From 1933 to 1973
the difference between Hayek and Mises is striking indeed (Hoppe, 2011).
This declaration not only sets the polemical tone of the debate; it also delineates with precision the battlefield itself: not technical economics but social philosophy and epistemology are, according to Hoppe, the terrain on which Hayek abandoned Austrian principles. Moreover, this accusation of falsity is not confined to the theoretical plane; Hoppe extends it into a thesis about the sociology of intellectual power. In his lecture The Hayek Myth, he argues that Hayek’s fame was strategically constructed by the left-wing establishment, which allegedly selected him as its “official enemy” precisely because he was a muddled and moderate thinker. On this view, the left could appear tolerant and open by engaging Hayek in debate, only to win easily by pointing out that “even Hayek and Friedman admit this and do not deny that,” thereby sidelining the true radicals such as Mises and Rothbard (Hoppe, 2012)
Rothbard puts it forcefully:
Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek’s continuous and all-pervasive attack on reason. Reason is his bête noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it. The true rationalist theory was, and is, that reason can discover the natural law of man, and from this can discover the natural rights of liberty. Since Hayek dismisses this even from historical consideration, he is left with only two choices for the formation of a political ethic: either blind adherence to custom and the traditions of the ‘social organism,’ or the coercive force of government edict (Rothbard, 1958/2009, p. 63).
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