Abstract
In spite of his reputation as a defender of freedom, Hayek did not value human rights, claiming it to be a relatively recent concept derived from combining ‘the old civil rights’ with rights derived from Marxism. His conception of freedom is a minimal form of freedom, which serves as a very useful tool in promoting the superiority of the ‘free’ market economy. His concept of freedom includes economic freedom in the ‘free’ market (with negative freedom as components) while, at the same time, excluding positive freedom and ignoring ethical and moral values. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that Hayek accepted the invitation to visit Chile during General Pinochet’s dictatorship—or that he claimed ‘personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.’ In their efforts to preserve Hayek’s reputation by providing justifications for his decision, Bruce Caldwell and Leonidas Montes resort to providing incomplete information and concealing certain facts, while misrepresenting others. Furthermore, the discrepancies between the English and Spanish language versions of ‘Friedrich Hayek and His Visits to Chile’ (in terms of the information included and omitted) appear to have been strategic decisions based on the audiences being targeted—which suggests a deliberate and concerted effort to mislead their readers. They failed to fully enlighten their English- and Spanish-speaking readers about this ‘controversial episode’ in Hayek’s life. This chapter demonstrates that they were overzealous in their defense of Hayek: they present him almost as a naïve and saintly figure—in the face of persuasive evidence to the contrary.
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Friedrich Hayek, interviewed by Robert Chitester date unspecified 1978 (Centre for Oral History Research, University of California, Los Angeles), http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/.
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Hayek (1982 [1976], 183, 184, n2) directed his readers to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948) and an ‘intellectual background’ report (‘Human Rights, Comments and Interpretations’), a symposium edited by UNESCO which contains in the Appendix a ‘Memorandum Circulated by UNESCO on the Theoretical Bases of the Rights of Men’ plus a ‘Report of the UNESCO Committee on the Theoretical Bases of the Human Rights’ (also described as ‘UNESCO Committee on the Principles of the Rights of Men’), which, according to Hayek, explained that their ‘efforts’ had been directed towards ‘reconciling’ the two different ‘complementary’ working concepts of human rights, of which one ‘started, from the premises of inherent individual rights’ while the other was ‘based on Marxist principles,’ and at finding ‘some common measure of the two tendencies.’
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Ismael Huerta (1977–1984) and Arturo Niño de Zepeda (1984–1989) were two examples of former military commanders who served as Rectors of Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María.
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Pedro Ibáñez Ojeda’s father, Adolfo Ibáñez, was a very successful businessman who served as general manager of Compañía Comercial e Industrial Tres Montes S.A., which has always dominated the trade of coffee, tea, vine and oil in Chile. In 1951, Pedro Ibáñez Ojeda succeeded his father in the same role and continued to diversify the products of the company into other areas including juice, gelatins, and condiments.
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The Mont Pèlerin Society was ‘originally financed by a group of aristocratic families’ and has always been supported by ‘the top financial aristocracy of Europe’ (Peterson 1999, 122). ‘The connections between the business world and that of think tanks and intellectual organizations would only deepen over the years’ (Phillips-Fein 2009, 296).
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The list of Earhart Foundation fellows also included a number of other Nobel-winning economists, including Gary Becker, James M. Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Friedman, Robert Lucas, Daniel McFadden, Vernon L. Smith, and Stigler, all of whom played significant roles in promoting ‘free’ market economic policies around the world.
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One of the largest recipients of Earhart funding was the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a ‘global network of more than 450 free-market organizations in over 90 countries’ originally founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher (1915–1988), to provide ‘the ideas and resources needed to advance the cause of liberty’ (https://www.atlasnetwork.org/about/our-story). After reading The Road to Serfdom, Fisher contacted Hayek to tell him that ‘he agreed with every word in the book, and was going to go into politics to save Britain from socialism.’ ‘Fisher asked Hayek ‘for his advice as to what he should do to further the cause, and Hayek advised him not to go into politics, but instead to start a public policy think tank’ (Mirowski 2014, 17, 18). ‘Several years later, after achieving success as an entrepreneur (creating the first factory-style chicken farm in Britain), Fisher decided the most effective way to act on Hayek’s advice would be by establishing an independent research institute that would bring innovative, market-based perspectives to issues of public policy. In 1955, he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London, which gradually gained credibility and laid the intellectual groundwork for what later became the Thatcher Revolution… Friends like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Margaret Thatcher applauded the idea of replicating the IEA model far and wide.’ The Atlas Economic Research Foundation’s main objective was ‘to coordinate activities and corporate funding among the network of European and American think tanks and to extend it by developing and financing a group of neoliberal organizations outside Western Europe and the United States.’ It played an important role in setting up the Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo (ILD), ‘one of the first generation of neoliberal think tanks in the South’ (Mitchell 2009, 396, 397).
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Friedman was considered to be the ‘intellectual leader’ and ‘primary architect of the Chicago School’ because of his defense of laissez-faire capitalism, his strong opposition to state intervention, and his defense of ‘freedom rather than equality’ (Van Overtveldt 2007, 8).
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Hernán Büchi obtained an MBA at Columbia University.
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The Chicago School was ‘established in the immediate postwar era as a complement to the Mont Pelèrin Society, and was dedicated to the reconciliation of the nascent neoliberal ideas with a rather simplistic form of neoclassical economics’ (Mirowski 2014, 9).
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Four academic centers played prominent roles in the development of neo-liberalism in the twentieth century: the Freiburg School (Walter Eucken), the Austrian School of Economics (Hayek), the London School of Economics (Edwin Cannan), and the Chicago School of Economics.
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In addition to the financial funding and support provided by the CIA, El Mercurio also received funding from ITT, which owned 70% of the Chilean Telephone Company, to finance a propaganda campaign to prevent Allende from being elected, as well as a subsequent media campaign that contributed to the overthrow of his government (Gustafson 2007, 182). Significantly, the first economy minister named by Pinochet was ‘Fernando Léniz, president of the El Mercurio newspaper’ (O’Shaughnessy 2000, 137).
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Filip, B. (2018). Friedrich Hayek and His Visits to Chile: Some Austrian Misrepresentations. In: Leeson, R. (eds) Hayek: A Collaborative Biography. Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91358-2_11
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