“People are fully alive to the superstition in priests,” Lord Salisbury once remarked. “In time they will find out that professors may be just as bad.” Salisbury was a Conservative prime minister of Britain in the late nineteenth century, and his scepticism was to be sorely missed during the twentieth century, when religious superstition in the West gave way to the academic and political kind. And it is with a notable example of such folly that Alan Ebenstein introduces his new biography of F. A. Hayek, the economist and social philosopher who won the Nobel Prize in 1974.[1] The Soviet Union, wrote Paul Samuelson of Harvard, also a Nobel Prize winner, “is proof that contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.” “Proof” is not a word economists should use lightly, but the sentence still features in his textbook in 1989, during a decade in which the Soviet system was collapsing, and no less than 364 academic economists in Britain joined together in a letter to The Times to tell Margaret Thatcher, wrongly as it turned out, that her economic policies could not work. The moral to be learned from this example is that if you see a herd of academics advancing on you with proof of something, run for your lives. And preferably, don’t argue. The casuistry won’t be worth the candle.

A talent for undermining common academic superstitions certainly marked Hayek, who spent his life in