The Time F. A. Hayek Killed a Man

F.A. Hayek

In IHS and the Rebirth of Austrian Economics: Some Reflections on 1974–1976 John Blundell writes:

[At South Royalton,] I heard Hayek reply to Sudha, “yes, you may be my official biographer, but on one condition, and one condition only: namely, you must first become fluent in German.” Sudha accepted, but never even learned to count from eins to zehn, thus leaving open the door in the early 1980s for W. W. Bartley III, who started the Hayek Collected Works Project, began work on the biography as well as Popper’s, and then, so sadly, died. The Collected Works moved to Stephen Kresge but has blossomed under Bruce Caldwell now at Duke University. I have no idea what happened to the enormous time line of Hayek’s life or the many hours of taped interviews Bartley made with Hayek’s generation, because they were passing on at an alarming rate, but I assume Kresge has them.

When Hayek asked Bartley to do the biography he said: “There are only three things that sell books namely sex, money and violence. As to sex, well, I left my first wife for my first girlfriend. As to money, well, I never had any. And as to violence, let me tell you how I came to bayonet a man to death in World War One!”

-RW

(via @ThoBishop)