Hayek and Simons formed an intellectual alliance by 1939

Evidence

Hayek and Simons’s intellectual friendship dated back as early as 1934 when Hayek sent an appreciation of Simons’s Positive Program for Laissez Faire (SPRL, Hayek to Simons, December 1, 1934, box 3, file 40). By 1939, a close comradeship had developed: Simons then commiserated with Hayek over the British political landscape: “For England, however, it seems impossible to hold out even a slender hope. England, to be sure, may still be saved, but not by her own actions—only by the example of a wise and successful liberal program in the United States. So, I welcome your contribution to discussion here and, hoping that you will again write for American readers, I suggest that this may be the most useful contribution you can make toward the cause of liberalism in England and elsewhere.” Hayek had earlier praised A Positive Program for Laissez Faire: “I have the greatest sympathy for the general spirit which it expresses and I feel that it does raise the problems which economists ought to discuss to-day more than others.” — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 720

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the network-formation story — the Hayek-Simons correspondence shows how Chicago’s law school became a beachhead for American neoliberalism.
• SHARE: Simons’s 1939 letter arguing England could only be saved by American example is a sharp, quotable exchange worth sending to someone studying Chicago-school history.
• XREF: connects to: LSE and Chicago economists formed a tight transatlantic alliance against collectivism — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 87; Henry Simons independently converged on Hayek’s politics-economics synthesis in the 1930s — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 135