Hayek saw trade-union power as the thorniest question for reviving a free economy.

Evidence

In their opinion, arrangements between organized labor and capital paved the way to the institutionalization of a quasi-corporatist regime, which implied a terrible threat to the market economy and, in their view, a free society. That is precisely what one of the most prominent of neoliberal thinkers, Friedrich A. Hayek, argued in his famous pamphlet published in 1944, The Road to Serfdom (Hayek: 1993 , 145–148). In fact, Hayek identified this issue as the thorniest question that neoliberals would have to tackle in the postwar world. … Hayek delegated to the MPS the task of formulating “an appropriate program of labor or trade-union policy.” As he insisted, “if there is to be any hope of a return to a free economy, the question of how the powers of trade-unions can be appropriately delimited by law as well as in fact is one of the most important of all the questions which we must give our attention” (Hayek 1949, 117). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 953

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly did Hayek’s labor-union position in The Road to Serfdom compare to his later, more explicit anti-union writings in Law, Legislation and Liberty?
• XREF: Connects to general histories of the MPS founding (April 1947) and to analyses of corporatism as the enemy category in liberal thought. — connects to: Hayek framed unions as distortions of spontaneous order requiring legal disenfranchisement — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 978

Broader Connections

• Hayek framed unions as distortions of spontaneous order requiring legal disenfranchisement #expands (1.00) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 978