“The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945)

The impetus of Hayek’s essay was to respond to Lange’s work on centrally planned economies. In this work, Lange defends his form of “market socialism.”

Cockshott and Cottrell wrote their academic paper as a direct response to Hayek’s criticisms of central planning, and the broader critique of socialist economies which stemmed from The Use of Knowledge in Society. They discuss the advent of information technology as a rebuttal to Hayek’s knowledge…

In a life that spanned almost the entire twentieth century, Hayek went from being dismissed, ridiculed, and ignored to being recognized and acclaimed as perhaps this century’s most significant social scientist and philosopher. To a remarkable degree, his story is the story of the twentieth century.…

Hayek included The Use of Knowledge in Society essay in this collection of 12 essays discussing many of his ideas on philosophy and economics.

Hayek’s essay inspired Sowell to write Knowledge and Decisions. Hayek significantly praised Sowell’s dutiful extrapolation of the theme of dispersed knowledge to themes such as modern central planning.

Boudreaux and Russ Roberts discuss the importance of Hayek’s work, and how to go about reading one of the most influential economic thinkers of the twentieth century.

Hayek’s epistemic institutionalism, as articulated in the 1930s and 1940s, provided the foundation for his own reconstruction and restatement of liberal political economy as evidenced in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973-79). Recognizing this aspect of Hayek’…