Henry Hazlitt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He was a collateral descendant of the British essayist William Hazlitt,[2] but grew up in relative poverty, his father having died when Hazlitt was an infant. His early heroes were Herbert Spencer and William James, and his first ambition was for an academic career in psychology and philosophy. He attended New York's City College, but left after only a short time to support his twice-widowed mother.[3]
As he later wrote, his short time at college "had a greater influence than may at first sight be supposed, not as much from the knowledge gained there, as from the increased consciousness of the knowledge which I still had to gain and the consequent ambition to attain it."[4]
Career
Early accomplishments
Hazlitt started his career at The Wall Street Journal as secretary to the managing editor when he was still a teenager, and his interest in the field of economics began while working there. His studies led him to The Common Sense of Political Economy by Philip Wicksteed which, he later said, was his first "tremendous influence" in the subject.[5] Hazlitt published his first book, Thinking as a Science at age 21.[6] He wrote the book because he realized—through his intense process of self-education—that it was more important to think clearly than to merely absorb information. As he explains in its opening pages:
Every man knows there are evils in the world which need setting right. Every man has pretty definite ideas as to what these evils are. But to most men one in particular stands out vividly. To some, in fact, this stands out with such startling vividness that they lose sight of other evils, or look upon them as the natural consequences of their own particular evil-in-chief.
To the Socialist this evil is the capitalistic system; to the prohibitionist it is intemperance; to the feminist it is the subjection of women; to the clergyman it is the decline of religion; to Andrew Carnegie it is war; to the staunch Republican it is the Democratic Party, and so on, ad infinitum.
I, too, have a pet little evil, to which in more passionate moments I am apt to attribute all the others. This evil is the neglect of thinking. And when I say thinking I mean real thinking, independent thinking, hard thinking.[6]
Military service
During World War I, he served in the Army Air Service. While residing in Brooklyn, he enlisted in New York City on February 11, 1918, and served with the Aviation Section of the Signal Enlisted Reserve Corps until July 9, 1918. He was then in Princeton, New Jersey, at the US School of Military Aeronautics until October 22, when he was sent to AS Camp Dick in Dallas, Texas, for a few weeks until November 7, and he was honorably discharged from service with the rank of private first class on December 12, 1918. He returned to New York, residing at Washington Square Park for many years.[7]
Editor and author
In the early 1920s, he was financial editor of The
W. W. Norton suggested he write an official biography of their author Bertrand Russell, Hazlitt spent "a good deal of time," as he described it, with the famous philosopher.[4] Lord Russell "so admired the young journalist's talent" that he had agreed with Norton's proposal,[8] but the project ended after nearly two years of work when Russell declared his intention to write it on his own as an autobiography instead.[4]
During the interwar decades, a vibrant period in the history of
left-leaning journal, The Nation (1930–1933). In connection with his work for The Nation, Hazlitt also edited A Practical Program for America (1932), a compilation of Great Depression policy considerations. After a series of public debates with socialist Louis Fischer, Hazlitt and The Nation parted ways.[9]
In 1933, Hazlitt published The Anatomy of Criticism, an extended "trialogue" examining the nature of literary criticism and appreciation, regarded by some to be an early refutation of literary deconstruction.[8][10] In the same year, he became H. L. Mencken's chosen successor as editor of the literary magazine, The American Mercury, which Mencken had founded with George Jean Nathan,[11] as a result of which appointment Vanity Fair included Hazlitt among those hailed in its regular "Hall of Fame" photo feature.[2] Due to increasing differences with the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf Sr., he served in that role for only a brief time, but Mencken wrote that Hazlitt was the "only competent critic of the arts that I have heard of who was at the same time a competent economist, of practical as well as theoretical training," adding that he "is one of the few economists in human history who could really write."[a]
From 1934 to 1946, Hazlitt was the principal editorial writer on finance and economics for The New York Times, writing both a signed weekly column and most of the unsigned editorials on economics, producing a considerable volume of work.[7] Following World War II, he came into conflict with Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, over the newly established Bretton Woods system which created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Hazlitt opposed the Bretton Woods agreement, primarily fearing the risk of inflation. After agreeing not to write on the topic, he looked for another venue for his work, deciding on Newsweek magazine, for which he wrote a signed column, "Business Tides", from 1946 to 1966.[8]
According to Hazlitt, the greatest influence on his writing in economics was the work of
F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom to the American reading public. His 1944 review in The New York Times caused Reader's Digest, where Eastman served as roving editor, to publish one of its trademark condensations, bringing the future Nobel laureate's work to a vast audience.[13]
Author Tom Malone contends that Hazlitt distinguished himself from other economists largely by his skill as a writer:
What set Hazlitt apart from other writers on economics was the incredible clarity of his writing and his ability to make the subject interesting to laymen. He did this by focusing on principles, using practical examples, and writing in a direct and conversational style. He also avoided the technical jargon and reliance on statistics that stud the writing of most economists—to the bane of most readers. When H. L. Mencken selected Hazlitt to succeed him as literary editor at the American Mercury, he called Hazlitt the "only competent critic of the arts that I have heard of who was at the same time a competent economist," as well as "one of the few economists in human history who could really write."
classical liberal political views. He was the founding vice president of the Foundation for Economic Education, which also acquired his large personal library in the 1980s. Established by Leonard Read in 1946, FEE is considered to be the first "think tank" for free-market ideas. He was also one of the original members of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.[15]
With John Chamberlain (and
Harry Truman on the issue of communism, "undiscriminatingly" according to some critics, but upon becoming editor, Hazlitt changed the magazine's policy to one of support for President Truman.[17]
The Freeman is widely considered to be an important forerunner to the conservative
William F. Buckley, Jr., which from the start included many of the same contributing editors.[18] Hazlitt himself was on the masthead of National Review, either as a contributing editor or, later, as contributor, from its inception in 1955 until his death in 1993. Differences existed between the journals: The Freeman under Hazlitt was more secular and presented a wider range of foreign policy opinion than the later National Review.[17]
Even prior to her success with The Fountainhead, the novelist Ayn Rand was a friend of both Hazlitt and his wife, Frances, and Hazlitt introduced Rand to Mises, bringing together the two figures who would become most associated with the defense of pure laissez-faire capitalism.[19] The two became admirers of Hazlitt and of one another.[20]
Hazlitt became well known both through his articles and by frequently debating prominent politicians on the radio, including: Vice President
right-libertarian circles, such as at the Mises Institute.[27]Ayn Rand called it a "magnificent job of theoretical exposition", while Congressman Ron Paul ranks it with the works of Frédéric Bastiat and Friedrich Hayek.[28] Hayek himself praised the work, saying that "Henry Hazlitt's explanation of how a price system works is a true classic: timeless, correct, painlessly instructive." Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman described it as "a brilliant performance. It says precisely the things which need most saying and says them with rare courage and integrity. I know of no other modern book from which the intelligent layman can learn so much about the basic truths of economics in so short a time." In 1996, Laissez Faire Books issued a 50th anniversary edition with an introduction by publisher and presidential candidate Steve Forbes.[29][30] Economist Thomas Sowell's work has been described as following in the "Bastiat-Hazlitt tradition" of economic exposition.[31][32]
In A New Constitution Now (1942), published during
market pricing
-system, private ownership of capital goods and competitive markets.
Personal life
Henry was born to Stuart Clark and Bertha (Zauner) Hazlitt on November 28, 1894, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They resided at 819 North Broad Street in Philadelphia. The Hazlitt family was originally from England, although his paternal grandmother was from Ireland. His maternal grandparents were German immigrants. Henry's father, a clerk, died of diabetes when Henry was only five months old. His mother, Bertha, then married Frederick E. Piebes, who was engaged in manufacturing, and they resided in Brooklyn, where Henry was raised. Henry is listed on the 1905 New York state census as Henry S. Piebes, and he is listed on Frederick's will as Henry Hazlitt Piebes, Frederick's adopted son. His stepfather died in 1907, leaving Henry to support his mother and probably leading to the ambition that enabled him to work at the Wall Street Journal while he was still a teenager.[40]
In 1929, Hazlitt married Valerie Earle, daughter of the noted photographer and
Vitagraph film director William P. S. Earle. They were married by the pacifist minister John Haynes Holmes, but later divorced.[41] In 1936, he married Frances Kanes, the author of The Concise Bible,[42] with whom he later collaborated to produce an anthology of the Stoic philosophers, The Wisdom of the Stoics: Selections from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius (1984). They were married until Frances' death in 1991.[43]
Hazlitt died at the age of 98 in Fairfield, Connecticut. At the time of his death, he resided in Wilton, Connecticut.
Legacy
Hazlitt was a prolific writer,[44] authoring 25 works in his lifetime.
Ludwig von Mises said at a dinner honoring Hazlitt: "In this age of the great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you are our leader. You have indefatigably fought against the step-by-step advance of the powers anxious to destroy everything that human civilization has created over a long period of centuries... You are the economic conscience of our country and of our nation."[29]
Hazlitt Policy Center
On 1 March 2019, the Young Americans for Liberty announced the launch of the Hazlitt Policy Center "to provide YAL's elected officials with modern legislation, facts, and strategies to give them the extra muscle they need to be effective liberty legislators."[46][47]
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 Great Britain, revised and rereleased with this title in 1966.)
Rules for Living: The Ethics of Social Cooperation, 1999 (an abridgment by Bettina Bien Greaves of Hazlitt's The Foundations of Morality.)
Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt, 2011
Articles
Ludwig von Mises Institute
, 1 August 2007.
References
Notes
^The quotation appears on the book jacket of the first edition of Economics in One Lesson, which may or may not have been its first appearance.
Citations
^Doherty, B., Radicals for Capitalism: a Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), pp. 33, 91–94, 97, 123, 156, 159, 162–167, 189, 198–199, 203, 213, 231, 238 and 279; Nash, G. H., The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976) pp. 418–420.
^Greaves, Bettina Bien, "Biography of Henry Hazlitt". the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Retrieved February 16, 2011.; Henry Hazlitt: an Appreciation, Foundation for Economic Education, 1989
Regnery
, p.138; Hamilton, Charles H., "The Freeman: the Early Years," The Freeman, Dec. 1984, vol. 34, iss. 12.
, pp. 141–143; cf. Branden, Barbara, The Passion of Ayn Rand, Doubleday, 1986, pp. 168–169, 181n.
The Objectivist Newsletter, "Review: Planned Chaos by Ludwig von Mises," vol. 1, no. 1, Jan. 1962), and the second issue which declared Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson to be "a classic in the literature of freedom" and "the finest primer available for students of capitalism" (The Objectivist Newsletter, "Review: Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt," vol. 1, no. 2, Feb. 1962); Mises invited Rand to attend his seminar as an "honored guest" (Burns, Goddess of the Market, p. 177) and praised her novel Atlas Shrugged
as "a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and political parties" and "a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society" in a letter to Rand (dated January 23, 1958, quoted in Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, p. 996.); and see, McConnell, Scott, 100 Voices: an Oral History of Ayn Rand, "Sylvester Petro," New American Library, 2010, pp. 165–170.
, "Book Review: Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell," Freedom Daily, April 2001.
^"Book Review: Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell". Future of Freedom Foundation. April 2001. Archived from the original on February 26, 2002. Retrieved March 6, 2011. In Basic Economics, Sowell follows in the Bastiat-Hazlitt tradition of educating the reader in the elementary principles of sound, free-market economics through criticisms and critiques of dozens of domestic and international economic policies, with historical examples ranging from the ancient world to the most recent government follies.
^Rockwell, Llewellyn H. (August 1, 2007). "Biography of Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993)". Mises Institute. Retrieved July 8, 2019. In 1959, Hazlitt came out with The Failure of the "New Economics," an extraordinary line-by-line refutation of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory.
^White, Nathaniel R. (July 27, 2019). "Sixtieth Anniversary of Hazlitt's The Failure of the 'New Economics'". Mises Institute. Retrieved July 10, 2021. Now though I have analyzed Keynes's General Theory in the following pages theorem by theorem, chapter by chapter, and sometimes even sentence by sentence, to what to some readers may appear a tedious length, I have been unable to find in it a single important doctrine that is both true and original. What is original in the book is not true; and what is true is not original. In fact, as we shall find, even much that is fallacious in the book is not original, but can be found in a score of previous writers.
Henry Hazlitt, "The Early History of FEE," The Freeman, March 1984 (article is excerpted from his remarks at the
Leonard E. Read
Memorial Conference on Freedom, November 18, 1983.)
Llewellyn H. Rockwell
, "Henry Hazlitt: Journalist of the Century," The Freeman, May 1995.
Murray N. Rothbard, "Henry Hazlitt Celebrates 80th Birthday," Human Events
, November 20, 1974, reprinted in The Libertarian Forum, December 1974.
Don Boudreaux
, and Sanford Ikeda:, "An Interview with Henry Hazlitt", Austrian Economics Newsletter, Spring 1984.
"Reason Interview: Henry Hazlitt", Reason, December 1984.
Hans F. Sennholz
, edit., The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt, Foundation for Economic Education, 1993.
Ludwig von Mises Institute
.
Jeffrey Tucker, "Henry Hazlitt: The People's Austrian" in Randall Holcombe, edit., The Great Austrian Economists (2009; originally published as 15 Great Austrian Economists, 1999), pp. 167–179.
