Friedrich Hayek, like it or not, is embedded deep into LSE’s culture. From his appearance on our reading lists to rumours over potential statues, the approaching 28th anniversary of Hayek’s death gives us an opportunity to journey deep into the heart of Hayek. The Beaver sat down with Max Marlow, President of LSE’s Hayek Society, to discuss are Hayek’s ties to LSE, as well as issues concerning possible Hayekian influences on the tenures of Thatcher and Reagan. Probably the most shocking thing we found at the end of this trip, deep in the jungle of Max’s mind, was his love for LSE100.
[Beaver] So, Max, we’re nearing the 28th anniversary of Hayek’s death on March 23rd. There is also news of the Adam Smith Institute fundraising for a Hayek Statue at the corner of Lincoln’s Inn. In a November 2019 Beaver article, you were quoted saying that “the Hayek Society will be helping to fundraise and campaign to have this statue put up.” How has the fundraising and campaigning been carried out so far and, most importantly, when will I be able to have a picnic right by the statue of Friedrich Hayek?
[Max Marlow] LSE’s Hayek Society isn’t directly involved in the fundraising. Rather, we’re acting as auxiliaries in raising awareness on LSE’s campus and amongst other interested groups on London University campuses. Given the disruption of COVID-19, the statue’s construction is currently delayed. I’m just hoping we can have it up as soon as possible.
[B] If you were to give that classic American ‘elevator pitch’ regarding what Hayek’s legacy would be, how would you sell it to me?
[MM] Hayek’s legacy is one of exponential economic growth in every hemisphere. His Nobel Prize-winning ideas on knowledge and the price signal have changed the way markets interact, letting us know that the individual is far superior at making decisions than a centralised body who only sees out-of-date statistics and conjectures.
[B] We talk today about the trend of increasing political polarisation- take your Trumps, Hillarys’, Corbyns and Boris’. Could you place Hayek along that spectrum?
[MM] At present, he’s definitely not. If anything, someone he could be close to is Boris, but even then that’s way too much of a push, because Boris is very much about high tax rates, nationalising certain the industries, let’s say Flybe, and he’s about investing massively in infrastructure projects that aren’t primarily good ideas, not very well thought out. There’s also the cruel and unnecessary deportation of those fifty Jamaicans, that was just disgusting, Hayek would have completely disagreed with that. But you can’t put him anywhere near Trump, because Trump’s very much nationalistic, he’s very much ‘close borders’, he’s very- ‘putting tariffs on foreign economies’, he’s very nebulous. His ideas seem to be everywhere but at the same time very fused together with one core ideology. That’s basically Burkeian classical liberalism.
[B] He’s also traditionally associated with figures such as Reagan and Thatcher.
[MM] Yes, so the reason that Hayek is very much associated with Reagan and Thatcher is because he was at LSE in the 1940s and 50s where he wrote a book called The Road to Serfdom, which became very popular as the post-war consensus solidified. A lot of people were unhappy with Keynes’ very heavy interventionist monetary policies, and they picked up the book and they started looking both at communism and what was the fallout of fascism. Hayek fused these ideas together. Thatcher was one of the people to pick it up, so was Reagan.
When Hayek was at the LSE, there was a guy called Anthony Fisher who was actually an RAF pilot. Fisher wanted to try and influence with these ideas- he was very much influenced by Hayek. So he came to Hayek at the Economics department and they discussed what to do, and Hayek said to Anthony Fisher- don’t go into politics, start up a think tank. So Fisher went away, and then set up the Institute for Economic Affairs, and then he went over to America after that and set up the Atlas Foundation. Reagan and Thatcher drew a lot of their ideas from Think Tanks so you can see Hayek’s influence there also.
[B] Aside from ‘The Road to Serfdom’, Hayek’s other books aren’t that well known. Is there an issue with Hayek in the sense that you can see a ‘freedom-propagating’ YouTube video, you can access Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Zizek, but Hayek is more of a nebulous intellectual figure who is harder to grasp?
[MM] The problem with Hayek was that he thought in German, and therefore he wrote in German, so whenever you read Hayek it’s very broad. It’s a very extended form essay on every page. I remember reading Hayek for the first time at the age of sixteen and having to reread the page because there would be no punctuation, there would be just weird words stuck together. Compare that to his best friend who was Karl Popper here at LSE who thought in English: he wrote beautiful prose that’s very easy to follow.
Hayek also just wasn’t very good on TV, and he was definitely more of a thinker than a speaker. Related to that thought, the better speaker would be Milton Friedman: he could give a talk to a room full of left-wing college students, and even find some of them applauding him at the end, saying that was brilliant, because it was very well thought out, it had a lot of great ideas, great metaphors. So Hayek was certainly the ideas man behind classical liberalism in that sense.
[B] Could you tell us about the sort of types of people who attend the Hayek society events?
[MM] Sure. So under my presidency I’ve been really trying to pull Hayek away from outrage culture, which has really irritated me.
[B] What do you mean by outrage culture?
[MM] The Hayek Society has previously invited ludicrous figures like Godfrey Bloom to speak at LSE, and I’m thinking ‘why would you invite that bigot to come and speak at LSE? What does that do for the look of your society?’So instead we’ve been looking at more intellectual figures. So we had on Tuesday Dr Madsen Pirie who founded the Adam Smith Institute come for an event. He knew Hayek personally because Hayek was the chair of academic affairs at the Adam Smith Institute. He came and he talked about knowing Hayek’s ideas- his relevance to the world. We had a couple of PHD students , a couple of masters students, and we had a few undergrads: some from the committee, and other people who just came along including a Kings student who’s studying a masters in medicine. It’s a very eclectic mix of people because Hayek’s ideas aren’t an ideology.
[B] In terms of Hayek’s thoughts on freedom, and his accessibility across the political spectrum, do you think there’s a left-wing strand in Hayek at all?
[MM] Yes, there’s a whole quadrant of the political compass which is left libertarianism. So there is a bit of a left-wing strand, and it is about challenging the status quo. Hayek doesn’t like conservatism. He wrote an essay at the end of one of his books ‘Law, Liberty and Legislation.’ He wrote ‘Why I’m not a conservative’ because he doesn’t believe in this weird status quo of authority pushing down on people for the sake of it, or because it’s got historical precedence. A lot of this is about liberating people who before would have been under cahoots with the state. You’ve got to remember; he grew up in Austria during the height of the most depraved identarian regime- Hayek really hated that – he brought people into his circle that were Jewish. He was very close to people like Sigmund Freud, and all those sorts of interesting intellectuals. Hayek brought them in because they were heterodox. That is probably the left-wing in him. It’s the heterodoxy- pushing back against the status quo. And I really like that about Hayek. It’s a nice rebellious streak.
[B] What would you say to someone who has never read Hayek before, maybe a first-year Government student fresh into politics, and they see the legacy of Hayek being Thatcher, being Reagan, political figures who they may be opposed to? How do you convince them that he is otherwise?
[MM] One thing to note is that Hayek never met Ronald Reagan. But even at that point, Reagan’s ideas concerning Neoliberalism were somewhat nebulous: Reagan was quite Neoconservative in many ways- look at his views on Pol Pot for example. So it’s hard to pin down a certain bit of policy that one may find reprehensible and then put it on Hayek because you know, they sort of share some elements. But one may always look at the miners’ strike in the UK. The way you would think about that with Hayek. What Hayek would say about that is ‘is it fair on other people in the economy to be supporting a business which wouldn’t actually hold up in any other economic circumstance?’. The thing about the unions was that they were holding the country very much to ransom over their demands, and to look at it one must weigh up- to look at a miner and then a baker from Brighton and then say ‘actually are those two people equal, or is one more equal than the other?’ and Hayek would’ve said actually they’re both equal.
Hayek liked unions. Unions are a form of voluntarism. No one is forcing you to go to a union. The thing Hayek didn’t like about unions was that they would picket places, and they would use violence against other miners who tried to go and make a living off their families.
If I was a first-year student looking at that, it would have to be more of a nuanced understanding of Hayek. The direction I’d want to go in is fairness. The system should be fair to the person who doesn’t even know who the miners are, and doesn’t know where his coal comes from, but still has his lights turned out because of some disputes, and also fair to the miners who were struggling to make ends meet, especially under such dire economic conditions.
[B] You have Hayek’s legacy written in books, in articles, in periodicals. What use is there in connecting those policies to Hayek’s legacy?
[MM] Hayek was a fan of the Virginia School of political economy, which states that actors within government will try and manipulate ideas in order to gain their own mandate. Bureaucracies will try and take ideas whenever they see a problem. Hayek certainly had this problem in the eighties with Thatcher. Thatcher needed to take these ideas from this obscure Austrian and transform them into realpolitik. A lot of those times that doesn’t match up because they’ve got contingency needs, they’ve got problems with foreign policy. It is hard to translate an idea straight from the Constitution of Liberty and immediately transplant it over into policy.
[B] All this talk about realpolitik and theory is giving me LSE100 flashbacks. Tell me Max, was I dozing before this interview when you were professing your love for ‘The LSE Course’?
[MM] No. I truly love it.
[B] I see. Where does the affinity stem from?
[MM] What I like about LSE is that it’s so interdisciplinary. One of the reasons that I’m sort of a supporter of Decolonising LSE is because it brings in so much more of the literature to students.
In order to get a full view of academia, you need to bring in other thinkers and other ideas, other writers, and other cultures and smash it all into one. This doesn’t just apply to LSE100, but also to history, politics, sociology, economics- you need much more ideas rather than the old school sort of stuff.
On this Hayek, would’ve said that you should have enough information as is possible to truly derive your ideas. I would never have come across Hayek, if I had not read Fukuyama or Runciman- a guy from Cambridge. After reading Hayek, I found him completely transformative. Not only this, but I could compare his work to other books I had read: I could use Hayek to refute all the other thinkers, and I could use Orwell to refute Hayek, and orient my thoughts that way. That is why the LSE100 idea is so good- it throws together all these ideas on you, and lets you make the decision.
[B] Max Marlow, thank you very much.
[MM] Thank you, and don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for a Hayek statue.
