I have started putting together my next post responding to Corey Robin’s Hayek scholarship, this time concerning Robin’s claims about Hayek’s views on Pinochet. I have to say that I’ve gotten interested in the question on its own merits, so I’ve decided to reply to the post with, what I hope will be, a bit of new scholarship. I’m presently in contact with the folks in charge of the Hayek archive over at Hoover. I’m trying to figure out why Hayek stopped talking about Pinochet, when he could have kept heralding Pinochet’s supposed successes.

My theory at the moment is that he stopped largely because Margaret Thatcher rebuked him for his support in a private letter after he wrote to her about some of Chile’s economic successes (PDF of Thatcher’s letter here, from the Thatcher archive). According to his secretary, Charlotte Cubitt, the rebuke led him to sulk for weeks. But before I can say anything defensible, I need to review some non-digitized documents. I’m not sure how long it will take to get them, but I hope to have them in the next few weeks.

At that time, I’ll also discuss (a) whether there is any interesting Hayekian rationale for Hayek’s various claims about the Pinochet regime and (b) what I think all this Pinochet talk is really about, and why I think it matters.

I have to admit another reason for stalling: I fear by wading into the debate, I’ll give Robin the opportunity to focus on what I say about Hayek and Pinochet rather than my criticisms of his Hayek scholarship. Since the validity of his Hayek scholarship is far more philosophically important than the Hayek-Pinochet question, I think it’s best to focus on these more enduring questions, at least for the moment.

Fortunately, Henry Farrell over at CT has already helped me achieve that goal by focusing on what I say about Hayek’s thought. Unfortunately, he hasn’t yet engaged my claims about the text. But I’m hopeful someone over there will at least try to challenge me on the matter. There are many careful political theorists and political philosophers at CT, so I’m staying positive. Maybe we can get a productive discussion going.

Hopefully any such discussion will recall that I’m trying to show that Hayek is not an elitist in Robin’s sense (insofar as he has a clear sense of elitism in mind, which I don’t think he does). Perhaps there’s some definition of elitism on which Hayek counts as an elitist, but it had better be a sense that doesn’t trivialize the term. For example, Robin’s thesis isn’t remotely interesting if elitism means “believing in income inequality” or “believing that a minority of people are responsible for economic progress.”