Henry Hazlitt: life, ideas and books

Life

Henry Hazlitt was born in Philadelphia in 1894. He worked as a newspaper journalist and literary editor, at The New York Sun from 1925 to 1929 and at The Nation from 1930 to 1933, and edited The American Mercury in 1933 and 1934. From 1934 to 1946 he wrote editorials on finance and economics for The New York Times, and he then wrote a column for Newsweek from 1946 to 1966.

He co-edited and later edited The Freeman, was a founding vice president of the Foundation for Economic Education, joined the Mont Pelerin Society at its founding in 1947 and was a member of the National Review masthead from 1955. He died in 1993 at the age of 98.

Ideas

Hazlitt was a layman's economist in the Austrian tradition, a defender of free markets, sound money and limited government, and a steady critic of inflation and government intervention. His central teaching, laid out in Economics in One Lesson (1946), was that good economics looks at the long-run consequences of a policy for all groups, not only the immediate effect on one, a lesson he drew from Bastiat's contrast between what is seen and what is not seen.

He criticised Keynesian economics at length in The Failure of the "New Economics" (1959), a point-by-point reply to Keynes's General Theory. In The Foundations of Morality (1964) he defended a utilitarian ethics, and he held to agnosticism on religion, which set him apart from many of his allies on the right.

Major works

• Thinking as a Science (1916).
• Economics in One Lesson (1946).
• The Great Idea (1951), later reissued as Time Will Run Back.
• The Failure of the "New Economics" (1959).
• The Foundations of Morality (1964).
• Man vs. the Welfare State (1969).
• The Conquest of Poverty (1973).

Why conservatives read him

Economics in One Lesson is probably the most widely given introduction to free-market economics in English, having sold around a million copies and appeared in ten languages. Hazlitt popularised the ideas of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek for general readers, and he reviewed and promoted their books at a time when few journalists took them seriously. In 1981 Ronald Reagan named him among the intellectual figures who shaped conservative thought.

He stands for the economic-liberal wing of the movement, and his agnosticism and utilitarianism put him at odds with traditionalists. Even so, his clear prose and his method of tracing a policy's hidden costs are widely imitated, and his book is still a standard first read for students of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school.