================= HES POSTING ================= George Stigler gets Friedrich Hayek's position on state regulation and its relation to the threat of arbitrary government flat wrong in his _Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist_. He provides with it a claim against Hayek's development of the notion of liberty in a liberal society which doesn't get beyond a sophomores' strawman, utterly violating the most minimal commitment to the principle of charity. I have also found it striking that in the early literature on the role of information and knowledge produced after Hayek's seminal essays of 1937 and 1945, Stigler is almost alone in failing to credit or even cite Hayek's pathbreaking work in this area, as if Stigler's own contribution fell out of the void ready-made, without any debt to any prior context or contribution. Until reading McCloskey on Stigler, now buttressed by several recent posts on this list, I had thought these to be rather sui generis events. Now I'm wondering if instead this is part of a wider pattern, explained in part by a particular stand toward scholarly ethics, in part by a particular view of the advance of knowledge or understanding, and in part by the character of the man. Never having known the man it is hard for someone attempting to make a judgment on such a matter to come to a very firm conclusion. Greg Ransom Dept. of Philosophy UC-Riverside [log in to unmask] http://members.gnn.com/logosapien/ransom.htm ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]