Table Of ContentErbacher (ed.)
Friedrich August von Hayek’s Draft Biography
of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Christian Erbacher (ed.)
Friedrich August von Hayek’s
Draft Biography of Ludwig
Wittgenstein
The Text and its History
Afterword by Allan Janik
mentis
Printed with support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the
Collaborative Research Center »Media of Cooperation« (SFB 1187, TP 01: Wissenschaftliche
Medien der Praxistheorie: Harold Garfinkel und Ludwig Wittgenstein).
Cover: The cover uses a picture of the first page of Hayek’s draft biography in the version
that is kept at the Von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki
(WWA). The picture was taken by Bernt Österman, curator of the WWA, and has been
reproduced with his permission.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
©2019 mentis Verlag, ein Imprint der Brill-Gruppe
(Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Niederlande;
Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH,
Paderborn, Deutschland)
Internet: www.mentis.de
Cover design: Dipl.-Des. Jessica Siegel, Marburg
Typesetting: satz & sonders GmbH, Dülmen
Production : Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn
ISBN 978-3-95743-157-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978-3-95743-797-6 (e-book)
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Christian Erbacher
The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never been published . . . 9
Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Friedrich August von Hayek
Unfinished draft of a sketch of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein . . . . . . 28
Allan Janik
Family Relationships and Family Resemblances: Hayek and Wittgenstein
An Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Preface and Acknowledgements
This volume publishes for the first time Friedrich August von Hayek’s draft for a
biographical sketch of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Having compiled the draft in 1953,
Hayek was among the first who systematically collected biographical information
about Wittgenstein. He planned to publish his sketch, but Wittgenstein’s sister as
well as his friends and literary executors resented the idea and stopped him to
further elaborate the text. The intellectual history of the sketch is elaborated in the
introduction.
The text of Hayek’s fragment is reproduced and edited with permission from
the Estate of F. A. von Hayek. The physical copy that is edited here is deposited
at The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki (WWA).
It has been found and investigated during the research project »Joint Nordic Use of
WAB Bergen and VWA Helsinki « funded by Nordforsk in 2010. Further research on
the material has been conducted during the research project »Shaping a Domain
of Knowledge by Editorial Processing: the Case of Wittgenstein’s Work « that was
funded by the Norwegian Research Council in 2012 –2015. The final editorial work
and preparation of the manuscript has been conducted within the DFG Collabora-
tive Research Center »Media of Cooperation« (SFB TP 01, Wissenschaftliche Medien
der Praxistheorie: Harold Garfinkel und Ludwig Wittgenstein). Bernt Österman, as
curator of WWA, granted permission to use the picture of the first page of Hayek’s
draft for the book cover.
The introduction is a revised and translated version of an article that has first
been published as: Erbacher, C., 2015. »Friedrich August von Hayeks unvollendete
›Skizze für eine Biographie von Ludwig Wittgenstein‹ « . Mitteilungen aus dem Bren-
ner-Archiv , 34, 83 –100. I am especially thankful to Ingrid Hänsel for allowing me to
quote from Ludwig Hänsel’s letters, and to Pierre Stonborough for permission to
quote from Margaret Stonborough’s letters. I thank Anita and Benedict von Wright
for permitting me to quote passages from letters by Georg Henrik von Wright. Peg
Rhees gave permission to quote from letters by Rush Rhees. Sadly she passed away
during preparation of early versions of the text. I am thankful to Volker Munz for
renewing the permission. Letters by Friedrich August von Hayek are quoted with
permission from the Estate of F. A. von Hayek. In the introduction, transcription
of letters has been normalized, that is handwritten additions or corrections have
been carried out without editorial explication. I am indebted to WWA and the
Finnish National Library for providing access to their holdings. The Department
of Philosophy at the University of Bergen and the Wittgenstein Archives at the
University of Bergen supported the here presented work by providing access to
their research resources and infrastructure. For commenting on earlier versions of
the text, I wish to thank especially Allan Janik, Bernt Österman, Ilse Somavilla and
8 Preface and Acknowledgements
Anton Unterkircher, and for revisions of the penultimate version Marjorie Perloff.
For help in preparing the translation I thank Tina Schirmer and Arlyne Moi. Julia
Jung and Anne dos Santos Reis contributed indispensable help during all stages of
the editorial process; I thank them for their tireless efforts. Radmila Schweitzer,
Secretary General of the Wittgenstein Initiative Wien, I thank for inciting me to
make Hayek’s fragment eventually available in print.
Christian Erbacher
Siegen and Cölbe, July 2019
Christian Erbacher
The First Wittgenstein Biography and why it has never
been published
1. Wittgenstein and Hayek
At first sight, the life trajectories of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 –1951) and Friedrich
August von Hayek (1899 –1992) show remarkable parallels: both of these Viennese
thinkers served in the Austrian army during the First World War; both emigrated
to England in the 1930s and became British citizens when Hitler annexed Austria in
1938; both were to become major intellectual figures who transformed their fields
of study. A closer look, however, reveals considerable differences in the two men,
in their upbringing, their war -experiences and their intellectual careers after the
war.
Hayek and Wittgenstein were distantly related: Hayek’s great grandfather and
Wittgenstein’s grandmother had been siblings, making the two men remote cousins.
But in this era, when a family of ten children was not uncommon, this relationship
was not especially significant. Hayek and Wittgenstein had met occasionally during
vacations or family visits, but there was no real friendship (Hayek 1992: 177). Then,
too, although Hayek’s family was quite well off, their way of life could not compare
to that of the Wittgensteins, one of the wealthiest families in the Austrian Empire,
whose Palais welcomed such guests as Johannes Brahms and Josef Labor. Still, the
casual acquaintance between Hayek and Wittgenstein was enough to enable them
to recognize one another on the train to the Italian Front in the late summer of 1918,
as Hayek remembered:
My first recollection goes back to a day on furlough and leave of absence from the
front, where on the railway station in Bad Ischl, [Austria], two young ensigns in
the artillery in uniform looked at each other and said, »You have a fairly familiar
face. « Then we asked each other »Aren’t you a Wittgenstein? « and »Aren’t you
a Hayek? « I now know that at this moment returning to the front, he must have
had the manuscript of the Tractatus in his rucksack. But I didn’t know it at that
time. But many of the mental characteristics of the man were already present as I
gathered in this night journey from Bad Ischl to Innsbruck, where the occasion was
his contempt for the noisy crowd of returning young officers, half -drunk; a certain
contempt for the world. (Hayek 1983: 251) 1
During the train ride the two men conversed, but they did not have intellectual
discussions. Hayek knew nothing about Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing before
1 A similar recollection is published in Hayek (1977).
10 Christian Erbacher
the publication of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus in 1921 (Hayek 1983: 254). And
this fact points to yet another major difference between the two men: when they
met in the train compartment, Wittgenstein had already studied logic with Bertrand
Russell for years, and had worked at notes that would become the Tractatus ; he had
served in the army for four years and seen action on the Eastern Front and had lost
beloved friends such as David Pinsent. Hayek, by contrast, had just graduated from
secondary school and was recruited only shortly before war’s end. Indeed, although
they were only ten years apart, Wittgenstein and Hayek belonged to essentially
different generations: the war generation and its aftermath.
Hayek’s academic career developed rapidly after the war. In 1921 −the year the
Tractatus first appeared −Hayek finished his studies under Friedrich von Wieser,
one of the founding fathers of the Austrian school of economics. Wieser introduced
Hayek to Ludwig von Mises, who became an intellectual tutor for Hayek. Through
Mises’ seminars in Vienna, Hayek became a member of the group of liberalist
academics who were intellectually connected to the philosophical movement that
would become known as the Vienna Circle. In fact, Ludwig von Mises’s brother
Richard is said to have decisively inspired the gatherings that gave rise to the
Vienna Circle in the years that followed the First World War (Stadler 1997: 741 –
751; Hayek 1992). Through these academic ties, Hayek entered the milieu in which
the Tractatus was already prominently and heatedly discussed. Thus, while Hayek
did not meet Wittgenstein in person in the 1920s, he became aware of him as an
important and admired intellectual: The author of the Tractatus had become an
idol for his teachers and the then leading intellectuals of the Vienna Circle who
regarded the book as a miraculously presented foundation of their vision for a sci-
entific worldview. Wittgenstein, however, was no longer interested in philosophical
discussions or indeed in any academic career. He had completed the Tractatus at
the end of the war (McGuinness 1988: 287) and when the book was published three
years later, it became famous in the philosophical world. But Wittgenstein thought
that he had contributed all he could to philosophy. Like many other war veterans,
he attended a teachers’ college in Vienna in 1919. From 1920 onwards, he started
working as an elementary schoolteacher in remote villages in Lower Austria – first
in Trattenbach, later in Puchberg and, eventually, in Otterthal. Thus, Wittgenstein’s
and Hayek’s paths did not cross again for a decade, although both men spent most
of their time in Austria. Their lives had taken different directions: Wittgenstein
turning his back on the Viennese upper class of the old order and Hayek entering
the upcoming academic elite of a new world.
After working for Mises for two years, Hayek left Austria to do doctoral studies in
New York. There he became acquainted with new statistical methods for empirical
research in economics. This made him, on his return to Austria, a most valuable
collaborator for Mises, who in early 1927 appointed him the first director of the
Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. Hayek was then only 27 years old. He
now concentrated on the history of monetary and economic theory and two years
