I really should stay out of this distasteful set of threads,but as the then-editor who published Paul Samuelson's "A few remembrances of Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992)" in JEBO in 2009, I think I should add a few remarks largely drawn on that paper, which I had correspondence with the late Samuelson regarding prior to its publication.  Four points.

1) The first is not tied to that article and is simply to state that I support the editors of this list in their efforts to provide an open forum for free discussion, despite ensuing difficulties.

2)  On the matter of Hayek's Nobel, Samuelson supported it, although for his role in introducing "information economics," not for his role in business cycle theory regarding which Samuelson was fairly critical (and much of the paper comes down pretty hard on Hayek on various matters, with many Austrians not pleased with this paper by Samuelson).  Anyway, the paper opens with the following:

"Hayek was the seventh to receive the Bank of Sweden's new Nobel Prize in economics.  In my judgment his was a worthy choice.  And yet in the 1974 senior commons rooms of Harvard and MIT, the majority of the inhabitants there seemed not to even know the name of this new laureate."

And later in the paper:

"In the 1940s Friedrich Hayek in an invited Harvard lecture introduced a new dynamic element into the debate [the socialist calculation debate].  Call it "information economics."  The broad competitive markets, Hayek proclaimed, were the recipients of heterogeneous idiosyncratic bits of individual' information.  Playing for matches rather than for real money or blood was as different an economic dynamics as night is from day.
I was not at all the only one to be converted to the view that, as between Abba Lerner, Oskar Lange and Ludwig von mises, Friedrich Hayek was actually the debate's winner."...
"Hayek's 1974 Stockholm Nobel Prize was importantly won for him by his notions about decentralized information economics discussed that day in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

3)  Given that the unpleasant matter of anti-Semitism and the famous article by Reder (2000) has been raised, I shall also provide Samuelson's comment on this, which occurred near the end of a long final footnote to the paper, and which I think is particularly relevant given that he was arguably at the time the last living person directly affected by the issue at hand.

"Most of my gifted mentors, born in the nineteenth century, lacked today's "political (and ethnic) correctness."  There were of course some honorable exceptions among both my Yankee and European teachers.  Reder (2000) has provided a useful exploration of such unpleasantries.  Central to his expositions were appraisals of the triad John Maynard Keynes, Joseph A. Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek, on the subject of anti-semitism.
Unexpectedly, I was forced to in the end to conclude that Keynes's lifetime profile was the worst of the three. In the record of his letters to wife and other Bloomsburg buddies, Keynes apparently remained in viewpoint much the same as in his Eton essay on the subject as a callow seventeen-year-old.
Hayek, I came to realize, seemed to the one of the three who at leat tried to grow beyond his early conditioning.  The full record suggests that he did not succeed fully in cleansing those Augean Stables.  Still, a B grade for effort does trump a C- grade."

4)  And finally a trivial note on his using "von Hayek" in the title of the paper while referring to "Friedrich Hayek" regularly in the text.  I urged him to do the latter, but he would not bend on the former, arguing that this was the name used by the Nobel Prize committee when it awarded him the prize, and if Hayek did not object to them doing so, then he would use it in that location.  

My own view on this is that people should be called what they choose to be called.  While Hayek used the "von" on publications in German in the 20s, after then he used "F.A. Hayek" for his later work, particularly in English, although I am aware that for some time afterwards he still used the "von" in private social correspondence.  OTOH, his mentor always used "Ludwig von Mises" on all his publications, which makes me somewhat amused by how so many Austrians seem to violate his wishes by referring to him as just "Mises," although Samuelson did so at one point in this paper as well.  As far as I am concerned, they should be "Hayek" and "von Mises" respectively, but this really is a trivial matter more of interest to overly anal journal editors.

________________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Robert Leeson [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 7:10 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] The "very well-deserved" 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

"von Hayek's contributions in the field of economic theory are both profound and original ... He tried to penetrate more deeply into the business cycle mechanism than was usual at that time. Perhaps, partly due to this more profound analysis, he was one of the few economists who gave warning of the possibility of a major economic crisis before the great crash came in the autumn of 1929."

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/press.html

Could Alan provide the evidence?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan G Isaac" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, 20 May, 2014 8:53:44 PM
Subject: Re: [SHOE] The Hayek question

On 5/20/2014 7:07 AM, Robert Leeson quoted:
> Austrians have framed Friedman ("fascist"), Pigou
> ("communist spy"), Phillips ("underground communist") and
> Keynes (a “Godhating, principle-hating, State-loving
> homosexual pervert”; Keynesians have “pushed the world
> into evil, and therefore toward God’s righteous
> judgment”).


Are you proposing Gary North as a representative "Austrian"?
I don't think his association with the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, however regrettable it might be, earns him that
honor.

I largely agree with Eloy: the posted project outline struck
my ears as a near-comical call for the promotion of ad
hominem and guilt by association, not like a proposal for
historical investigation.  Of course that may not be the
project's intent; it may just reflect a desire to present it in
a provocative and combative way.

I would like to stress that I am not suggesting that a project
that asks why cranks are attracted to certain kinds of ideas
need be without merit, as long as there is no presumption that
the attraction of cranks to an idea implies that it is
a crank idea.  I also think that it can be reasonable to
document the moral failings of a writer, especially one who
seems to attract hagiography.  So I would not suggest that
Hayek's involvement with Pinochet or von Mises brief praise
of fascism are not fair topics for discussion, as long as
the discussion acknowledges that lapses in moral judgment do
not immediately translate into general theoretical error.

Although I was mostly amused, I did find offensive the
apparent suggestion that historians of economics might be
qualified to diagnose mental disease, and the apparent
implication that such diagnoses could shed light on the
quality of theory produced by a mind.  It may be worth
recalling that a very well-deserved "Nobel Prize in
Economics" was awarded to a man whose struggles with serious
mental illness are a matter of record.

Cheers,
Alan Isaac