Friedrich Hayek

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Friedrich Hayek : biography

8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992

New Right critiques

Alain de Benoist of the Nouvelle Droite (New Right) produced a highly critical essay on Hayek’s work in an issue of Telos, citing the flawed assumptions behind Hayek’s idea of "spontaneous order" and the authoritarian, totalizing implications of his free-market ideology.

Hayek’s views on Pinochet’s Chile

Hayek visited Chile in the 1970s and 1980s during the Government Junta of general Augusto Pinochet and accepted being named Honorary Chairman of the Centro de Estudios Públicos, the think tank formed by the economists who transformed Chile into a free market economy. According to Corey Robin: "Hayek admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that he decided to hold a meeting of his Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar, the seaside resort where the coup against Allende was planned. In 1978 he wrote to The Times that he had ‘not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.’"Robin, Corey (October 19, 2009) , The Nation. accessed July 12, 2012

Asked about the liberal, non-democratic rule by a Chilean interviewer, Hayek is translated from German to Spanish to English as having said, "As long term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. […] Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression – and this is valid for South America – is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government."Greg Grandin, professor of history, New York University,

, pp. 172,173, Metropolitan, 2006, ISBN 0-8050-7738-3.Dan Avnôn,