Epistemic institutionalism

The temptation when reviewing a book is to talk about the one you, the reviewer, would have written, but which the person who actually wrote the book under consideration was not wise enough to write themselves. I am going to try to avoid that failing by engaging in an immanent critique of Boettke’s F. A. Hayek, considering it on its own terms and seeing how well it succeeds in fulfilling the goals set by its author. So, what is Boettke’s goal? The book, we are told, is “not a proper intellectual history. (pp. xii, xiii). Rather, it “is the story of the evolution of a perspective of economic, political economic, and social philosophic thought about how the world works.” The ultimate objective is to highlight the evolutionary potential of Hayek’s ideas, by which is meant “what his ideas still have to say to us in our context and in our debates” (p. xiv).