From Foreign Affairs comes a review by Sheri Berman of Jerry Z. Muller’s The Mind and the Market (Knopf, 2002): “Indeed, perhaps the only defender of capitalism whom Muller finds largely unmoved by the critiques is the twentieth-century Austrian liberal Friedrich Hayek (which undoubtedly explains a large part of his contemporary appeal). Hayek had little sympathy for talk of virtue or “higher ends” and was skeptical of any state role in controlling the market or in fostering so-called public goods. Instead, he praised precisely what was often criticized, the emergence of a society in which individuals were as free as possible to do as they pleased and states served merely as ‘pieces of utilitarian machinery intended to help individuals in the fullest development of their individual personality.’ But Hayek is the exception that proves the rule, for he was honest enough to recognize that the libertarianism he championed would not necessarily be very popular because it would be too personally and socially destabilizing for many to handle. Rather than try to alleviate such concerns, however, he was content to suppress them and accept limitations on democracy in the process -- an aspect of his thinking that receives little attention from his admirers today.”
