[lbo-talk] Hayek, reading suggestions

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Apr 7 12:59:53 PDT 2008


"So Gombrich and the UK influenced the US art history view, which got handed down to me. In effect this paranoid stupidity obscured or censored most of the French, German, and Italian art history works."

Count yourself lucky. Gombrich's books on art history are excellent. Was there any good Hegel-inspired art history? It seems doubtful to me. One imagines the empirical material being dragged in after the event to justify the logistical pyrotechnics. Certainly Georg Lukacs' literary criticism (unlike his philosophy) was pretty worthless.

As to Hayek, I found his New Studies essays revealing, as he gets his hands dirty. One of them is a polemic against democracy, another boasts of having converted Denis Healey (Labour chancellor, c. 1976) to monetarism, but anticipating a struggle against 'grassroots Keynesianism' - ten years later, his acolyte Margaret Thatcher did just that in the miners' strike. I thought the Fatal Conceit exploded his commitment to rational thought, and told a free market champion so - but he said, intriguingly, that by the time it was written Hayek was not all there, and it was in truth written by the Editor WW Bartleby the third (or something like that).



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