Henry Hazlitt

File:Henry hazlitt.jpg

Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt (November 28, 1894 – July 8, 1993) was a libertarian philosopher, economist, and journalist for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, and The American Mercury, among other publications.

History

In childhood his family's finances were meager, his father having died when Henry was an infant, and he left college after a year and a half to become a journalist. He was credited with bringing Austrian economics to an English-speaking audience. Hazlitt was a prolific writer, authoring some 25 books in his lifetime.

Economics

Hazlitt is well-known for his book Economics in One Lesson, but he also wrote other books, among which are a major work on ethics, The Foundations of Morality, and The Failure of the New Economics, a detailed chapter-by-chapter critique of Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (of which he paraphrased a quote attributed to Samuel Johnson that he was "unable to find in it a single doctrine that is both true and original. What is original in the book is not true; and what is true is not original." In the preface to the General Theory, Keynes had written: "Those who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right.")

Affiliation

Hazlitt was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine.

From 1997 to 2002 there was an organization called The Henry Hazlitt Foundation which actively promoted libertarian networking online, especially through its website Free-Market.Net. This organization was named in honor of Hazlitt because he was known for introducing a wide range of people to libertarian ideas through his writing and for helping free-market advocates connect with each other. For example, he introduced Ayn Rand to free-market circles in New York, and secured a position at New York University for Ludwig von Mises. It is important to note that the foundation was started after Hazlitt's passing and had no official connection with his estate. He wrote nearly 30 books.

Books

• Thinking as a Science, 1915
• The Way to Will Power, 1922
• A Practical Program for America, 1933
• The Anatomy of Criticism, 1933
• Instead of Dictatorship, 1933
• A New Constitution Now, 1942
• Freedom in America: The Freeman (with Virgil Jordan), 1945
• The Full Employment Bill: An Analysis, 1945
• Economics in One Lesson, 1946
• Economics in One Lesson (Spanish), 1946
• Will Dollars Save the World?, 1947
• Forum: Do Current Events Indicate Greater Government Regulation, Nationalization, or Socialization?, Proceedings from a Conference Sponsored by The Economic and Business Foundation, 1948
• The Illusions of Point Four, 1950
• The Great Idea, 1951 (titled Time Will Run Back in Britain, revised and rereleased with this title in 1966)
• The Free Man's Library, 1956
• The Failure of the 'New Economics': An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies, 1959
• The Critics of Keynesian Economics (ed.), 1960
• What You Should Know About Inflation, 1960
• The Foundations of Morality, 1964
• Man vs. The Welfare State, 1969
• The Conquest of Poverty, 1973
• To Stop Inflation, Return to Gold, 1974
• The Inflation Crisis and How to Resolve It, 1978
• From Bretton Woods to World Inflation, 1984
• The Wisdom of the Stoics: Selections from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, 1984
• The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt, 1993

Notes

• Henry Hazlitt: A Giant of Liberty. Ludwig von Mises Institute. 1994. ISBN 0-945466-16-1.

Articles

See Bibliography of Henry Hazlitt for complete list.

External links

• Directory from the Open Directory Project