Pache.co

At Oxford, Emilio and I were both liberals in the classical (and not the contemporary American) sense, with me perhaps being more conservative than him. He was then as now a quiet, thoughtful, erudite scholar. We were both very interested in Hayek’s ideas. I had first met Hayek in 1980 when he came to Iceland and gave two lectures, and one of our teachers at Oxford, Dr. John Gray of Jesus College, shared our interest in Hayek and was himself working on a book on him. In the spring of 1983, Hayek visited us in Oxford, and we took him to a Chinese restaurant, Xian on Banbury Road. Over dinner, we had a long and fruitful discussion with him, not least about the two most prominent schools of free market economics, the Chicago School of Frank H. Knight, Milton Friedman, George J. Stigler, and Gary S. Becker, and the Austrian School of Hayek himself, Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises and to some extent Joseph Schumpeter.

We kept in touch with Hayek, and in the spring of 1985 he told us that he would be in London one day and that we could meet. I wrote to Leonard Liggio who was in charge of the Hayek Fund which was supposed to encourage liberal scholarship, and he gave us a small grant which enabled us to invite Hayek to dinner at the Ritz in London. There were five of us at the dinner, Emilio, Chandran Kukathas, Stephen Macedo, Andrew Melnyk, and I. Our guest was in a very good mood and told us a lot about his life and works.

For example, Hayek recalled that at a meeting with Pope John Paul II (on 22 December 1980) he had used the word ‘superstitions’ about certain ideas which might be useful, but which were neither analytically nor empirically true. When he noticed that the holy father was not very happy with his choice of words, he gently suggested that perhaps ‘symbolic truths’ would be more appropriate. Pope John Paul immediately agreed and seemed quite pleased. Although himself an agnostic, Hayek always thought that the classical liberal movement should regard the christian churches as allies. He knew that they had been almost the only centres of resistance to European totalitarianism in the period of what we could call ‘the thirty years war’ from 1914 to 1945. During our conversation, it came out that Hayek was not sympathetic to ‘liberation theology’, then much in vogue in Latin America. ‘Paradoxically, liberation can be the opposite of liberty. It can indeed destroy liberty. We should not liberate ourselves from our liberal heritage, for example, or the rule of law,’ Hayek said.

Hayek told us that he had personally met four American presidents. The first one, unbelievably, was Calvin Coolidge in 1923. Hayek was then in America as the research assistant of an economics professor, and when the American Economic Association held its general meeting in Washington DC, it was small enough that the President could invite all the participants to a reception in the White House (on 27 December 1923). The second president Hayek met was Herbert Hoover but that was long after he had left office. During John F. Kennedy’s presidency he was once invited to the White House and again once by Ronald Reagan. ‘The interesting contrast between them,’ Hayek told us, ‘was that Kennedy seemed much less authentic than the professional actor Reagan. Kennedy pretended to have read several books of mine which of course he had not done, whereas Reagan told me that he had read one of my books, “The Road to Serfdom,” and that he had liked it a lot. Reagan had also been influenced by my old mentor Mises and by that brilliant journalist Frederic Bastiat.’ (The meeting with Reagan took place on 17 November 1983.)

Indeed, sometimes dreams come true, as can be seen in the case of Liberty Fund in Indianapolis. This venerable institution was established in 1960 by a successful local businessman, Pierre F. Goodrich, an avid reader of classical literature as well as a passionate believer in liberty as the sweetest, and healthiest, fruit of Western civilisation. Liberty Fund is unique as an institution in that its focus is not on short-term policies, but rather on the conservative-liberal political tradition of the West, in a broad sense. It regularly holds colloquia which engage in what could be called Socratic dialogues, without any preset conclusions, and it publishes classical political texts in accessible formats, both on paper and online, including the collected works of Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, James M. Buchanan, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. Dr. Emilio Pacheco has worked for Liberty Fund since 1991, as President from 2016 to 2020, and now as Senior Vice President and Pierre F. Goodrich Resident Scholar; and he has made a significant contribution to the remarkable activities of this institution.

I still remember how intellectually stimulating my two first Liberty Fund colloquia were in Oxford in the early 1980s when I had the chance to exchange ideas and arguments with such distinguished scholars as James M. Buchanan, Robert Nozick, and David Friedman. I can also personally testify to the impact and usefulness of the publishing activities of Liberty Fund: It helped me a lot when I was writing my recent book in two volumes about twenty-four conservative-liberal thinkers that Liberty Fund had made many of their books available online, by Hume, Burke, Bastiat, Tocqueville, Spencer, Sumner, Oakeshott and many others. Goodrich had even anticipated my own discovery of Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson as a pioneer of classical liberal thought: Sturluson’s works were on Goodrich’s list of thinkers who had contributed to our understanding of what it means to be free and responsible individuals, as visitors to the Goodrich Seminar Room at Wabash College can see for themselves.

In the same way as monasteries were sanctuaries for scholars in the Middle Ages, Liberty Fund has been a sanctuary for conservatives and classical liberals since its foundation, but more than that: it has been an inspiring forum for the discussion and development of conservative-liberal ideas. Emilio Pacheco and his colleagues at Liberty Fund well illustrate the old fact which Hayek used to stress that in the long run ideas are more powerful than special interests, that the pen is mightier than the sword.