Hayek framed socialism’s rise as primarily a moral problem.

Evidence

In December 1961, Hayek addressed the Congress of American Industry on ‘The Moral Elements of Free Enterprise.’ The congress, held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, was sponsored by The National Association of Manufacturers, which had a long history of challenging state welfare and organised labour, and attempting to ‘sell free enterprise the way Proctor and Gamble sold soap’. Hayek spoke alongside the professor and executive member of the American Meat Institute in Chicago, Herrell DeGraff, and his fellow MPS members and journalists John Davenport and Felix Morley, all of whom addressed questions of morals and values. Hayek’s message was that free enterprise required ‘not only moral standards but moral standards of a particular kind’. Like the manufacturers he was addressing, Hayek and his MPS companions had long been convinced that a market order required a conducive moral order. From their perspective, the rise of socialism and social democracy was, first of all, a moral problem. No free society would survive, the Austrian economist told this sympathetic business audience, without a moral climate that instils personal responsibility and regards it as just that people are rewarded materially based on how valuable their services are to their fellows. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 23

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how market order is legitimated through moral discourse — parallels modern arguments that markets need a moral foundation (e.g. ‘moral capitalism’).