Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Naomi Beck. Hayek and the Evolution of Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 208 pp.

Review by Sarah Comyn

19 March 2019

In a review of Friedrich August von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), George Orwell cautioned “that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.”[1] Examining the influence of evolutionary science on Hayek’s economic and philosophical thinking, Naomi Beck’s Hayek and the Evolution of Capitalism (2018) provides an insightful and sustained critique of the origins and development of Hayek’s unrelenting support of the free market and the benefits of competition he believed were inherent to it. Part of a renewed scholarly interest in Hayek and the philosophy of science, this book also participates in broader conversations about theories of evolutionary economics.

Although Beck provides an account of Hayek’s eclectic early academic interests and his economic and philosophical training (including the waxing and waning of Ludwig von Mises’s influence), the focus of this book is on Hayek’s post-WWII work, beginning with his publication of The Sensory Order in 1952. Beck is nonetheless determined to show that Hayek’s later theory of cultural evolution is not a theoretical break with his earlier work but a “final point of a long trajectory” in Hayek’s thought and his “most substantial contribution to the attack on socialism” (p. 17).

The book covers an impressive range of philosophers, evolutionary scientists, economists, and social theorists—including Adam Smith, Auguste Comte, Karl Popper, Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, and Richard Dawkins––and is concerned as much with Hayek’s philosophical “misreadings” as it is with the development of his cultural evolutionary theory. Consequently, the complexity and density of the interwoven arguments can occasionally feel burdensome to the reader. Nevertheless, Beck’s fine-grained analysis provides astute readings of Hayek, as is the case when she demonstrates how Hayek’s use of a botanical analogy about “garden plots” (one also favored by Darwin) allows him to discredit a reliance on statistical techniques to explain complex phenomena, which he eventually incorporates into a critique of macroeconomics.

Beck is not the first scholar to point out the inherent contradictions and “contorted thinking” (p. 8) involved in Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution and its relationship to his economic theories, but rather than attempt to reconcile these tensions as others have done, Beck elucidates their political and social consequences.[2] Beck’s critique is sharpest in her explication of the practical implications of Hayek’s evolutionary theory as they apply to issues of social justice, law, governance, and the increasing threat imposed by the Anthropocene in chapter 4. Addressing the Panglossian tendencies of Hayek’s evolutionary theory, Beck’s study opens up new opportunities for the engagement with and critique of Hayek’s substantial corpus by intellectual and economic historians, social scientists, and evolutionary biologists.[3]

[1]George Orwell, “Review of The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek, etc.,” review of The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek, in As I Please, 1943–1945: The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston, Mass., 1970), p. 118. 

[2]See Viktor J. Vanberg, “Darwinian Paradigm, Cultural Evolution, and Human Purposes: On F. A. Hayek’s Evolutionary View of the Market,” Journal of Evolutionary Economics 24 (Jan. 2014): 35–57.

[3]For an account of Hayek’s Panglossian inclinations, see Andy Denis, “Was Hayek a Panglossian Evolutionary Theorist? A Reply to Whitman,” Constitutional Political Economy 13 (Sept. 2002): 275–85.