his process of maturation within that environment, and indeed the development of certain of his political commitments. From early on Hayek pushed back against his family on such matters. Everyone familiar with Hayek’s work knows that his defense of liberalism ran very much against the “spirit of the age” in which he lived. It makes his stance all the more poignant to realize that it also directly opposed the views of some members of his immediate family. The most sensitive issue that we treat is his divorce from his first wife, Hella, which he initiated to be able to marry Lenerl. We decided to go into that painful episode in intricate detail for three reasons. First, it was evidently the central event in his personal life, something that was lurking in his mind for years before it happened, and which had profound consequences for his life and the lives of everyone around him going forward. Second, all the documents surrounding the divorce have now been deposited in archives, so are publicly available. But they are scattered. Besides those that have recently arrived at the Hoover Institution, key documents are also located in the papers of Lionel Robbins at the London School of Economics (LSE) and John Nef at the University of Chicago. Unless one has consulted all the materials, it is easy to miss things, and even to be led astray. For example, the Hayek Collection contains a letter that Hayek wrote to Hella that is dated July 13, 1950. Unless one also visited the

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Robbins papers at LSE, one would not realize that it was actually sent over three months later, and contained a crucial handwritten addendum that, when Hella showed it to Lionel, led to the final break between Hayek and his best friend. The Hayek archive also contains what appears to be a typed letter from Fritz to Hella, dated December 21, 1948. But the document is actually a typed-up compendium of two letters he sent her, one from 1948 and the other from 1950. There have been other treatments of the divorce that have only touched on some of the materials now available, and even in those that drew on more sources, sometimes mistakes were made (Hoover 2003, 188, 192–95; Howson 2011, 704–6; Ebenstein 2018).9 We felt that his biography was the appropriate place to offer the definitive treatment. Finally, it seems that Hayek, too, may have wanted this story told, or at least would not have opposed its telling. After all, his letters to Hella written in December 1948 and February 1950 were found in his papers typed up in a single document, parts of which were corrected in his hand. We do not know the story behind why he preserved his letters to Hella in this way, but he knew there was to be a biography, and the document was in his papers. We think he was leaving this paper trail for a reason, no matter how bad their contents may have made him look to some observers. In any event, our decision was to offer as full a treatment as the materials allowed us to provide.

Hayek: A Snapshot and a Preview The first salient fact about Friedrich Hayek is that he was born in 1899 and died in 1992. His was a twentieth-century life. As a child his first car ride, a quick trip around Vienna’s Ringstraße, was in one of the first automobiles. As a youth he took up downhill skiing, then a new sport, a modification of the more traditional Nordic cross-country one. Had World War I not ended when it did he would have joined the pilot academy and flown planes, themselves relatively new inventions. As an economist he was a participantobserver in the hyperinflation that followed the First World War, the Great Depression, the rise of the welfare state, and the stagflation of the 1970s. As 9. The account of the divorce in Hoover 2003 is one of the most complete of those we mentioned, but also contains some errors. Hoover cites as a source the “Cubitt Archive.” This consisted of materials Hayek’s secretary had photocopied from the divorce file and later shared with him. Unfortunately, Cubitt did not realize that the typed-up document she provided to Hoover contained two letters from Fritz to Hella, not one. Fritz’s original handwritten letter to Hella of February 16, 1950, that establishes that fact has been deposited at the Hoover Institution.

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a liberal he watched the rise and fall of various forms of fascism on the continent. He also witnessed the creation of the Soviet Union, its expansion to control much of Eastern Europe, and its ultimate dissolution. He lived through the transformation of his own profession from the (mostly verbal) study of political economy into the (mostly mathematical) science of economics. Like John Maynard Keynes, whom he knew, he was an economic theorist who used virtually no mathematics to express his ideas. He was made fun of by some mean-spirited colleagues for his lack of mathematical acumen (the Austrian tradition in economics was largely a verbal one), yet his treatments of what he called “phenomena of organized complexity” or “spontaneous orders” anticipated subsequent theoretical developments for which the mathematics had not yet been developed. His contributions to economics were impressive, even if they did not always impress his economist colleagues—though they frequently did. There was a brief time in the 1930s when Hayek was considered the chief economic rival of Keynes, who was destined to become the most famous economist of the twentieth century. Their competing models of the economy and theories about the causes of, and remedies for, the business cycle held the attention of the profession as a whole, until Keynes penned The General Theory and swept the field. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises are justly famous for their critique of socialism, though for decades most economists thought that they had lost the so-called socialist calculation debate. It took the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East bloc for the power of their arguments to become more widely recognized and accepted. Though he stuck to prose, scholars working in the more technical economics of information invariably invoke as a key precursor his 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” a phenomenon that itself gives rise to the question of whether Hayek’s “knowledge” and the profession’s “information” refer to the same thing. His 1970s essay The Denationalization of Money challenged the wisdom of granting a central bank a monopoly over the issuance of money and became a foundational work for those who explore alternative monetary regimes. Hayek might be considered one of the last of the political economists. With some justice he called his most famous work, The Road to Serfdom, a political book. His two biggest contributions, The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty, incorporated history and political theory in exploring the set of economic, political, juridical, cultural, and social institutions that are most conducive to the establishment of a successful liberal democratic order. He did important work in the history of ideas and in social science methodology. He wrote a book on the foundations of

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theoretical psychology. He even tried to explain, in his last book, why so many people seemed to detest the free market system, even though it had brought about manifold increases in both wealth and personal liberty. This brief summary does not include all of the projects that he started, or thought about, but never finished. He was perpetually coming up with new ones. Some were books, of course, and some of these were multivolume works, at least as planned: a big book on money, a two-volume treatise exposing the abuse and decline of reason, a volume on the economic calculus, this last complete with a penciled-in book cover. He hoped someday to offer a lecture course titled “An Overview of the Evolution and the System of Sciences (for Students of all Faculties)”—a project gargantuan in scope, and this was when he was twenty years old. He wanted to organize a grand debate on the feasibility of socialism, dubbed the Paris Challenge—this was when he was in his late seventies. He aspired to create a Central European University, a three-year residential college for postgraduates that would educate future leaders of the region about the merits of a liberal free market democratic order—he thought about some variant of this over and over again. There were few limits to the range of his ideas or of his ambitions. Hayek was a cosmopolitan citizen of the world but he did not start out that way. His origins in Vienna were distinctly upper middle class, and his horizons there accordingly distinctly limited, at least until he went to university, where he learned from his new friends among the Jewish intelligentsia just how circumscribed his education had been. He spent fifteen months in America, mostly in New York City, when he was in his early twenties. He hated it, but later ended up visiting the country frequently, even living in Chicago for twelve years, dedicating the book he wrote there “To the unknown civilization that is growing in America,” an ambiguous dedication that was probably intentional, for he always was a bit ambivalent about the States. He fell in love with England before he set foot on its soil, though he came to realize that the England of the nineteenth century that he revered had all but disappeared in the twentieth. He left it in 1950 under a cloud, and never lived there again. Virtually every summer he returned to the mountains of his native Austria, the one place on the planet he felt completely at home, but the time he spent in Salzburg, from 1969 to 1977, was a disaster. Before and after his sojourn in Salzburg he and Lenerl lived in Freiburg, Germany, both times in the exact same flat. It was there that he died. Given the many places he lived, Hayek was a perpetual stranger, a man who, on his own admission, had only a few close friends. That may have suited him just fine: when he described himself as a loner in an interview, he did not say it wistfully, he was merely observing himself and stating a

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fact (IB 38).10 If he did not make close friends easily he certainly was not lacking in social skills. Hayek not only seemed to know everyone, he got along with all sorts of people. When his daughter Christine was asked if he was the “absentminded professor” type, she said that, quite the contrary, he was very good company (at least outside of the family), recalling as evidence his behavior at the summer schools that were held in the small Tyrolean town of Alpbach in the late 1940s, where she remembered him smiling and laughing and enjoying the stimulation of the intellectual and social interaction. And indeed later in life he lamented that his loss of hearing made him appear less sociable than he actually was (Hayek 1994, 135). But it is also a fact that toward members of his own family—his first wife and children—he was often rather reserved. His father, August, once supposedly said that being intelligent and taciturn was a family trait among the males, and that well described August himself. This may have been how Hayek thought men were “supposed” to behave, but it may also have been offered as an excuse for aspects of his own interactions that he later came to regret. Hayek had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He knew (or, in the case of its founder, Carl Menger, had at least seen) all of the principals of the Austrian school of economics: his grandfather was a climbing friend of Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser was his teacher, Ludwig von Mises was his mentor, and Joseph Schumpeter wrote letters of introduction for him to economists he knew in America. He came to America just as its leading economist, the institutionalist Wesley Clair Mitchell, was about to become the president of the American Economic Association. Hayek sat in on his classes and took back with him enough knowledge to become the head of a business cycle institute. He arrived in England just at the right time to challenge Keynes, but also to participate in Lionel Robbins’s Grand Seminar at the London School of Economics, where the formalism for most of what we now think of as intermediate microeconomic theory was developed. He went to the University of Chicago just as the Chicago School of Economics was taking shape—and he may well have played a role in its creation, scholars differ on that—yet he went there to join the Committee on Social Thought, not the Economics Department. Some consider Hayek the prophet of the rugged, independent individual. He would have demurred—he insisted in his essay “Individualism: True and False” that the individualism he was interested in was a theory of society, one that started from the premise of people “whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society” (Hayek 2010 [1946a], 10. As noted earlier, IB refers to Bartley’s “Inductive Base.”

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52). But there is less controversy about his own independent streak. It was there from the beginning, and, as we will see in the chapter on his early education, not always with salutary results. But one sees it most forcefully in the fact that, throughout his life, Hayek so often disagreed with people, always politely but always firmly. When people failed to see the world the way that he did, his response was to try to reformulate the argument, the better to change their minds. In his famous essay “Two Types of Mind,” he distinguished between the master of the subject, someone who knew every detail of a literature and all of the arguments, and the puzzler, someone who would keep coming back and rethinking a set of claims, adding new insights along the way. Hayek would use the distinction many times, and placed himself squarely in the camp of the puzzlers (Hayek 1975). He was often repetitious in his arguments, the natural fate, one supposes, of the puzzler. But another reason he kept repeating himself was that he kept encountering the same old arguments, ones he thought he had disposed of, arising again and again. Perhaps this is the fate, especially, of a liberal puzzler who lives for nearly a century. In any event there were many puzzles to engage him. * * * The biography ahead is separated into six parts, each carrying its own introduction, so the preview here will be cursory. Part I, “A Viennese Youth,” traces the early days of our protagonist in fin-de-siècle Vienna. We explore his family life and his somewhat erratic path through the Austrian educational system, and end with his experiences as a young soldier on the Italian front during World War I. Part II, “A Broadening of Horizons,” recounts his days at the University of Vienna, where both the professors he encountered and the friends he made had a profound influence on his further intellectual development. After finishing his first degree he broadened his horizons further by becoming better acquainted with Ludwig von Mises and spending fifteen months in America. In part III, “The Making of an Economist,” we show Hayek’s movement into the adult world, as he marries, finds a job at the Institute for Business Cycle Research, and takes the necessary steps to prepare himself for a life in the academy. Part IV, “Hayek in 1930s England,” the longest in terms of chapters, tells the story of how Hayek managed at the young age of thirty-three to secure a named university chair at the London School of Economics. This decade was a period of great creative productivity for Hayek, but also one of frustration, as he fought battles on many academic fronts and struggled to bring his own work on capital theory to a conclusion, all while living in a strange new country. It did

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not help that it was also a painful period personally: he came to regret his marriage to Hella, and he found the political stances taken by his brother and mother on the continent increasingly noxious. In part V, “Fighting the Spirit of the Age,” we explore Hayek’s war effort, a great two-volume work that would expose the intellectual origins of the twentieth-century collapse of Western civilization in the writings of nineteenth-century socialists, positivists, and their followers. Though he never finished the larger project, it led him to the publication of The Road to Serfdom, his best-known book and a work that brought him international fame. Part VI, “Changing Worlds,” examines Hayek’s activities in the five years following World War II, as he sought to form a society of like-minded individuals who would dedicate themselves to rebuilding the foundations of liberalism, and to take the steps necessary to divorce Hella and marry Lenerl. He was ultimately successful in both endeavors, but the second one required him to leave his beloved adopted country of England to settle in a truly new and different world, the United States.

· Part I · A Viennese Youth

In part I we will explore the period from Friedrich Hayek’s birth in 1899 through his service in World War I. He grew up in fin-de-siècle Vienna, a period and place of enormous creative tensions, but also of enormously destructive political, religious, and ethnic divisions. If one thinks in terms of those divisions, Hayek’s family was conservative, Christian (though mostly nonpracticing), and culturally German (his father would quote from the great German writers at length and from memory at the dinner table). Though his family’s ennoblement made them members of the so-called second society, and their status was that of the upper middle class, their lifestyle was anything but ostentatious. Hayek’s father August’s chosen field was medicine—he was a district physician—but his passion was botany. In a tradition that was common at the time in Vienna, he worked to make a respectable living (which was supplemented by income from his wife’s endowment—hers was the wealthier family), then devoted the rest of his time to botany, organizing meetings, creating an herbarium, giving lectures. He pursued this interest single-mindedly and, fully supported in this decision by his wife, made it a family affair. Weekends and summers were spent by the family Hayek collecting specimens, exploring different habitats, always out in nature. It is little wonder that one of Hayek’s two brothers became an anatomist and the other a chemist, and that of his own two children, one would become a medical doctor and the other an entomologist specializing in the study of beetles. And it is little wonder that throughout his life Hayek would return to the Tyrolean mountains each summer to find his center. His family was fully embedded in an extended intellectual and academic community, one that included extended family members and acquaintances, in Vienna. In trying to understand the world that the young Hayek inhabited, part of our task will be to explore the variety of intersecting circles that made up such an important part of his environment.

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That world was changing as Hayek grew from a child into a young adult, and not always in good ways. As the monarchy slowly lost its grip on society, an age of increasingly raw and nasty mass politics began. Racial, religious, and ethnic intolerance became normalized, as various segments of society were wooed by politicians and parties that sought to gain power by demonizing their opposition. Fanaticisms of many varieties, Marxist, fascist, anti-Semitic, pan-German, and nationalist, were on offer. Compounding the problem, these explosive political competitions played themselves out just as the Western world was headed for the most horrific war it had ever witnessed. Hayek would fight in that war, but much of our focus will be on earlier and more innocent times. We will see that from the beginning the young Hayek stood out from his peers. He was bright enough to be thoroughly bored with schoolwork, with perhaps predictable unfortunate consequences. He also had an independent streak that, again, did not always serve him well. It would become more pronounced as he became an adult, as he gradually moved further from the influence of his family and milieu. One sees it perhaps most dramatically in some of the decisions he made as a young soldier at the Italian front. As one of the authors of this biography remarked to the other on reviewing the evidence before us, “it is amazing that he made it out of the war alive!”

·1· A Fin-de-Siècle Wedding

On Tuesday, May 24, 1898, a newly minted municipal physician named August von Hayek, aged twenty-six, wed Felicitas von Juraschek, the twentythree-year-old daughter of a prominent, and wealthy, university professor and civil servant, in Vienna’s Votivkirche. The couple had been engaged about six months, and their nuptials were announced in Vienna’s liberal newspaper, the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. The ceremony was followed by a multicourse feast, with sherry, a local white wine, medoc, and champagne complementing the various courses. Their wedding photograph, executed by Carl Pietzner, whose studio carried the imperial seal (“K.u.k. Hof- u. Kammer-Photograph” is also engraved below the picture), shows a serious, thin young man looking directly at the camera, and an equally serious wife looking at her spouse, her hand resting on his, which rests on a chair. Regarding descent and profession both families belonged to that social stratum referred to in Austria as the “second society” of lower nobility, in contrast with the “first society” of higher nobility comprising the ruling houses, princes and earls. Within the lower nobility there were three ranks, the lowest level—that bestowed on the Hayek family—carrying the predicate of nobility “von” (or the title Edler). Above them were the knights (Ritter)—the Juraschek family had attained this level—and at the top of lower nobility the barons (Freiherren). In the Austrian monarchy the award of titles of lower nobility had proliferated during the nineteenth century. Between 1804 and 1918, dates that mark the foundation of the Austrian Empire and its demise, roughly eight thousand people had been ennobled, mainly—in descending numbers—officers, civil servants, businessmen, and artists and scientists (Wandruszka 1971; Waldstein-Wartenberg 1971). Of the leaders of the Austrian school of economics, many either belonged to the lower nobility or during their lifetimes were elevated to it, as indicated by the “von” in the names of the nobles Menger, Mises, and

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Hayek, the knight Böhm-Bawerk, and the barons Wieser and Haberler (cf. Streissler 1988).1 Just off the Ringstraße, the Votivkirche was an appropriate venue for members of the second society to be married. It looked ancient (it had been built in neo-Gothic style) but had been completed in 1879. In February 1853 a young Hungarian apprentice tailor tried to assassinate the twenty-threeyear-old Emperor Franz Joseph, who was out for a walk on the city ramparts, by stabbing him in the neck. The emperor’s thick collar helped to deflect the blade, and he was able to recover in a few weeks. The church was financed by subscriptions from thousands of donors and built to praise God for preserving the emperor’s life (Johnston 1980, 92–93, 122).2 The Votivkirche was the first of many buildings built in the historicist style that were erected in the massive redevelopment of the city that took place in Vienna beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1857 the emperor issued an edict calling for the city fortifications to be torn down and for a connected series of wide boulevards to be put in their place. Lining the new Ringstraße would be the various seats of government, as well as cultural and educational centers like the imperial opera house and theater, various museums, and the university. Each edifice had its own style, and for many the construction of the Ringstraße and its many buildings, both public and private, became a visual symbol of the brief triumph within the Empire of constitutional government and the cultural values associated with liberalism.3 Though both families were of the second society, full members of the bourgeoisie and of the intellectual elite, we can get a better sense of where each fit by tracing back to the respective ennoblements.4 The Hayek line 1. In 1919, after the demise of the Empire, the Republic of Austria abolished the nobility and all its titles, so that “von” had to be deleted from the names of the nobles. Hayek’s occasional use of the “von,” and its frequent use by others, with varying intents, will come up again. 2. The tailor was hanged. Older Viennese residents may still recall the (typically Viennese) saying that refers to the incident: “Auf der Simmeringer Had hat’s ein Schneider verwaht. Es geschieht ihm schon recht, warum sticht er so schlecht,” that is, “At the Simmering Heath [the execution site] a tailor is blowing in the wind. This serves him right, why did he fail with his knife?” 3. The classic citation linking the architecture of the Ringstraße with liberalism is Schorske 1981, chap. 2, but for a more recent account that challenges some of his claims, see Judson 2001. For more on the brief liberal moment in the AustroHungarian Empire, see chapter 4 below. 4. See Caldwell and Klausinger 2021a for a more detailed genealogical account of August’s and Felicitas’s families. In this and the next chapter the basic biographical

A Fin-de-Siècle Wedding 23

was the more ancient. August’s great-grandfather Josef (1750–1830) had been the steward of a large estate in Moravia and in that capacity developed two modern-style textile factories that ultimately employed several hundred people. He became a partner in the operations, which led to his acquiring both a substantial fortune and, in 1789, ennoblement. On his death his estate was divided among his children. His son Heinrich, August’s grandfather and the only male heir, inherited his father’s mansion in Brünn as well as other property and securities. In 1840 he moved to Vienna to become a secretary in the Ministry of Police (k.k. Polizeiministerium), a position “where he probably had to work for only two or three hours each morning” and that allowed him to lead the “life of a gentleman” (Hayek 1994, 37). August remembered his grandfather “as a tall thin figure, blue-eyed and clean shaven, wearing a fair wig, very good-natured and devoted to his duty, intelligent and taciturn (as the Hayeks were generally supposed to be), but somewhat given to bursts of indignation” (Hayek, “Family History,” henceforth FH).5 Whatever his other personal characteristics, under his watch the family fortune was gradually but definitively depleted, with much of it gone by the 1860s (Hayek 1994, 38). After finishing his gymnasium education Gustav, August’s father, started on a naval career but (apparently owing to financial exigencies) later switched paths. After passing the requisite exams, he found a position at the newly founded Landstraßer Gymnasium. Though only a gymnasium teacher, Gustav established himself early on in scientific circles, writing a four-volume handbook of zoology (G. von Hayek 1877–93) and editing a biological atlas (G. von Hayek, ed. 1885). His most public achievement was in the field of ornithology. After joining an ornithology association (Ornithologischer Verein) in 1882, he quickly was elected its secretary and editor of its newsletter. Under the auspices of Crown Prince Rudolf, who also had an interest in the field, he organized an ornithological exposition in Vienna in April 1884, an event marked by visits by Rudolf himself, Archduke Rainer of the royal family, and the Emperor Franz Joseph (Holzleitner 2013). Despite such honors, after retirement Gustav was forced to suppleinformation is drawn from the various entries in Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon. 5. “Family History” refers to a history of the Hayek family that Hayek offered as a wedding gift to his son Laurence when he married Esca Drury. The history lacks page numbers so none are given when it is referenced. Except where noted what follows draws on this invaluable document and on the reminiscences by Hayek’s brother Erich, “Erinnerungen aus dem Hause Hayek” (1983), henceforth EHH.

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ment his meager schoolteacher’s pension with journalistic work on popular science. It was the sort of challenge—balancing scientific curiosity and ambition with the realities of earning a living—that his own son, August, would also have to confront. In 1871, Gustav married Sidonie Marie Anna, née Mayerhofer von Eisfelden. They had two sons, Friedrich’s father, August Gustav Josef (born December 14, 1871), and his uncle Paul Gustav Heinrich (born December 13, 1875). Whereas the Hayeks had only recently arrived in Vienna, Sidonie’s family on both her father’s and her mother’s (the Bergenstamm dynasty) sides had deep roots in Viennese society. August grew up in rather modest living conditions owing to his grandfather’s losing most of the family fortune and to his father’s failure to receive a hoped-for inheritance from his grandfather’s unmarried sisters (Hayek 1994, 38). August’s financial burdens were further exacerbated because he felt obligated to help “his not very gifted younger brother to complete his legal studies” (IB 9). For secondary school August attended the Landstraßer Gymnasium, where his father was teaching biology. After that he chose, mostly for financial reasons, the study of medicine, which he concluded in 1895 with a doctorate. In contrast to her husband, Felicitas von Juraschek came from a family that was a well-established part of the upper-class bourgeoisie, their status due in part to her father’s having married well, twice. Consequently, “in the early years of their married life [when] money must have been pretty scarce the small salary of my father . . . was at first just about equaled by the income from my mother’s small fortune,” apparently an inheritance from her deceased mother, Johanna Stallner (AF 1).6 Though Felicitas von Juraschek brought considerable wealth to the union, her family had experienced much personal tragedy, and indeed the two were connected. It was Felicitas’s grandfather, Franz Ritter von Juraschek (1809–1868), a military officer, who was knighted for his service at 6. Hayek began writing “Autobiographical Fragments,” hereafter cited as AF, when he was elected to the British Academy in 1944. He added to it subsequently, and the draft in the archives carries the date November 1967. Franz von Juraschek’s wealth derived not only from his marrying relatively rich wives, but also from his salary as a high civil servant—he eventually became the director of the Statistische Zentralkommission, the Statistical Office of the Austrian part of the monarchy—and from the royalties he received for editing a book (Brachelli 1907) on the statistics of Europe (Bartley interviews, Feb 11, 1983). Its author, Hugo Brachelli, was a colleague from the statistical office and incidentally the father of the first wife of Ludwig Reitz, who was to become the second husband of Beate von Juraschek.

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the siege of the fortress Arad, located in present-day Romania. His son, also named Franz, studied law and philosophy in Graz, where he met and married Johanna Theresa Stallner, a wealthy “lady of Graz society,” in 1873.7 Felicitas was born to them on March 13, 1875, and Beatrix (Beata or Beate) followed on July 20, 1876. Meanwhile Franz had acquired his venia legendi (right to teach) in Graz in 1875 in constitutional law, to be followed later by one in statistics, and began an academic career. All that unraveled when his wife gave birth to twins in October 1879. One of the twin daughters was stillborn, and Johanna herself died from complications less than a month later—we will see that during this period, even among the upper classes, childbirth and the period directly following were often dangerous for both mother and child. Franz and his three daughters, Felicitas (aged 4½), Beata (3½), and the infant Ida moved in with the mother of Johanna, Johanna Christine Stallner. The children spent the next few years there, looked after by their grandmother while their father pursued his academic career at Czernowitz. When he moved next to a position at Innsbruck, his sister Helene watched over them. It was at Innsbruck that Franz met the Austrian economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, with whom he would occasionally go mountain-climbing. At some point Franz Juraschek met Ida Pokorny, who ultimately became his second wife. Her father, the botanist Alois Pokorny, was the first director of the Sperl Gymnasium, one of those with a majority of Jewish pupils, and, like Gustav von Hayek, he taught biology and became a lecturer at the University in Vienna. Franz and Ida wed on May 24, 1885, in the Vienna Votivkirche. A notable witness at their marriage was the Vienna professor of geology Eduard Suess (1831–1914), a former pupil of the Sperl Gymnasium. An outstanding figure in science as well as in public life and politics, his election as the rector of the University of Vienna three years later would, owing to his Jewish descent, cause violent student riots that led to his resigning prematurely. The happy couple with Franz’s children from his first marriage, whom Ida treated as her own, remained in Innsbruck, and that summer Franz was appointed to an ordinary professor chair at the university there.8 Everything seemed at last back on track. It would not last. 7. As noted in Caldwell and Klausinger 2021a, Johanna was the link to the Wittgenstein family. Her father’s sister, Marie Stallner, married Jakob Kalmus. Jakob and Marie’s daughter Leopoldine (Poldi) married Karl Wittgenstein and was the mother of Ludwig. 8. The terms “extraordinary professor” and “ordinary professor” in contemporaneous Austrian universities roughly corresponded to “associate professor” and “full professor” in Anglo-Saxon usage. At the time extraordinary professors were noto-

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Not two months after their marriage Franz’s daughter Ida, who had not yet celebrated her sixth birthday, died suddenly while on summer vacation at the Villa Stallner in Hochenegg, near Cilli (then part of the province of Styria, now in Slovenia). The next year Franz’s wife became pregnant with twin boys, Johann and Rudolf. She gave birth on December 27, 1886, and Johann did not survive the day. This tragedy may also have contributed to the death of Ida Pokorny’s father, Alois, who was visiting the couple for Christmas and had a stroke; in any event, he died two days later. But this was not all: the second twin died about a month later. These events were doubtless contributing causes of the family’s departure from Innsbruck for Vienna in 1887, where they settled into a magnificent ten-room top floor flat in the first district, across from the Opera where the Ringstraße and Kärntner Straße meet. The family would live there until 1910 and have three children of their own, Felicitas’s half-sisters Margarete and Gertrud and half-brother Franz. Though not much is known about the youth of Felicitas von Juraschek, we do know that her education was the typical one bestowed on girls from upper-class families, that of a MädchenLyzeum, an extended form of secondary school. In any event, with the move to Vienna the family tragedies were finally at an end, and in true fin-de-siècle style, they were replaced by merriment. The Juraschek home became famous for dancing parties (or “jours”) that were regularly arranged there for almost two decades. “My maternal grandfather . . . used, as it was the practice, to give for the daughters of his two wives dancing parties . . . Other professors’ daughters and promising young academics were the main participants. As a result, a number of later professors were her early dancing partners and remained friends of the family well known to me . . . I don’t know how my father, then a young doctor, got into this circle; but in consequence, even before he himself became a Privatdozent for botany, his friends were also largely university people in a great variety of subjects” (IB 3). August and Felicitas, Fritz’s parents, met at these dancing events at the Juraschek home, and although they were always under the watchful eyes of her parents, they agreed to get married, at first keeping it a secret from Felicitas’s parents because of fear that they would not approve her marrying someone from a less well-to-do family (EHH). The wedding took place on a Tuesday in May, a strange day of the week for a wedding, until one realizes that the date (May 24) and location for the ceremony duplicated that of Felicitas’s father’s marriage to Ida Pokorny riously ill-paid. The position of extraordinary professor must be distinguished from the mere title that was just honorary and regularly conferred on lecturers after a few years of teaching.

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thirteen years earlier. Slightly less than a year later, on May 8, 1899, their first child, Friedrich August Edler von Hayek, was born. According to the entry in the parish register of St. Rochus in Landstraße, the birth took place, as was common at the time, in the presence of a midwife in a room in their flat in the Messenhausergasse at the corner of Landstraßer Hauptstraße.9 He was—to their great delight—the first grandchild born to both grandparents. Friedrich was baptized almost a month later with his greatgrandparents August and Sidonie Mayerhofer acting as godparents. His mother immediately bestowed on her son the nickname of Fritz, an act he always resented: “there are few Christian names which I like less than my own . . . it reminds me too much of the Fritz, the Prussian emperor” (Hayek 1983a, 397). Using the familiar Austrian diminutive of Fritzerl, Felicitas kept track of the first year of his life in a fictitious diary, “Fritzerls Tagebuch,” written by her but from her son’s perspective.10 At 4,030 grams (8 pounds, 14 ounces) and 55 centimeters (21½ inches) he was a big newborn, and he kept growing: by the end of the year Fritzerl’s weight had increased to 10 kilograms (22 pounds). Fortunately, in the first months he was spared the usual diseases that for so many proved fatal. “Fritzerls Tagebuch” records family gatherings, gifts received, and other minutia of daily life, as well as more important events like the arrival of Fritz’s brother Heinz in October 1900. The diary ends—somewhat abruptly, so possibly some part of it is missing—with Christmas 1900. Perhaps with two children the idea of a diary just for Fritzerl made less sense. The diary does provide some insights into the rhythms of their family life. In the two years covered, 1899/1900, Fritz and his mother, accompanied part of the time by August, spent their summers mostly with Felicitas’s relatives in Hochenegg. There they were welcomed by great-grandmother Johanna Stallner and by a host of uncles and aunts.11 There were also excursions to the Styrian resort of Gaishorn, later a favorite location for them to spend the summer holidays, and regular visits, during spring and fall, to the Jurascheks’ small summer house in Neuwaldegg on the outskirts of Vienna. Fritz was presented early on to various family friends, including the Magg family with their son Walter, who was slightly older than Fritz, and also the distantly related Eisenmenger-Bitterlich family. There he met 9. See the register of 1899, 51, no. 151. 10. The “Tagebuch” may be found in FAHP 171. 11. Hayek would later recount that he felt “burdened by old grandaunts” and that the one person whom he knew best among the Stallner relatives was his granduncle Moritz Stallner, “a typical country gentleman,” who had represented Cilli at the Styrian Diet (Bartley interviews, Feb 9, 1983; Hayek erroneously speaks of him representing the “Salzburg Diet”).

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“great-aunt” Lisi (Elisabeth) Fleischhacker, her daughters (Lilli Eisenmenger and Grete Bitterlich), and their respective daughters (Gerterl and Lieserl). In September 1900, Grete gave birth to Helene (Lenerl) Bitterlich, who was to become a frequent companion in Fritz’s youth and, eventually, his second wife. Given that Hayek as an adult often referred to Lenerl simply as his cousin, it should be emphasized that she was a very distant cousin, indeed, one of the third degree, that is, she and Fritz shared one pair of great-greatgrandparents. The common ancestor was one Anton Groppenberger (1761– 1831), ennobled with the predicate “von Bergenstamm,” and the Hayek and Bitterlich families derived from two of his daughters, Sidonie and Wilhelmine, respectively. Sidonie married a Mayerhofer and was the one great-grandmother present at Fritz’s baptism in 1899. From Wilhelmine the line of ancestry would run through her daughter Elisabeth, who married a Fleischhacker, and their daughter Margarete, who married Friedrich Bitterlich, an officer of the Austrian army, and these were Lenerl’s parents. The Bitterlich family was prominent in Vienna’s artistic circles. Friedrich’s father Eduard and his brother Hans Bitterlich, as well as Eduard’s brother-in-law August Eisenmenger, contributed to Vienna’s Ringstraße architecture, as both painters and sculptors. Fritz (and perhaps as important, Lenerl) would have been reminded of this often, just living in Vienna. For example, on a walk through the inner city through the famous Volksgarten, a public park, one would encounter the monument of Empress Elisabeth, created by Lenerl’s uncle Hans Bitterlich