SIR WALDRON SMITHERS AND THE MUDDLE OF THE TORY MIDDLE

Waldron Smithers was highly critical of Attlee's post‐war Labour government and placed much weight on Hayek having dedicated The Road to Serfdom to ‘the Socialists of all parties’. Accordingly, Smithers was assiduous in combating what he saw as a dangerous turn towards middle‐way policy within his own party in the late 1940s.     

SIR WALDRON SMITHERS AND THE LONG WALK TO FINCHLEY

The television drama ‘Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley’ has Sir Waldron Smithers strongly objecting to Thatcher's selection as a Conservative candidate prior to the 1950 General Election. It is more likely that Smithers would have found her a kindred ideological spirit: both shared an anti‐socialist commitment and admiration for Hayek's ‘The Road to Serfdom’.     

Can a Dictator Turn a Constitution into a Can-opener? F.A. Hayek and the Alchemy of Transitional Dictatorship in Chile

Commenting on the Pinochet regime, Friedrich Hayek famously claimed in 1981 that he would prefer a ‘liberal’ dictator to ‘democratic government lacking liberalism.’ Hayek's defense of a transitional dictatorship in Chile was not an impromptu response. In late 1960, in a little known BBC radio broadcast, Hayek suggested that a dictatorial regime may be able to facilitate a transition to stable limited democracy. While Hayek's comments about Pinochet have generated much controversy, this paper neither provides a blanket condemnation of his views (he did not advocate dictatorship as a first-best ‘state of the world’) nor tries to excuse his failure to condemn the Pinochet junta's human rights abuses, but instead provides a critical assessment of Hayek's implicit model of transitional dictatorship.     

Relaxing benevolence: public choice, socialist calculation, and planner self-interest

The Austrian calculation argument suggests that inability to engage in economic calculation worsened outcomes in socialist states. We suggest that this is hardly the case. When Austrian assumptions of benevolence are relaxed, inability to engage in economic calculation prevents the non-benevolent planner from fully extracting all available surplus from the citizenry. Consequently, when planners are non-benevolent, calculation ceases to be a relevant argument against the desirability of central planning; its normative force reverses absent benevolent planners. JEL Code P0, P16, P50     

The “Vanity of the Philosopher”: Analytical Egalitarianism,Associationist Psychology,and Eugenic Remaking?

A bstract .   These comments explore the relationship between analytical egalitarianism, race-blind theorizing, and associationist psychology. Associationist psychology, though making an implicit appearance in Vanity , was central to the egalitarian analysis provided by James Mill and John Stuart Mill. Indeed, associationist considerations lay at the heart of Mill's race-blind analysis of cottier tenure, and his exchange with Thomas Carlyle over the "Negro Question." These comments also note some intriguing comparisons between the debate over eugenics and the debate over socialist calculation.     

The Income and Transactions Velocities of Money

Abstract

Is Socialism a possibility after Hayek? Ted Burczak—drawing upon a variety of heterodox traditions—provides a provocative answer.