“The Agony of Eros” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

This short book, by Han, is a meditation on the conflict he sees between modernity and eros. Han begins, “The crisis of love does not derive from too many others so much as from the erosion of the Other. This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self…. Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego…. Eros—erotic desire—conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the atopia, indeed the utopia, of the wholly Other.”

Modernity has become what Han describes as a “burnout culture.” He decries the sterilization, the lack of differentiation, the consumption, and the fetishization of materialism. “Today, more and more, dignity, decency, and propriety—matters of maintaining distance—are disappearing. That is, the ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost…. Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings…. Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.” Han suggests that modernity lives in a constant present. It is unable to reach back into the past or push forward to a future, because it is stuck in banality. “Today, the future is shedding the negativity of the Other and positivizing itself an optimized present that excludes all disaster…. Memory is not an organ of simple restitution, by means of which one makes the past present again. In memory, what has been is constantly changing. It is a progressive, living, narrative process.”

Han discusses how eros necessitates the change of the ego upon first contact with the Other, “According to Ficino, love is the “most serious disease of all”; a “change,” it “takes away from a man that which is his own and changes him into the nature of another.” Such injury and transformation constitute its negativity. Today, through the increasing positivization and domestication of love, it is disappearing entirely. One stays the same and seeks only the confirmation of oneself in the Other.” Han stays on the theme of the transformation of the Self through eros, but with a Hegelian twist, “Love is an absolute end unto itself. It is absolute because it presupposes death, the surrender of the self. The “true essence of love consists in giving up consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another.”” Han continues, “As an absolute end, love passes through death…. The reconciled return to oneself out of the Other means anything but violent appropriation of the Other…. Rather it is the gift of the Other—preceded by the surrender, the giving up, of one’s own self.” Han returns to Ficino, “When Ficino writes that the lover loses himself in another self—and yet, in this same waning oblivion, “recovers” and even “possesses” himself—this possession is the gift of the Other. The priority of the Other distinguishes the power of Eros from the violence of Ares. When power is a relation of domination, I assert myself against and oppose the Other by subjugating him or her to myself. In contrast, the power (Macht) or eros implies powerlessness and unconsciousness (Ohn-Macht); instead of affirming myself, I lose myself in (or for) the Other, who then rights me again: “The ruler possesses others through himself, but the lover takes possession of himself through another, and the farther each of the lovers is from himself, the nearer he is to the other, and though he is dead in himself, he comes to life again in the other.”” Han ends, “Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death…. Faithfulness is a form of decision and conclusion that introduces an eternity into time.”

Han finishes by returning to the theme of the duality of eros, with a riff on Badiou, “Love is a “Two scene,” a theater meant for a duo, to paraphrase Badiou. Interrupting the isolated perspective of the One, it makes the world arise anew from the vantage point of the Other, or Difference. Love, as an experience and an encounter is marked by the negativity of upheaval: “It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ [habiter] my situation.” The “event” is a moment of “truth”; it introduces a new and entirely different way of being into the habit of habiter, the situation at hand. It gives rise to something that circumstances cannot account for. It interrupts the Same in favor of the Other…. This transcendental fidelity may be understood as a universal quality of eros…. Love as an event—as a “Two scene”—is dehabitualizing and denarcissifying. It generates a “rupture,” a “hole” in the order of the Habitual and the Same…. Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving.”

“Menexenus” by Plato (translated by Paul Ryan)

This dialogue was known in antiquity as the “Funeral Oration” and is mainly comprised of a speech that Socrates claims was handed down to him by Aspasia, Pericles’ renown mistress. Socrates tells Menexenus that he takes no responsibility for its contents, themes, and veracity. Still, Menexenus has his doubts about who is the speech’s real author. The oration concerns Athens’ war dead and the themes of courage, virtue, glory, and heroism. Socrates begins, “Indeed, dying in war looks like a splendid fate in many ways…. They became brave by being sons of brave fathers. Let us, therefore, extoll first their noble birth, second their rearing and education. After that, let us put on view the deeds they performed, showing that they were noble and worthy of their birth and upbringing.”

Socrates proceeds to recount not only Athens’ recent war heroes, but first goes back, past the Peloponnesian War even, to the ancient wars with Persia. He begins with Athens’ most illustrious ancestors. “Those men were fathers not only of our bodies but of our freedom, ours and that of everyone on this continent.” He then continues to boast about Athens, “The opinion gained currency that our city could never be defeated in war, not even by all mankind. And that belief was true. We were overcome by our own quarrels, not by other men; by them we remain undefeated to this day, but we conquered ourselves and suffered defeat at our won hands.” After all, the more recent loss to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and the Civil War of the Thirty Tyrants have to be explained away.

Finally, Socrates returns to the valor of the war dead and what the present generation of Athenians owe to their ancestors, “We must remember the fallen, and every man, just as in war, must encourage their descendants not to desert the ranks of their ancestors and not to yield to cowardice and fall back…. Free to live on ignobly, we prefer to die nobly rather than subject you and your descendants to reproach and bring disgrace on our fathers and all our ancestors. We consider the life of one who has brought disgrace on his own family no life…. Do whatever you do to the accompaniment of valor, knowing that without it all possessions and all ways of life are shameful and base. For neither does wealth confer distinction on one who possesses it with cowardice (the riches of a man like that belong to another, not himself) nor do bodily beauty and strength, when they reside in a worthless and cowardly man, seem to suit him…. All knowledge cut off from rectitude and the rest of virtue has the look of low cunning, not wisdom…. For a man with self-respect nothing is more disgraceful than to make himself honored not through himself, but through his ancestors’ glory…. For that man’s life is best arranged for whom all, or nearly all, the things that promote happiness depend on himself.”

“The Gnostic Religion” by Hans Jonas

Jonas was a Jewish philosopher and, perhaps, the second most famous student of Heidegger’s. This book was originally his German dissertation, which he later fleshed out, and then, again, briefly updated as more of the Nag-Hammadi discovery was translated. However, most of Jonas’ history of the Gnostic movement does not rely on the more recent discoveries. Nonetheless, this book is a thorough examination of Gnostic belief and its opposition to contemporary standard Christianity, neo-Platonism, paganism, and Jewish thought. Jonas begins, “The name “Gnosticism,” which has come to serve as a collective heading for a manifoldness of sectarian doctrines appearing within and around Christianity during its critical first centuries, is derived from gnosis, the Greek word for “knowledge.” The emphasis on knowledge as the means for attainment of salvation, or even as the form of salvation itself, and the claim to the possession of this knowledge in one’s own articulate doctrine, are common features of the numerous sects…. The Church Fathers considered Gnosticism as essentially a Christian heresy.”

For Gnosticism, knowledge does not quite have its secular meaning. Knowledge “refers to objects which we nowadays should call those of faith rather than of reason…. Gnosis meant pre-eminently knowledge of God, and from what we have said about the radical transcendence of the deity it follows that “knowledge of God” is knowledge of something naturally unknowable and therefore itself not a natural condition…. It is closely bound up with revelatory experience, so that reception of the truth either through sacred and secret lore or through inner illumination replaces rational argument and theory…. “Knowledge” is not just theoretical information about certain things but is itself, as a modification of the human condition, charged with performing a function in bringing about salvation. Thus gnostic “knowledge” has an eminently practical aspect. The ultimate “object” of knowledge is God.”

Jonas relates how man fits into gnostic metaphysics, “Reduced to ultimate principles, his origin is twofold: mundane and extra-mundane….Through his body and his soul man is a part of the world and subjected to the heimarmene. Enclosed in the soul is the spirit, or “pneuma” (called also the “spark”), a portion of the divine substance from beyond which has fallen into the world…. The radical nature of the dualism determines that of the doctrine of salvation. As alien as the transcendent God is to “this world” is the pneumatic self in the midst of it. The goal of gnostic striving is the release of the “inner man” from the bonds of the world and his return to his native realm of light… The transcendent God is unknown in the world and cannot be discovered from it; therefore revelation is needed…. The Greek meaning of psyche, with all its dignity, did not suffice to express the new conception of a principle transcending all natural and cosmic associations that adhered to the Greek concept. The term pneuma serves in Greek Gnosticism generally as the equivalent of the expression for the spiritual “self,” for which Greek, unlike some oriental languages, lacked an indigenous word…. The discovery of this transcendent inner principle in man and the supreme concern about its destiny is the very center of the gnostic religion.”

The Gnostics had two main schools, Iranian and Syrian. These two schools principally differed in their conception of dualism. “The Gnostics were the first speculative “theologians” in the new age of religion superseding classical antiquity…. [Gnosticism] comprised as main tenets the ideas of an antidivine universe, of man’s alienness within it, and of the acosmic nature of the godhead…. Two types of system, called here for short (and without undue commitment to a theory of actual genetics) the Iranian and the Syrian, were evolved to explain essentially the same facts of a dislocated metaphysical situation—both “dualistic”…. The Iranian type, in a gnostic adaptation of Zoroastrian doctrine starting from a dualism of two opposed principles, has mainly to explain how the original Darkness came to engulf elements of the Light: i.e., it describes the world-drama as a war of changing fortunes…. The Syrian speculation undertakes the more ambitious task of deriving dualism itself, and the ensuing predicament of the divine in the system of creation, from the one and undivided source of being…. This inner divine “devolution” ends in the decadence of complete self-alienation that is this world…. Both dramas start with a disturbance in the heights; in both, the existence of the world marks a discomfiture of the divine and a necessary, in itself undesirable, means of its eventual restoration; in both, the salvation of man is that of the deity itself.”

Later, Jonas goes back to refining a conception of gnostic knowledge, “We have found “gnosis” to mean one of these things: knowledge of the secrets of existence as related in the gnostic myth, and these comprise the divine history from which the world originated, man’s condition in it, and the nature of salvation; then, more intellectually, the elaboration of these tenets into coherent speculative systems; then, more practically, knowledge of the “way” of the soul’s future ascent and of the right life preparing for this event; and, most technically or magically, knowledge of the sacraments, effective formulas, and other instrumental means by which the passage and liberation can be assured…. The mystical gnosis theou—direct beholding of the divine reality—is itself an earnest of the consummation to come. It is transcendence become immanent…. The ecstatic experience exhibits the double-edged character of the true eschaton of eschatological transcendental religion, which it draws—illegitimately, as we think—into the range of temporal life and the possibilities open to it…. It is this transposition of eschatology into the inwardness which yields the surpassing concept of gnosis.”

Jonas touches again on the nature of man in the cosmos, “This elevation—whether going that far or not—of ‘Man’ to a transmundane deity, prior and superior the creator of the universe, or, the assigning of that name to such a deity, is one of the most significant traits of gnostic theology…. That terrestrial man can identify his innermost being (“spirit,” “light,” etc.) with this supracosmic power, can therefore despise his cosmic oppressors and count on his ultimate triumph over them—and it becomes visible that the doctrine of the god Man, and in the creation story specifically: the humiliation of the demiurge in his name, mark the distinctly revolutionary aspect of gnosticism on the cosmic plane.”

Finally, Jonas circles back to gnostic dualism, “It is on this primary human foundation of a passionately felt experience of self and world, that the formulated dualistic doctrines rest. The dualism is between man and the world, and concurrently between the world and God…. Primarily would then be the feeling of an absolute rift between man and that in which he finds himself lodged—the world…. The divine is alien to the world and has neither part nor concern in the physical universe…. The true god, strictly transmundane, is not revealed or even indicated by the world, and is therefore the Unknown, the totally Other, unknowable in terms of any worldly analogies…. In its cosmological aspect it states that the world as the creation not of God but of some inferior principle whose law it executes; and, in its anthropological aspect, that man’s inner self, the pneuma (“spirit” in contrast to “soul”=psyche) is not part of the world, of nature’s creation and domain, but is, within that world, as totally transcendent and as unknown by all worldly categories as its transmundane counterpart, the unknown God without…. But whoever has created the world, man does not owe him allegiance, nor respect for his work…. The world, then, is the product, and even the embodiment, of the negative of knowledge. What it reveals is unenlightened and therefore malignant force, proceeding from the spirit of self-assertive power, from the will to rule and coerce. The mindlessness of this will is the spirit of the world, which bears no relation to understanding and love. The laws of the universe are the laws of this rule, and not of divine wisdom.” Jonas ends by quoting a famous Valentinian school saying, “What makes us free is the knowledge of who we were, what we have become; where we were, wherein we have been thrown; whereto we speed, where-from we are redeemed; what is birth and what rebirth.”

“Babel: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution or The Necessity of Violence” by R.F. Kuang

Could this novel be called ahistorical fiction? It is a history of pre-Victorian England, the prelude to the Opium Wars, and a sci-fi thriller all wrapped into one. Despite its share of anti-colonial moralizing, it weaves a fast-paced tale centered around language, subjectivity, and translation. Not an easy task. This alternative history centers around the Translation Institute at Oxford. “I think the Literature Department are an indulgent lot…. See, the sad thing is, they could be the most dangerous scholars of them all, because they’re the ones who really understand languages—know how they live and breathe and how they can make our blood pump, or our skin prickle, with just a turn of phrase. But they’re too obsessed fiddling with their lovely images to bother with how all that living energy might be channeled into something far more powerful. I mean, of course, silver.”

In Kuang’s novel, the magic of translated pair words etched onto silver bars makes the British empire run. “Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace. Translation makes possible communication, which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation between foreign peoples that brings wealth and prosperity to all.” But for the empire to rule, it has to constantly expropriate all the wealth and knowledge from her dominions. “The newest, most powerful bars in use rely on Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic to work, but you’ll count less than a thousand bars in the countries where those languages are spoken, and then only in the homes of the wealthy and powerful…. This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism.”

Robin, a Chinese orphan rescued by a British professor from his shack in Canton in the midst of a plague, lives squarely with a foot in both worlds. “He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradiction threatened to break him.” His half-brother, Griffin, forewarned, “You’re lost, brother. You’re a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It’s gone.”

“Lysis” by Plato (translated by Stanley Lombardo)

In this dialogue, with an unnamed companion, Socrates recounts a discussion he has had with two noble youths, Lysis and Menexenus, at a wrestling school. The theme of their discussion was the meaning and nature of friendship. As often for Socrates, the discussion ends with no resolution, even to the definition of friendship. Instead, Socrates takes the group around in circles, poking at this and that aspect of friendship. At first, the definition seems so simple, as Socrates addresses the two boys, “And friends have everything in common, as the saying goes; so in this respect the two of you won’t differ, that is, if what you said about being friends is true.”

At the outset, Socrates discloses, “You know how it is, everybody is different: one person wants to own horses, another dogs, another wants money, and another fame. Well, I’m pretty lukewarm about those things, but when it comes to having friends I’m absolutely passionate, and I would rather have a good friend than the best quail or gamecock known to man, and, I swear by Zeus above, more than any horse or dog. There’s no doubt in my mind, by the Dog, that I would rather possess a friend than all Darius’ gold, or even than Darius himself. That’s how much I value friends and companions.”

After leading the boys around for a bit, Socrates proposes, “Those who are already wise no longer love wisdom, whether they are gods or men. Nor do those love it who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid man loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don’t know. The upshot is that those who are bad do not, and neither do those who are good…. We have discovered for sure what is a friend and what it is a friend to. For we maintain that in the soul and in the body and everywhere, that which is neither good nor bad itself is, by the presence of evil, a friend to the good.”

Not so fast. Later Socrates asks, “Can it really be, as we were just saying, that desire is the cause of friendship, and that what desires is a friend to that which it desires, and is so whenever it does so? And that what we were saying earlier about being a friend was all just chatter…. A thing desires what it is deficient in…. And the deficient is a friend to that in which it is deficient…. And it becomes deficient where something is taken away from it…. Then it is what belongs to oneself, it seems, that passionate love and friendship and desire are directed towards…. And if you two are friends with each other, then in some way you naturally belong to each other…. And if one person desires another, my boys, or loves him passionately, he would not desire him or love him passionately or as a friend unless he somehow belonged to his beloved either in his soul or in some characteristic, habit, or aspect of his soul…. What belongs to us by nature has shown itself to us as something we must love.” In the end, Socrates admits, “These people here will go away saying that we are friends of one another—for I count myself in with you—but what a friend is we have not yet been able to find out.”

“Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen

Austen’s first novel is certainly a romantic page-turner. The love triangles, furtive glances, hinted-at engagements, and reversals of affairs of the heart abound. Of the three eligible Dashwood daughters, Elinor is considered the most sensible. ““I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes,” said Elinor, “in a total misapprehension of character in some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why, or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.””

Austen is at her best with her sly asides on the character of her characters, especially when they are found wanting. The three Miss Dashwoods’ half-brother and sole heir to the family estate, John, was admittedly somewhat henpecked by his insatiable wife, Fanny, into being less than scrupulous with the financial care of his siblings. At times, he almost felt bad about it, “He had just compunction enough for having done nothing for his sisters himself, to be exceedingly anxious that everybody else should do a great deal; and an offer from Colonel Brandon, or a legacy from Mrs. Jennings, was the easiest means of atoning for his own neglect.”

However, it is through the character of Elenor that the most biting and insightful comments judging moral rectitude shine forth, “Her thoughts were silently fixed on the irreparable injury which too early an independence and its consequent habits of idleness, dissipation, and luxury, had made in the mind, the character, the happiness, of a man who, to every advantage of person and talents, united a disposition naturally open and honest, and a feeling, affectionate temper. The world had made him extravagant and vain—Extravagance and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish. Vanity, while seeking its own guilty triumph at the expense of another, had involved him in a real attachment, which extravagance, or at least its offspring necessity, had required to be sacrificed. Each faulty propensity in leading him to evil, had led him likewise to punishment. The attachment, from which against honour, against feeling, against every better interest he had outwardly torn himself, now, when no longer allowable, governed every thought.”

“Laches” by Plato (translated by Rosamond Kent Sprague)

This dialogue is on the Greek concept of andreia, literally meaning manliness, but most often translated by moderns as courage. Socrates and his interlocutors begin by seeking to define the concept and then to ruminate on its worth. As in many of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, there is no satisfactory conclusion to the debate. The pretext of the conversation is the proper manner for the general education of two particular noble youth and, only secondarily, the benefits of instilling courage in them. To that end, Socrates initially comments, “I think it is by knowledge that one ought to make decisions, if one is to make them well, and not by majority rule.”

Nicias gives due praise, of sorts, to Socrates’ methods, “Whoever comes into close contact with Socrates and associates with him in conversation must necessarily, even if he began by conversing about something quite different in the first place, keep on being led about by the man’s arguments until he submits to answering questions about himself concerning both his present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto. And when he does submit to this questioning, you don’t realize that Socrates will not let him go before he has well and truly tested every last detail…. I think that a man who does not run away from such treatment but is willing, according to the saying of Solon, to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings him wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.”

For Socrates, it is necessary to strip away the layers and to get down to the nature of the thing in itself—in this case, courage. “Whenever a man considers a thing for the sake of another thing, he is taking counsel about that thing for the sake of which he was considering, and not about what he was investigating for the sake of something else.” As is his want, Socrates leads the debate around in circles, questioning conclusions just previously agreed to and pushing the point of argument to all its extremes, “Now foolish daring and endurance was found by us to be not only disgraceful but harmful, in what we said earlier…. But now, on the contrary, we are saying that a disgraceful thing, foolish endurance, is courage.” There is no conclusion to this dialogue, but Socrates does propose, “In addition to courage, I call temperance and justice and everything else of this kind parts of virtue. Don't you?”

“Daniel Deronda” by George Eliot

Eliot’s final novel is a philosophical meditation on the nature of love, duty, and religion. The flawed heroine of the story is Gwendolen, a flighty beauty, who thinks a little too highly of herself, “That she was to be married some time or other she would have felt obliged to admit; and that her marriage would not be of a middling kind, such as most girls were contented with, she felt quickly, unargumentatively sure. But her thoughts never dwelt on marriage as a fulfillment of her ambition; the dramas in which she imagined herself a heroine were not wrought up to that close. To be very much sued or hopelessly sighed for as a bride was indeed an indispensable and agreeable guarantee of womanly power; but to become a wife and wear all the domestic fetters of that condition, was on the whole a vexatious necessity. Her observation of matrimony had inclined her to think it rather a dreary state.”

The eponymous hero of the novel Eliot describes thus, Daniel Deronda “was moved by an affectionateness such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing him to yield in ordinary details, while he had a certain inflexibility of judgment, an independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine…. True, when a young man has a fine person, no eccentricity of manners, the education of a gentleman, and a present income, it is not customary to feel a prying curiosity about his way of thinking, or his peculiar tastes.”

Wise beyond his years, Deronda ends up being a mentor, advisor, and confidante to more than one of his contemporaries. He advises one, “Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are, and how they are borne. Try to care about something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action—something that is good apart from the accidents of your own lot.” Later, he again advises, “That is the bitterest of all—to wear the yoke of our own wrongdoing. But if you submitted to that, as men submit to maiming or a lifelong incurable disease?—and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more effort towards a good that may do something to counterbalance the evil? One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course than is common.”

The plot of this novel allows Eliot wide breath for philosophical and psychological digressions on the nature of humanity, “In the wonderful mixtures of our nature there is a feeling distinct from that exclusive passionate love of which some men and women (by no means all) are capable, which yet is not the same with friendship, nor with a merely benevolent regard, whether admiring or compassionate: a man, say—for it is a man who is here concerned—hardly represents to himself this shade of feeling towards a woman more nearly than in the words, ‘I should have loved her, if —:’ the ‘if’ covering some prior growth in the inclinations, or else some circumstances which have made an inward prohibitory law as a stay against the emotions ready to quiver out of balance.” Later, Deronda, himself, concludes, “We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what we imagine might have been.”

“Hayek: A Life 1899-1950” by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger

This massive tome only takes us through half of Hayek’s life—through his time growing up in Austria, fighting in Italy during WWI, working for Mises in Vienna, moving to the LSE in London, his WWII years temporarily ensconced at Cambridge, and to his move to America at the University of Chicago. The book tightly balances an intellectual biography with the facts of his life—going into great detail of his friendships, his rivalries with colleagues, and his divorce to his first wife. The biography tries to weave how these personal events helped shape his work, his personality, his politics, and his ideology—and vice-versa. Quite early in his professional life, Hayek happily admitted, “In the sense of that Gladstonian liberalism, I am much more English than the English.”

One area of economics that first drew Hayek’s attention was the role of money in the modern economy. “His next step was to identify money as the root cause of cyclical movements, because money is able to disrupt the “tendency to equilibrium” prevalent in the static theory of a barter economy and lead to movements away from equilibrium. As he would later put it, money constitutes a “loose joint in the self-equilibrating apparatus of the price mechanism”…. Hayek drew on Wicksell by identifying the market for saving (or loanable funds) as the main channel where money may enter and disturb the economic system…. The equilibrium or natural rate of interest will be determined by the balance of the supply of (voluntary) saving and the demand for funds for investment purposes. If there are monetary disturbances, however, the prevailing money rate of interest may diverge from the rate in (intertemporal) equilibrium, e.g., when injections of money increase funds, or when money hoarding diverts the supply of funds…. This structure [of newly injected money], created by a depressed money rate of interest, cannot be sustained. Monetary expansion, then, will not produce an everlasting boom, and when the expansion eventually stops, crisis and depression follow. With regard to the sources of monetary expansion, while others like Mises put the blame on the misguided (“inflationist” or “cheap money”) attitude of the monetary authorities, Hayek pointed to the endogenous process of money creation by the banks, in particular in a system of fractional reserve banking.”

Another field that Hayek specialized in was the heterogenous structure of capital goods in an intertemporal system. “It appears that Hayek began his “capital project” almost immediately after arriving at LSE in 1931…. Hayek thought that the analysis in Prices and Production [his previous work] was deficient…. He quickly recognized that the one that he had used in his own book, a stages model that described the structure of production by means of an average period of production, was insufficient to the task…. The capital-theoretic foundations of Prices and Production were restricted to a special case well suited to an economy with variable capital (goods in process), but not to one with fixed capital, that is, durable capital goods generating a continuous flow of output over time. A more sophisticated capital theory would therefore need to allow for a truly general time structure of inputs and outputs…. This dynamic theory of capital would allow capital theory and monetary theory finally to be integrated and together be used to explain the nature and causes of the cyclical fluctuations that afflict market economies…. His [theory] would allow economists to “free themselves of the idea that capital is some homogenous mass, some given quantity of value, which will preserve its magnitude independently of the value of the real commodities of which it consists”…. He criticized the idea (which he attributed to Pigou, but a similar position can be found in Knight) that “there is a quantitatively determined fund of capital, which can be distributed and redistributed in any way between the different lines of production without changing its aggregate value”…. In his view, the capital stock is always composed of a collection of concrete capital goods, so that any adjustment would necessitate a change in the structure of capital, and the process of transition would thus depend on the capital structure inherited from the past…. The “maintenance of capital” must be accompanied by structural adaptations, in the course of which some capital goods would lose and others gain in value…. The capital structure is constantly evolving as the market continually provides new information. In that evolution, capital is rarely either so malleable as to be instantaneously transformable, or so permanent as to be incapable of being applied in a different production process.”

Hayek’s bete-noire was scientism, which he would address in his book Individualism and Economic Order. “The subtitle of the book, as well as the title of part 1, reveal the main theme: that the abuse and decline of reason was caused by hubris, by man’s overweening pride in the power of his own reason. This had been bolstered by the rapid advance and many successes of the natural sciences, which led to “scientism,” the idea that to make the social sciences truly scientific, all that was necessary was to apply within them the already proven methods of the natural sciences. Those infected by the scientistic prejudices believed that were the recipe followed, the scientific reengineering of society along more rational and just lines could begin…. Hayek saw scientism as arising from the intermingling of positivist and socialist ideas that themselves had their origins in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France.”

Hayek was self-aware enough to know that his economic methodology was going out of vogue. Nonetheless, he persisted against the Keynesian onslaught. “His decision to present the theory of production before consumer choice theory was “rather unusual.” In discussing his preferred approach, Hayek introduced the term “the economic calculus,” which might also be called “the pure logic of choice” (the phrase that he had used in his 1937 essay “Economics and Knowledge”) or “the theory of simple economy.” He explained that the economic calculus is used to analyze actions that follow from a single coherent plan. The plan may be that of an individual, a firm, a community, a nation, and so on…. [Hayek stated,] “In a way all the economic calculus is concerned with is the classification of goods according to their economically relevant characteristics; not concerned with their physical characteristics but with position in the means-end order…. In brief the purpose of this economic calculus is no more than to provide an exhaustive classification of the objects of economic activity according to their economically relevant attributes.””

Hayek contrasted this with the “multiple economy” in which the plans of many individuals interact. He explained, “As these plans are separate and not necessarily known to the other individuals, as soon as the people begin to act upon them, a new and different problem arises…. Every such experience he [the individual actor] will have, if it is not precisely what he has expected, is a new datum to him…. With his learning about new facts which may possibly lead him to alter his plan, we meet for the first time a true cause bringing about change.” Hayek later summed up, “It is important that from the beginning we look at competition not as a state of affairs in which everybody knows everything but as a process by which knowledge is dispersed and acquired.”

Hayek’s most famous book is probably The Road to Serfdom. It is dedicated to “the socialists of all parties.” This was not hyperbole. Hayek feared that the dangers of socialism could spring from both the political Right and Left. “He acknowledged that it was “a political book”…. He recognized that many well-intentioned people support socialism simply because they admire its aims—“social justice, greater equality, and security”—and do not realize that, in its standard definition, it means “the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of ‘planned economy’ in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.”” Hayek defended the market process with its divisions of labor. “That the division of labor has reached the extent which makes modern civilization possible we owe to the fact that it did not have to be consciously created but that man tumbled on a method by which the division of labor could be extended far beyond the limits within which it could have been planned. Any further growth of its complexity, therefore, far from making central direction more necessary, makes it more important than ever that we should use a technique which does not depend on conscious control.”

Hayek viewed himself as a social scientist who specialized in economics, but delved into history, philosophy, and psychology with gusto. “In Hayek’s view, the social sciences are properly conceived of as being theoretical, individualist, and subjectivist: they provide a theoretical account of how the actions of individuals, which are based on subjectivist perceptions and beliefs, lead to the creation of larger social structures that are unintended, that is, that are the results of human action but not of human design.” On economics, in general, Hayek pronounced, “It is probably no exaggeration to say that economics developed mainly as the outcome of the investigation and refutation of successive Utopian proposals—if by ‘Utopian’ we mean proposals for the improvement of undesirable effects of the existing system, based upon a complete disregard of those forces which actually enabled it to work.”

“Charmides” by Plato (translated by Rosamond Kent Sprague)

This dialogue is a long digression on the definition of temperance and on its possible worth. The editor, John M. Cooper, interjects, “The subject of discussion is the virtue of ‘sophrosune’, here translated ‘temperance’—but there is no adequate translation in modern European languages. Sophrosune means a well-developed consciousness of oneself and one’s legitimate duties in relation to others (where it will involve self-restraint and showing due respect) and in relation to one’s own ambitions, social standing, and the relevant expectations as regards to one’s own behavior. It is an aristocrat’s virtue par excellence, involving a sense of dignity and self-command.” The dialogue ends without being adequately resolved, but the reader goes on quite the journey, as Socrates guides through many twists and turns of thought along the way.

First, Socrates tries to confirm with Critias a working definition of temperance, “Then only the temperate man will know himself and will be able to examine what he knows and does not know, and in the same way he will be able to inspect other people to see when a man does in fact know what he knows and thinks he knows, and when again he does not know what he thinks he knows, and no one else will be able to do this. And being temperate and temperance and knowing oneself amount to this, to knowing what one knows and does not know.” Socrates continues, “Let us now grant this point, that the existence of a science of science is possible…. If this is perfectly possible, is it any more possible to know what one knows and does not know? We did say, I think, that knowing oneself and being temperate consisted in this?” Socrates is still perplexed, “I still don’t understand how knowing what one knows and does not know is the same thing as knowledge of self…. If temperance is only the science of science and absence of science, it will not be able to distinguish the doctor who knows the particulars of his art from the one who does not know them but pretends or supposes he does, nor will it recognize any other genuine practitioner whatsoever, except the man in its own field, the way other craftsmen do.”

Socrates is still not satisfied with their concept of temperance, “If, as we assumed in the beginning the temperate man knew what he knew and what he did not know (and that he knows the former but not the latter) and were able to investigate another man who was in the same situation, then it would be of the greatest benefit to us to be temperate. Because those of us who had temperance would live lives free from error and so would all those who were under our rule…. If temperance really ruled over us and were as we now define it, surely everything would be done according to science…. But whether acting scientifically would make us fare well and be happy, this we have yet to learn.”

Finally, Socrates admonishes Critias for leading him astray, after all, “All this time you’ve been leading me right round in a circle and concealing from me that it was not living scientifically that was making us fare well and be happy, even if we possessed all the sciences put together, but that we have to have this one science of good and evil…. Then this science, at any rate, is not temperance, as it seems, but that one of which the function is to benefit us. For it is not a science of science and absence of science but of good and evil. So that, if this latter one is beneficial, temperance would be something else for us.” Socrates concludes, “We conceded that there was a science of science when the argument did not allow us to make this statement. Again, we conceded that this science knew the tasks of the other sciences, when the argument did not allow us to say this either, so that our temperate man should turn out to be knowing, both that he knows things he knows and does not know things he does not know. And we made this concession in the most prodigal manner, quite overlooking the impossibility that a person should in some fashion know what he does not know at all—because our agreement amounts to saying he knows things he does not know…. It has very insolently exposed as useless the definition of temperance which we agreed upon and invented earlier.”