Was Hayek's Last Book Written By Someone Else?

Liberty reports:

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) was among the greatest political and pure philosophers of the 20th century. His most famous work, "The Road to Serfdom," published in 1944, is an anti-socialist classic. His later works, "The Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty," are rightly considered permanent contributions to political philosophy. His works in pure philosophy, extending from "Economics and Knowledge" in 1936 through studies published in the 1940s through early 1980s, are permanent contributions to human understanding. Hayek's was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.


The state of his final work, "The Fatal Conceit," published in 1988, is something of a mystery. The degree of involvement by the work's editor, William Warren Bartley, is not commonly known, troubling many scholars. The first indication that something might be amiss in the published version came from Jeffrey Friedman, editor of Critical Review, in 1998. "In 1986," Friedman wrote, "I served as research assistant to W.W. Bartley . . . the 'editor' of the book . . . [T]he products of Bartley's labors were allegedly reviewed by Hayek. . . . The extent of Hayek's supervision of the project . . . is called into question by the appearance in the book, verbatim, of passages I submitted to Bartley as suggestions for how Hayek might consider updating his critique of constructivist rationalism. Among these are . . . passages mentioning Marcuse, Habermas, and Foucault. Since Hayek had not previously referred to these figures in print, I was surprised to learn, upon the appearance of the book, that he would have accepted without alteration discussions of their work written by someone he had never met."

No word yet from Doris Kearns Goodwin.