Friedrich Hayek and his visits to Chile

F. A. Hayek took two trips to Chile, the first in 1977, the second in 1981. The visits were controversial. On the first trip he met with General Augusto Pinochet, who had led a coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. During his 1981 visit, Hayek gave interviews that were published in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio and in which he discussed authoritarian regimes and the problem of unlimited democracy. After each trip, he complained that the western press had painted an unfair picture of the economic situation under the Pinochet regime. Drawing on archival material, interviews, and past research, we provide a full account of this controversial episode in Hayek’s life

THE RADICAL CONSERVATISM OF FRANK H. KNIGHT

This article examines the most prominent interwar economist at the University of Chicago, Frank Knight, through the lens of a controversial 1932 lecture in which he exhorted his audience to vote Communist. The fact that he did so poses a historical problem: why did the premier American exponent of conservative economic principles appear to advocate a vote for radical change? This article argues that the speech is representative of Knight's deliberately paradoxical approach, in which he refused to praise markets without adding caveats about their substantial limitations, and expressed support for freedom of discussion alongside his skepticism of the public's capacity to exercise the privilege. In parsing these tensions, the article revises the conventional interpretation of Knight, illuminates the contested environment within which postwar free-market economics emerged, and reexamines a restrained defense of capitalism that has been largely forgotten in the subsequent years.</jats:p