Hayek and Bibliophile Porn

Steven Horwitz

This is just fun (no it's neither Selma nor Friedrich in the nude).  I love seeing the copy of Menger's Investigations in the original German and finding out that the 1778 edition of The Wealth of Nations, complete with Hayek's notes, can be found online.  (HT:  Jeff Tucker)

Comments

[Harrison Searles]

I don't know if porn this enticing can be ethically left on the internet.

[FC]

Ars longa, porn brevis.

[Mario Rizzo]

The University of Salzburg would not sell his library back to Hayek! How petty of them.

[Jonathan Thomas]

For those interested, here are pdfs of volumes 1 and 2 of Hayek's copy of "The Wealth of Nations":
http://www.ubs.sbg.ac.at/pdf/AC01125362.pdf
http://www.ubs.sbg.ac.at/pdf/AC01125369.pdf

[Mario Rizzo]

No Hayek notes in volume 1. (At least I didn't see them in the text.) I am afraid to look at volume 2 -- Why would he make marks in this valuable edition???!!!! Yeah, he is Hayek -- but not Adam Smith!!!!!

[Eric Mack]

Since no one else is mentioning it, I thought I'd mention that the speaker in this video falsely describes Hayek as a "social Darwinist." There were, of course, some social Darwinists -- who held that variation and competition among individuals lead to individuals who were biologically more fit for survival. But that, of course, was not Hayek's story. For Hayek's story focused on cultural evolution through which institutions and rules that were more apt to be beneficial to all individuals within a society emerge and take hold. The fitness resides in the institutions and rules not (biologically) in individuals. Moreover, Hayek repeatedly emphasized that it was inappropriate to label his sort of position as any type of Darwinism. This was because Darwin himself had (in part)been lead to his evolutionist account of biological phenomena by Scottish Enlightenment evolutionist accounts of social and economic phenomena. Darwin was a biological Smithian.

[Troy Camplin]

It is unfortunate that the Social Darwinists were who they were, because true social Darwinism would resemble nothing like it -- and more resemble Hayek's spontaneous order story.

[Birthday Greetings]

Funny. This is adventure sequence only an economist could love.