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During and immediately after World War Two (1939-1945), influential public debates in Britain concerned the postwar settlement. This was a global war and Britain was a global empire in its final epoch. A crucial aspect of several schemes for reconstruction and the establishment of global order concerned the place of science—an ostensibly global knowledge form—in the social order. Historians have tended to draw on a relatively narrow range of interlocutors to interpret this polemical landscape as a debate over freedom and planning. This thesis offers a new account of this set of influential polemical interactions by examining a richer cast of participants and by attending to the reflexive quality of the media technologies they used to articulate their arguments. I focus on the programmes forged by three major public intellectuals: J D Bernal, C S Lewis, and F A Hayek. These figures are rarely considered in direct relation to one another and are identified with very different intellectual contributions and political positions, but I show how they were each intensely concerned with the nature and role of science in the social order. All three articulated an image of science as a self-organising system of intelligence which would form the basis of global order. Setting these three figures in their social and intellectual milieux, I compare and contrast how Bernal, Lewis, and Hayek articulated their different notions of the global and images of the intelligent machinery which would secure global order. These images included Bernal's technoscientific world brain, Lewis’s fairy-tale protagonist Merlinus Ambrosius, and Hayek’s market or price mechanism. I show how, in each case, the media through which they articulated these images claimed to manifest and exercise the power of the intelligent machinery which they described. These figures’ work to articulate these images in mass media to educate their audiences was the work of forging the new global order. They each attempted to transform readers’ attitudes towards and tacit assumptions about science and the globe and to thereby transform the body politic and reconstitute the relationships between humans, nature, and technology. Often exciting and entertaining, their accounts invited and trained public audiences to participate as actors in a world and to see their enemies as occupying different consciousnesses, times, or worlds. I show how these works were cosmological interventions by examining the rhetorical and iconographical strategies they employed to project the techniques of their own cosmology onto the global history of science. An important output of the thesis is its provision of a historical explanation for why images of science matter in public culture. I argue that these figures deployed images of science to define the criteria for who counted as legitimate experts on human affairs. Finally, I use this analysis to reinterpret significant aspects of the genesis of British sociology of scientific knowledge. My first two chapters focus on Bernal, the third and fourth chapters on Lewis, and my fifth and sixth chapters on Hayek., The Royal Society

A brief idea

Este trabalho discute o debate sobre a teoria do capital entre Frank H. Knight e Friedrich A. Hayek ocorrida na década de 1930. Busca-se realizar uma reconstituição histórica dessa controvérsia entre Hayek e Knight, tentando entendê-la em seus próprios termos através da sumarização dos argumentos de ambos os participantes da mesma e situando cada artigo que a compõe no contexto dos desenvolvimentos teóricos correntes desses autores. Além disso, identifica-se a forma com que a teoria do capital de cada um dos autores é influenciada ou influencia as demais posições defendidas pelos mesmos em outros temas relacionados, em especial, o escopo e método da ciência econômica.

Desde seu renascimento no início dos anos 1970, o que veio a se chamar de “Economia Austríaca” tem sido considerado, pela maior parte de seus adeptos contemporâneos, como a continuação de uma tradição unificada que pode ser rastreada até Carl Menger. Este artigo desafia essa perspectiva e argumenta que, de fato, duas tradições muito diferentes emergiram do trabalho de Menger. Uma tradição pode ser rastreada, através da obra de F. A. Hayek, a Friedrich Wieser, um dos dois seguidores mais proeminentes de Menger. A outra tradição emana dos escritos do outro discípulo principal de Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, e inclui seu aluno Ludwig von Mises. Este ensaio defende a tese de que essas duas tradições separadas existem e foram confundidas pelos austríacos modernos.

This article offers a revisionist account of certain episodes in the development of F. A. Hayek's thought. It offers a new reading of his 1937 paper, “Economics and Knowledge,” that draws on unpublished lecture notes in which he articulated more fully the distinctions he made in the paper between a “pure logic of choice,” or the economic calculus, and an “empirical element,” which he would later call the competitive market order. Next, the essay shows that Hayek continued to try to develop his ideas about the role of the economic calculus through the 1950s and early 1960s, an effort that has been missed because it never led to any published work. Finally, the article examines Hayek's attempt to articulate a theory of the market process, one that would be at the same level of generality as the economic calculus, in lectures he gave at the University of Virginia. He never developed a full-fledged formal theory, but his failed efforts still bore fruit in leading him to his contributions on spontaneous orders and the (verbal) theory of complex phenomena. This work anticipated contributions by others who were more technically trained.

F. A. Hayek took two trips to Chile, the first in 1977, the second in 1981. The visits were controversial. On the first trip he met with General Augusto Pinochet, who had led a coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. During his 1981 visit, Hayek gave interviews that were published in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio and in which he discussed authoritarian regimes and the problem of unlimited democracy. After each trip, he complained that the western press had painted an unfair picture of the economic situation under the Pinochet regime. Drawing on archival material, interviews, and past research, we provide a full account of this controversial episode in Hayek’s life.