Hayek’s 1945 Finlay Memorial Lecture: Tracing the origins and evolution of his ‘true’ individualism

Hayek’s original 1945 University College Dublin lecture outlined the origins and evolution of two different interpretations of ‘individualism’, comparing and contrasting what Hayek terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ individualism notwithstanding the misleading contemporary interpretations and distorted perceptions of the assumptions underlining ‘true’ individualism. Hayek developed and extended the Scottish Enlightenment theory of spontaneous order originally formulated by Adam Ferguson’s maxim that social order was the result of unintended human action rather than the result of deliberate human design in order to explain the origin of complex social structures, which originated in a Cromwellian maxim. The origination and inspiration for the title of Hayek’s lecture is also considered, as is the influence of other thinkers; Mandeville, Tocqueville, Mill, Acton and Schatz that Hayek cites in his Dublin lecture. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013