Letters: Who is a conservative?

Policy Review, Fall 1994 by Friedman, Milton, Meyerson, Adam

Dear Sir:

In your symposium "Serfdom USA," you say, "Hayek's Road, and his later works such as The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation, and Liberty, are the most influential books in modern conservatism," yet Hayek added a postscript to The Constitution of Liberty entitled "Why I Am Not a Conservative."

Was Hayek wrong on his self-designation, but right on everything else?

Milton Friedman Senior Research Fellow Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace Stanford, California

Dear Professor Friedman:

Both Hayek and I are correct. Hayek was not a conservative at the time. It is precisely because he has been so influential in modern conservatism that he can be considered a conservative today.

Adam Meyerson Editor

Dear Adam:

Pure evasion. Hayek, to the best of my belief, like myself, always considered himself a "whig"--a 19th century liberal, never a conservative. Was he really a conservative in the same sense that Buchanan, Bennett, Kirk, let alone Rothbard, are or profess to be a conservative? You do him no service by regarding him as so. Milton Friedman

Dear Professor Friedman:

You are a conservative too. Sorry.

By the way, Hayek made it clear in "Why I am not a Conservative," that his quarrel was with European conservatives, not American ones. Hayek also considered himself in the same "liberal" tradition as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Adam Meyerson