Henry Hazlitt - Economics and Philosophy

Economics and Philosophy

"The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization."

Economics in One Lesson (1946) has been called Hazlitt's "most enduring contribution," with a million copies sold and available in ten languages, it is considered an "enduring classic" in conservative, free market and libertarian circles. Ayn Rand called it a "magnificent job of theoretical exposition," while Congressman Ron Paul ranks it with the works of Frédéric Bastiat and F. A. Hayek. Hayek himself praised the work, as did fellow Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman, who said that Hazlitt's description of the price system, for example, was "a true classic: timeless, correct, painlessly instructive." In his book Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell also compliments Hazlitt, and Sowell's work has been cited as "following" in the "Bastiat-Hazlitt tradition" of economic exposition. In 1996, Laissez Faire Books issued a 50th anniversary edition with an introduction by publisher and presidential candidate Steve Forbes.

Another of his enduring works is The Failure of the New Economics (1959), a detailed, chapter-by-chapter critique of John Maynard Keynes's highly influential General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, about which he paraphrased a quote attributed to Samuel Johnson, that he was "unable to find in it a single doctrine that is both true and original. What is original in the book is not true; and what is true is not original." Hazlitt also published three books on the subject of inflation, including From Bretton Woods to World Inflation (1984), and two influential works on poverty, Man vs. The Welfare State (1969), and The Conquest of Poverty (1973), thought by some to have anticipated the later work of Charles Murray in Losing Ground.

His major work in philosophy is The Foundations of Morality (1964), a treatise on ethics defending utilitarianism, which builds on the work of David Hume and John Stuart Mill. Hazlitt's 1922 work, The Way to Will-Power has been described as a defense of free will or "individual initiative against the deterministic claims of Freudian psychoanalysis." In contrast to many other thinkers on the political right, he was an agnostic with regard to religious beliefs.

In A New Constitution Now (1942), published during Franklin D. Roosevelt's unprecedented third term as President of the United States, Hazlitt called for the replacement of the existing fixed-term presidential tenure in the United States with a more Anglo-European system of "cabinet" government, under which a head of state who had lost the confidence of the legislature or cabinet might be removed from office after a no-confidence vote in as little as 30 days. (Shortly following FDR's death, presidential term limits were enacted.) His 1951 novel, The Great Idea (reissued in 1966 as Time Will Run Back) depicts rulers of a centrally-planned socialist dystopia discovering, amid the resulting economic chaos, the need to restore market pricing system, private ownership of capital goods and competitive markets.

Hazlitt was a prolific writer, authoring 25 works in his lifetime.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan in his speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference (or "CPAC") named Hazlitt as one of the "ntellectual leaders" (along with Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Frank Meyer) who had "shaped so much of our thoughts..."

Ludwig von Mises said at a dinner honoring Hazlitt: "In this age of the great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you are our leader. You have indefatigably fought against the step-by-step advance of the powers anxious to destroy everything that human civilization has created over a long period of centuries... You are the economic conscience of our country and of our nation."