Introduction 介绍

Every economist has at least one hero. I have several. Adam Smith, the wise eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher who founded economics, is one of my heroes. Another is Frederic Bastiast, a nineteenth-century French scholar and statesman who used humour brilliantly to convey basic economic insights. Also among my heroes is my late colleague at George Mason University, James Buchanan. Buchanan won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for using economics to better understand politics.

每个经济学家心里都至少有一个英雄。我有好几个。一个是亚当·斯密，博学的18世纪苏格兰道德哲学家，他创立了经济学。还一个是弗雷德里克·巴斯夏，19世纪的法国学者和政治家，他巧妙地运用幽默来传达基本的经济学观点。还一个是我在乔治梅森大学的已故同事，詹姆斯·布坎南，他利用经济学来更好的理解政治，并因此获得了1986年的诺贝尔经济学奖。

Milton Friedman, the American economist who not only revolutionized economic scholarship in the twentieth century but who also spoke plainly and compellingly to the general public, is yet another of my heroes. So, too, is Julian Simon, the economist who taught us that the ultimate resource in any economy is not inanimate stuff such as land or petroleum or gold or iron ore but, instead, the human mind that is free to innovate.

还一个是美国经济学家米尔顿·弗里德曼，他不仅在20世纪革新了经济学，还以清晰有力的方式向公众演说。还有朱利安·西蒙，作为一个经济学家，他教会了我们任何经济里的终极资源都不是无生命的物体，如土地、石油、黄金或铁矿，而是可以自由创新的人类心智。

But my greatest hero — by far — is Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992).

但到目前为止我心目中最伟大的英雄是弗雷德里希A.哈耶克(1899-1992)。

Born in Vienna on May 8, 1899, Hayek moved to England in 1931. While teaching and researching at the London School of Economics, Hayek became one of the world’s most renowned economists even though he was still only in his mid-30s. His fame grew from his research into the causes of what where then called “trade cycles,” what we today call booms and recessions.

哈耶克1899年5月8号出生于维也纳，于1931年移居英国。哈耶克在伦敦政治经济学院教研时，不过就处于而立之年的中期，但他已经是世界最著名的经济学家之一了。他的名气来源于对所谓的“贸易周期”——现在被称作繁荣和衰退的起因的研究。

In the Greatly Depressed 1930s, of course, such research was especially important. And Hayek wasn’t alone in researching the causes of booms and recessions. Another economist studying the same matter was John Maynard Keynes (pronounced “canes”). Yet Keynes’s theory of booms and recessions was totally different from Hayek’s. Not only were the two accounts of booms and recessions very different from each other at the purely theoretical level, they also differed in the implications they offered for government policies to deal with economic slumps. Keynes’s theory promised that recessions, even deep ones like the Great Depression, can easily be cured by greater government spending. Hayek’s theory, on the other hand, offered no hope that a slumping economy can be cured by any such easy fix.

在1930年代的大衰退期间这些研究理所当然的很重要。哈耶克并非唯一一个研究贸易周期起因的人，另一个也在研究的经济学家是约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯。不过他的贸易周期理论与哈耶克完全不同。不仅在理论层面非常不同，他们理论暗含的政府应对经济衰退的政策也截然不同。凯恩斯的理论许诺政府支出可以轻易地解决经济衰退——哪怕是像大萧条这样的深度衰退。哈耶克的理论则与之相反，认为经济下滑无望轻易克服。

Among professional economists, Hayek’s theory went quickly from being celebrated to being scorned. Keynes’s theory won the day.

在专业经济学家中，哈耶克的理论很快就从被赞美变成了被轻视，凯恩斯的理论在当时胜出了。

Whatever the reasons for Keynes’s victory over Hayek, that victory was total. Keynesian economics came to all but completely dominate the economics profession for the next 40 years and to win widespread acceptance among policy-makers. By the early 1940s Hayek was largely forgotten.

不管是什么原因让凯恩斯赢过了哈耶克，这种胜利都是全方位的。之后的40年凯恩斯经济学几乎彻底统治了经济学并且在政策制定者中被广泛接受。到1940年代的前期时，哈耶克很大程度上已经被遗忘了。

Hayek’s time in the shadows, however, was brief. In 1944 he published a book that became a surprise best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic: The Road to Serfdom. In this now-classic volume, Hayek warned that attempts to centrally plan an economy, or even to protect citizens from the downsides of economic change, pave a “road to serfdom.” Hayek showed that if government plans or regulates the economy in as much detail and as heavily as many of the intellectuals and politicians of the day were demanding, government must also regiment citizens and strip them of many cherished freedoms.

不过哈耶克在阴影中的时间并不长。1944年他出版了一本在大西洋两岸都惊人畅销的作品——《通往奴役之路》。在这本现在已成经典的著作里，哈耶克警告说：试图对经济进行中央计划、或者哪怕是在经济下滑时试图保护国民，都会铺就一条“通往奴役之路”。哈耶克展示了如果政府对经济进行当时很多知识分子和政客要求的那种深入、沉重的计划和管制，政府就必须也管制公民并剥夺许多值得珍视的自由。

Hayek did not say (as he is often mistakenly accused of saying) that the slightest bit of government regulation inevitably leads to socialism and tyranny. Rather, his point was that the more intent government is on socializing an economy and regulating it in great detail, the greater are the number of individual freedoms that must be crushed in the process.

人们常常错误地认为哈耶克说过最轻微的政府管制也会不可避免地导致社会主义和暴政，但哈耶克其实并没这么说过。他的观点是政府越想把经济社会主义化、越想深入控制经济，就会有越多的个人自由在这个过程中被摧毁。

Although informed by Hayek’s economic brilliance, The Road to Serfdom is not an economics book. It is instead a work of political philosophy, and it marks Hayek’s turning away from writing exclusively about economics for professional economists, to writing about the nature of society for broader audiences. And the audience for The Road to Serfdom was vast. In the United States, the popular magazine Reader’s Digest ran an abridged version of the book in 1945, which proved to be surprisingly successful. (The Road to Serfdom remains relevant and popular. Sixty-five years after its best-selling success with Reader’s Digest, American television and radio host Glenn Beck praised The Road to Serfdom on his Fox News channel program. As a result, in June 2010 Hayek’s 1944 book shot up to a number-one ranking on Amazon.com, where it stayed for a week.)

虽然包含着哈耶克的经济才华，但《通往奴役之路》并不是一本经济学书，而是一本关于政治哲学的作品。它标志着哈耶克从只向专业经济学家写经济学转向了向更多的读者谈论社会的性质。《通往奴役之路》的读者非常多。在美国，流行杂志《读者文摘》在1945年做了个精简版，取得了惊人的成功。（《通往奴役之路》现在也依然有意义并且流行。在读者文摘版热销65年后，美国电视和电台主播Glenn Beck在他的福克斯新闻频道节目里称赞了《通往奴役之路》，结果2010年6月哈耶克这本1944年的书冲上了亚马逊网站排行榜第一，并保持了一周。）

Along with his change from narrow economist to broad social scientist, Hayek moved in 1950 to the University of Chicago. During his 12 years at that institution, he was not a professor in the Department of Economics but, instead, in the Committee for Social Thought. While at Chicago Hayek wrote a second and more extensive book in defense of a free society: The Constitution of Liberty, which was published in 1960.

在哈耶克从一个专注的经济学家变为一个更广阔的社会科学家时，他也于1950年转去了芝加哥大学。在芝大的12年里，他并不是经济学系的教授，而是在社会思想委员会工作。在芝加哥时哈耶克撰写了他的第二本书，也是一本更全面的书——《自由宪章》，来为自由社会辩护。该书于1960年出版。

In subsequent decades, two more such “big think” books would flow from Hayek’s pen: the three-volume Law, Legislation, and Liberty (published in the 1970s) and Hayek’s final book, The Fatal Conceit (published in 1988). Law, Legislation, and Liberty shows Hayek at his most bold and pioneering. Volume I brilliantly explains the differences between unplanned orders (such as languages and market economies) and planned organizations (such as business firms and centrally planned economies). Volume II explains why the popular idea of “social justice” is meaningless. Volume III contains Hayek’s most ambitious attempt to describe in detail what the legal and political structure of his ideal society would look like.

在接下来几十年，哈耶克继续撰写了两部这种大部头：三卷本的《法律、立法与自由》（1970年代陆续出版）和他的最后一本书《致命的自负》（1988年出版）。《法律、立法与自由》体现了哈耶克最佳的勇气和原创性。第一卷出色地说明了无计划的秩序（例如语言和市场经济）和有计划的组织（例如商业公司和中央计划经济）之间的区别；第二卷解释了为什么关于“社会正义”的流行观念毫无意义；第三卷包含了哈耶克最雄心勃勃的尝试，他试图详细描述他理想的社会会有怎样的法律和政治结构。

The greatest contribution of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, however, is Hayek’s explanation of the fundamental difference between law and legislation. Influenced by the Italian legal scholar Bruno Leoni, Hayek argued that law is that set of rules that emerges “spontaneously,” unplanned and undesigned. Law forms out of the countless interactions of ordinary people as they go about their daily lives. Legislation, in contrast, is a set of rules and commands that government consciously designs and imposes. Hayek believed that every good society must use a combination of law and legislation, but that much mischief is caused when the two are confused.

不过《法律、立法与自由》的最大贡献是哈耶克解释了法律和立法之间的根本区别。受意大利法学家布鲁诺·里安尼的影响，哈耶克论证了法律是一套“自发”涌现的规则，无人计划也无人设计。法律是在普通人日常生活中无数的相互作用中形成的。相比之下，立法则是一组政府有意设计和实施的规则和命令。哈耶克相信良好的社会同时需要法律和立法，但许多麻烦是因为混淆了两者导致的。

While still working on volumes II and III of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic Science. Sharing this award with the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, Hayek finally was accorded the professional acclaim that he’d lost since his refusal, four decades earlier, to jump onto and ride the Keynesian bandwagon. Hayek’s close friends tell how this award renewed his vigour to work. He would live for nearly 18 more years and for much of that time he remained as creative and as productive as ever. His last book, The Fatal Conceit, published in 1988, deepens his insights into the potential creative powers of a society governed by evolved rules rather than by the discretion of political officials or of democratic majorities.

当哈耶克在写作《法律、立法与自由》的后两卷时，他于1974年和瑞典经济学家贡纳尔·默达尔分享了诺贝尔经济学奖。这让哈耶克终于重获四十年前因拒绝皈依凯恩斯而失去的专业上的赞美。哈耶克的密友曾经讲述过诺奖是怎样让哈耶克重获活力工作的。之后哈耶克又活了大约18年，并一直保持着以往的创造力和高效。他最后的一本书——《致命的自负》于1988年出版，深化了他关于一个由进化规则控制的社会比由政府官员或民主多数控制的社会更有创新潜力的洞见。

***

In this short book I aim to convey as clearly as possible the gist of ten of Hayek’s most important economic and political ideas. While I share Hayek’s viewpoint on most such matters, I’ve done my best in the pages that follow to convey Hayek’s ideas and perspectives rather than my own. Inevitably, and especially because no scholar has exercised such a long-standing and powerful influence on the way that I approach economics and how I “see” social reality, I surely, from time to time, confuse my own ideas and viewpoints for those of Hayek. I’ve tried to avoid any such confusion, but acknowledge up front that my efforts are unlikely to have been completely successful. Other Hayek scholars, therefore, can object to any number of interpretations that I’ve put here on Hayek’s writings. My hope is merely that I’ve reduced such confusions to a minimum and that the confusions that do remain are understandable and, hence, forgivable.

在这本小书中我想尽可能清晰地表述出十个哈耶克最重要的经济和政治思想的主旨。虽然我与哈耶克在多数事情上有着相同看法，但我尽力去表达哈耶克，而不是我的观点和看法。但不可避免地，尤其因为没人像哈耶克那样长期有力地影响着我理解经济学和看待世界的方式，我肯定时不时会把我的观点与看法和哈耶克的混在一起。我尽力避免这种混淆，但我得先在这承认我的努力可能并没有完全成功。因此其他研究哈耶克的学者可以反对任何我在此对哈耶克著作的解释。我的愿望仅仅是我已经把这种混淆减到了最少并且那些依然存在的混淆让人可以理解——因此可以原谅。

I’ve also avoided throughout excessive mention of Hayek himself. The reader should read the following chapters with the understanding that all of the ideas in those chapters are Hayek’s ideas (or, again, at least what I genuinely believe to be Hayek’s ideas). And so especially in combination with my other goal of making this volume accessible to a wide audience, there is no academic-style footnoting and citation in the text.

我也避免过多的提到哈耶克本人。读者在阅读随后的章节时应该明白那里所有的观点都是哈耶克的（或者至少我真诚地相信是哈耶克的）。而且我也想让这本书能让很多人觉得易读，所有没有加入任何学院式的脚注和参考文献。

Readers interested in exploring Hayek’s works in greater depth are, of course, encouraged to read those works directly. I recommend starting with The Road to Serfdom or The Constitution of Liberty, although economic students might wish to start with Hayek’s influential essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which has been reprinted in many places after originally appearing in the September 1945 issue of the American Economic Review. (This essay is also available free of charge on-line at http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html).

当然我鼓励想更深入了解哈耶克工作的读者直接阅读哈耶克的原著。我推荐从《通往奴役之路》或者《自由宪章》开始，不过经济学系的学生可能会希望从哈耶克富有影响力的文章“知识在社会中运用”入手。这篇文章于1945年9月在《美国经济评论》上发表，之后在很多地方进行了重印（现在在http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html可以免费阅读）。

Hayek wrote no autobiography. There are, though, several good intellectual biographies of him. Bruce Caldwell’s 2005 Hayek’s Challenge is especially good. Readers might also consult Eamonn Butler’s 2012 Friedrich Hayek: The Ideas and Influence of the Libertarian Economist, and Alan Ebenstein’s 2001 Friedrich Hayek: A Biography. But I emphasize: there is no better way to learn Hayek’s ideas than to read Hayek directly.

哈耶克没有写自传。不过市面上有些很好的哈耶克传记。Bruce Caldwell 2005年的《哈耶克评传》(Hayek’s Challenge)尤其好。读者们也可以查阅Eamonn Butler 2012年的《哈耶克思想解读》(Friedrich Hayek: The Ideas and Influence of the Libertarian Economist)和Alan Ebenstein 2001年的《哈耶克传》(Friedrich Hayek: A Biography)。（三本书均有中译，因此这里的中文书名用的是出版的书名——译者注）不过我要强调：想要学习哈耶克的思想，最好的办法就是直接阅读哈耶克。

Reading Hayek directly isn’t always easy. His prose, while unfailingly proper and precise, features long sentences filled with several clauses. Yet it (at least as I read Hayek’s prose) has an attractive cadence to it — if a cadence that becomes agreeable only after having read more than just a few pages! But if the reader will trust my judgment, I can attest that becoming more than passingly familiar with Hayek’s works yields generous intellectual dividends.

直接阅读哈耶克并不总是很容易。他的文章，为了追求恰当和精确，喜欢用有许多从句的长句。不过他的文章（至少就我的阅读体验来说）有着吸引人的节奏感，这种节奏刚读上几页就能让人觉得愉悦。如果读者信任我的判断的话，我可以作证多了解哈耶克的作品会带来丰富的智力回报。

Still, even Hayek’s “popular” works, such as The Road to Serfdom, are quite academic. He was, through and through, a profound scholar and never a journalist or popularizer. I will have done my job in the following pages if you, the reader, come to understand some of the key ideas of this great thinker, and to understand the timeless relevance of these ideas for the evaluation and formation of social policy. If you are inspired to go on to read Hayek directly, all the better.

但即使是哈耶克的“流行”作品，例如《通往奴役之路》，也依然很学术。他一直都是个深刻的学者，而不是记者或普及者。如果本书接下来的部分能让作为读者的你理解这位伟大思想家的一些关键思想，理解这些思想在评价和塑造社会政策上永恒的价值，那我的工作就完成了。如果你还被鼓舞着去直接阅读哈耶克，那就更好了。

***

My gratitude in writing this slim volume is great. I thank Jason Clemens and his colleagues at the Fraser Institute for the invitation to write this book, and for their support throughout the project. I thank my colleagues and students over the years, both at Clemson University and George Mason University. These colleagues and students are too numerous to mention here without risking leaving someone out, yet they have all taught me much. I’m grateful for my long friendship and collaboration — not least through our blog Café Hayek (www.cafehayek.com) — with Russell Roberts, now of the Hoover Institution. I am grateful also for Bruce Caldwell’s generous counsel early on in this project, as well as for the insightful and helpful criticisms and suggestions of three anonymous reviewers.

我要为这本小书的写作感谢很多人。我感谢Jason Clemens和他在弗雷泽研究所的同事邀请我写这本书并在过程中一直提供支持。我感谢我这些年在克莱门森大学和乔治梅森大学的同事和学生。他们人数太多，无法冒着有所遗漏的风险在这一一列出，但他们都教会了我很多。我感激与现在在胡佛研究所的Russell Roberts的长期友谊和合作——不仅仅是通过我们的共同博客Café Hayek (www.cafehayek.com)。我感谢Bruce Caldwell在这个项目早期的慷慨建议，也感谢三位匿名评论者深刻、有帮助的批评和建议。

And I am thankful especially to my early mentor, Bill Field, who introduced me to Hayek’s work. I still recall the day, nearly 40 years ago, that Bill handed me his copy of Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order and suggested that I read “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” “You won’t understand it all,” he warned. “But read it anyway. You’ll get enough of it to understand that you should re-read it in the future. It’s jam-packed with layers of insights.” Bill was right.

我还要特别感谢我早期的导师Bill Field，是他向我介绍了哈耶克的工作。我依然记得大约40年前的那一天，Bill递给我他复印的哈耶克的《个人主义和经济秩序》并建议我阅读《知识在社会中运用》。“你不会全部都读懂”，他警告说，“但还是去读。你会有足够的收获并且明白你未来应该再回来重读。它塞满了好几层的洞见。”Bill是对的。

Donald J. Boudreaux

Donald J. Boudreaux is Professor of Economics at George Mason University, a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute, and Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Donald J. Boudreaux是乔治梅森大学经济学教授，弗雷泽研究所高级研究员，乔治梅森大学Mercatus中心的Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair。