• Corpus ID: 17170765

Hayek and Friedman : Head to Head

@inproceedings{Garrison2007HayekAF,
  title={Hayek and Friedman : Head to Head},
  author={Roger W. Garrison},
  year={2007}
}

• R. Garrison
• Published 2007
• Economics

In the grand battle of ideas, F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman were, at the same time, soul mates and adversaries. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962) are rightly seen as companion volumes. By contrast, Hayek’s Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle ([1928] 1975) and Friedman’s Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays (1969) are worlds apart. The tenets of classical liberalism unite these two thinkers; the methods and substance of the their economics, particularly the economics of money and business cycles, divide them. A thorough understanding of both the common ground and the battle ground requires attention to several different fields of study, including philosophy of science, methodology, political economy, and economics. The comparison is facilitated by a wealth of literature produced by Hayek and Friedman as well as a voluminous and still-growing secondary literature aimed at reconciling the differences or at sharpening them. But sorting it all out requires 1