Barkley Rosser wrote:
>     I want to thank Greg Ransom for noting this
> issue about Hayek's actual authorship of passages
> in The Fatal Conceit.  I have heard from more than
> one source about this problem of Bartley's overly
> vigorous "editing" of that work.  Given that Hayek
> and Keynes were personal friends, despite their
> deep differences over ideology and theory, it
> seems somewhat unlikely and out of character
> for Hayek to have been slamming Keynes for
> his personal morals, especially so near the end
> of his long life.  Certainly such slamming looks
> very tacky and unacceptable by today's standards,
> whether it was done by Bartley or by Hayek.


Let me add a complication here.  I certainly agree with Greg's comments 
about the contested authorship of parts of *The Fatal Conceit*.  
However, we do have one other possible source for determining whether 
this view of Keynes was really Hayek's or Bartley's.  A few years ago, a 
transcription of a large number of notecards that Hayek used while 
writing gained circulation among a small group of Hayek scholars.  The 
original idea was to publish them along with commentaries by said 
scholars.  That project died and the status of the notecards is unclear. 
It just so happens that I came across my copy of those transcribed 
notecards this morning while looking for something else.

As I am unsure who exactly holds the copyright on the cards, I will not 
quote the transcriptions verbatim at any length.  What I can say is that 
there are several that are sentence/paragraph length commentaries on 
Keynes that are consistent with the quote from TFC that started this 
whole discussion.  Though not stated quite as bluntly as in TFC, Hayek 
does make it clear that he believes Keynes resisted/disliked "the moral 
restraints that became the foundation of the modern market economy" and 
that resistance was directly linked to his focused on known, rationally 
determinable short-run effects rather than long-run, unknown ones.  
Hayek quotes the "in the long run, we are all dead" line on several of 
the cards that address these issues.

Most of these cards have no dates on them, but those that do are from 
the period in the late 70s and 80s during which he was writing and 
re-writing TFC.  On the assumption that these cards are in fact Hayek's 
(and I'm quite confident in that assumption), that passage in TFC may 
not bear the heavy hand of Bartley, but instead might well reflect 
Hayek's increased impatience in his later years with those who 
promulgated ideas he thought were destructive, especially those 
concerning human morality and its link to the growth of civilization. 

It should be noted that one card includes a discussion that eventually 
appeared in print where he defends Keynes against the "inflationist 
Keynesians," believing, based on the last conversation he had with JMK, 
that Keynes would not have approved of things being done in his name in 
the 1940s.  So here we see Hayek defending Keynes, at least on the more 
narrow question of whether what Hayek saw as problematic policies 
undertaken in Keynes' name were really attributable to Keynes.

So it's possible that Hayek had both great sympathy for his life-long 
friend but also believed he had done enormous damage with some/many of 
his ideas.  In any case, I don't think the "Bartley did it" argument can 
get Hayek off the hook every time he said something in TFC that we might 
think was out of character.

Steve Horwitz