Hayek vs Keynes

Thomas Hoerber is Professor in European Studies at ESSCA School of Management in Angers, France. He is the author of five books, including The Foundations of Europe (2006) and European Space Policy: European Integration and the Final Frontier (2015).

"Where Hoerber is correct is when he asserts that the great differences between Keynes and Hayek are relevant to today’s world." - Wall Street Journal"The shock of the Great Depression led to intellectual tumult as economists tried to understand the causes and recommend responses. To Keynes, economic narrative offered a better approach than mathematics to Hayek, the problem was too little abstraction. To Keynes, people could work together within the framework of the state to Hayek, the answer was to operate within the free market. The shock of the Great Recession has not had the same impact on economics, with mathematical modelling remaining in the ascendant, and the state more often seen as the disease than the cure. Thomas Hoerber’s analysis of these two giants of the history of economics makes us reflect on the crisis of our own time as much as on the world they inhabited." - Martin Daunton, Professor of Economic History, University of Cambridge

• Introduction1 From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century: Momentous Change and StableElements2 Hayek’s Road to Liberty3 Information and Planning4 Keynes’s General Theory5 Man is Not the Master of His Own Fate: Misguided Socialist Idealism6 Liberal Polemic, or, the Threat of National Socialism7 The Necessity of Planning8 Liberty and Totalitarianism