Hayek and the Institutional Turn in Political Economy

Throughout his career, F. A. Hayek made incisive contributions to the disciplines of technical economics, legal theory, psychology, political theory, and political economy. With such a range of scholarship, it may be difficult to know where to start with Hayek. Is it possible to tie these various strands of scholarship together? 

In this essay, we propose that a commonality can be located. Specifically, we focus on Hayek’s works that touch on political economy and social theory—most notably The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960). We argue that Hayek’s work in political economy can fruitfully be read through the lens of epistemic institutionalism—a term developed by Peter Boettke in his 2018 book on Hayek. Boettke (2018) posits that the common thread underlying all of Hayek’s work was his emphasis on the institutional environment within which learning, knowledge generation, knowledge communication, and social cooperation are allowed to thrive. We show that this rendering is especially relevant for The Constitution of Liberty and that, upon the 65th anniversary of its publication, the book still has many insights to offer political economists as well as challenges for modern critics of liberalism that
have yet to be met.

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