ИПИ Библиотека

Friedrich A. Hayek published The Constitution of Liberty in 1960. To mark the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary the IEA is issuing Eugene F. Miller’s Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty: An Account of Its Argument. Miller’s study is best seen as a companion to The Constitution of Liberty rather than as a replacement for it. The Constitution of Liberty is a large book, with its text running to over 400 pages with an additional 110 pages of notes. While Hayek makes a systematic argument throughout the book, at times he deals with the same ideas or concerns in different parts of the work. Miller pulls these scattered discussions together so that the reader can get a complete picture of Hayek’s argument.

“Hayek’s discussion of freedom or liberty is divided into three main parts: The Value of Freedom; Freedom and the Law; and Freedom in the Welfare State. He explains that Part I ‘endeavors to show why we want liberty and what it does.’ Part II examines ‘the institutions that Western man has developed to secure individual liberty.’ Part III tests this ideal of liberty by applying its principles ‘to some of today’s critical economic and social issues’.”

Eugene F. Miller

Dr Eugene F. Miller (1935–2010) was a professor of political science at the University of Georgia from 1967 until his retirement in 2003. He was a student in the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought (PhD, 1965), where he wrote a dissertation on David Hume. F. A. Hayek chaired Miller’s dissertation committee, whose other members were Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey.  Miller edited David Hume’s Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Liberty Fund, 1985), and published articles on Hume, Strauss and Hayek. He also published on the American Founding, the nature of liberal education, the relationship between technology and politics, and the intellectual foundations of philanthropy.