SOURCE: “Hayek and the Left,” in Political Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 1, January-March, 1996, pp. 46-53.

In the following essay, Gamble discusses the reception of Hayek's writings among critics on the political left.

Hayek is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, but there has always been a tendency for intellectuals on the left to neglect or belittle his achievement. He has been frequently dismissed as a right-wing ideologue, whose energies were spent in a crusade against socialism and an attempt to revive an obsolete creed, economic liberalism. His arguments have often been regarded as exaggerated and polemical.

Hayek's Career

This reputation was established almost as soon as Hayek arrived in England to take up a chair in economics at the LSE in 1931. Here he quickly became involved in a controversy over the causes of the Depression and what to do about it. One of Lionel Robbins' motives...