Henry Hazlitt Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Henry Stuart Hazlitt was born in 1894 and grew up in the United States, spending much of his youth in New York. His father died when he was young, and he was raised largely by his mother and stepfather. He attended public schools and briefly studied at the City College of New York before leaving to support his family. From the beginning he displayed a remarkable self-directed intellectual discipline. As a teenager and young adult he read voraciously in philosophy, literature, psychology, and political economy. That habit matured into his first book, Thinking as a Science (1916), a guide to clear reasoning and self-education that revealed the method he would apply to journalism and economics throughout his long life.

Early Writing and Journalism
Hazlitt began his career in newspapers and magazines while still very young, developing the craft of concise explanation and the habit of patient inquiry. In the subsequent decades he served as an editor, reviewer, and columnist for several prominent publications. He became literary editor at The Nation during the early 1930s, a position that honed his skills as a critic of books and ideas. After leaving The Nation, he joined the editorial board of The New York Times, where through the mid-1940s he wrote on public policy and economics for a broad readership. In the late 1940s he moved to Newsweek, where his weekly columns on economics and public affairs ran for roughly two decades and made him one of the most widely read popular economists in America. He also contributed essays and reviews to many other periodicals, earning a reputation for clarity, fairness, and independence of mind.

Major Works and Ideas
Hazlitt became known around the world for Economics in One Lesson (1946), a short book that distilled what he considered the central insight of sound economics: to judge any policy by its long-run consequences for all groups, not by its short-run effects on a favored few. Drawing inspiration from Frederic Bastiat, particularly the essay What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, he illustrated the fallacies behind broken-window thinking, inflationary finance, price controls, rent ceilings, and protectionism. With plain language, everyday examples, and careful logic, he made ideas from classical liberalism and marginalist economics accessible to general readers.

He was also a formidable critic of Keynesian macroeconomics. In The Failure of the "New Economics" (1959), he offered a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal to John Maynard Keynes's General Theory, arguing that the promises of stimulus-driven prosperity ignored capital structure, incentives, and the hazards of inflation. He later compiled essays by others who challenged Keynesian doctrines, and he returned repeatedly to topics such as wage floors, credit expansion, and budget deficits, showing how well-intended interventions often produced unintended harm.

Hazlitt's range extended beyond economics narrowly defined. His novel Time Will Run Back used fiction to explore how prices, profits, and private property coordinate social cooperation. In The Foundations of Morality, he attempted to ground ethics in principles consistent with human flourishing and social cooperation, offering a lucid statement of liberal moral philosophy that complemented his arguments for voluntary exchange and limited government.

Circle of Colleagues, Influences, and Debates
Hazlitt's intellectual circle included many of the leading classical liberal and market-oriented thinkers of the twentieth century. He reviewed and championed F. A. Hayek's work, including an influential review of The Road to Serfdom that helped introduce Hayek to a broad American audience. He was a close friend and ally of Ludwig von Mises after Mises arrived in the United States; Hazlitt helped connect the great Austrian economist to American readers and to networks of support, and he wrote frequently to clarify and spread Misesian themes about money, calculation, and interventionism. He worked alongside Leonard E. Read and regularly wrote for the Foundation for Economic Education, reinforcing the case for liberty and responsibility to generations of students and lay readers.

He engaged in civil but sharp debates with economists who favored demand management and more expansive government. John Maynard Keynes remained his principal theoretical foil, while Paul Samuelson and other postwar Keynesians were frequent targets of his columns and reviews. He also exchanged ideas with Milton Friedman and other Chicago-school economists, agreeing sometimes and disagreeing at other times about monetary institutions and policy tactics while sharing a commitment to freer markets. Beyond economics, he interacted with writers such as Ayn Rand, who, like Hazlitt, defended capitalism on moral grounds; even where he diverged from Objectivism, his own ethical arguments in The Foundations of Morality approached the same problems from a different angle. Younger scholars and writers, including Murray N. Rothbard and many who contributed to journals of classical liberal thought, acknowledged Hazlitt's example as a journalist who understood theory and could translate it for the public.

Public Voice and Method
Hazlitt's method combined skepticism toward panaceas with a willingness to follow arguments to their logical conclusions. He distrusted slogans, preferring to trace cause and effect through time and across sectors. He asked readers to consider secondary consequences and unseen costs, and he insisted that the prosperity of one group could not be secured by policies that quietly impoverish others. Whether writing about rent control, tariffs, minimum wage laws, or monetary inflation, he emphasized that good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. His style was calm and respectful, but he did not compromise on principle. He often quoted and credited predecessors such as Bastiat, David Hume, and Adam Smith, and he insisted that classical liberal political economy remained relevant in an age of modern complexity.

Institutional Roles and Cultural Impact
As a prominent columnist, Hazlitt occupied a rare position at the intersection of scholarship and mass media. At The New York Times he brought serious economic reasoning to the editorial page during the turbulent years of the Great Depression and World War II. At Newsweek he reached a vast audience week after week, explaining complicated subjects such as inflation, exchange rates, and fiscal policy without jargon. He gave speeches and seminars for organizations devoted to economic education and liberty, including FEE and similar groups, and he wrote introductions and reviews that helped publicize books by Hayek, Mises, and other scholars. His work helped popularize terms and distinctions that later became commonplace in public debates, from the hazards of price controls to the importance of real versus nominal magnitudes.

Later Years and Continuing Work
Hazlitt remained active as a writer well into old age. He revised and reissued some of his books, published new collections of essays, and continued to write letters and prefaces that encouraged younger writers. He kept in touch with colleagues across different schools of thought, valuing spirited but courteous discussion. Even as academic economics moved through waves of technical modeling, he insisted there was no substitute for clear prose, ordinary examples, and everyday logic in explaining how markets coordinate human plans.

Legacy
Hazlitt died in 1993 after a remarkably long career. By then Economics in One Lesson had become a classic of popular economic writing, translated into multiple languages and used in classrooms, reading groups, editorial offices, and think tanks. His championship of Mises and Hayek helped secure a place for the Austrian tradition in postwar American intellectual life, while his engagement with thinkers such as Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson placed him inside the main debates of his century. Students of liberty know his name through awards, institutes, and reading lists that point back to his work. More generally, journalists and opinion writers continue to borrow his approach, asking readers to look past what is immediately visible, count all the costs, and remember that prosperity grows from production, saving, innovation, and voluntary exchange rather than from the printing press or mandates. For readers who want to understand how ideas shape policy and how clear language can change minds, Henry Hazlitt remains a model of intellectual honesty and courage.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by Henry, under the main topics: Motivational - Freedom - Reason & Logic - Learning from Mistakes - Money.

Other people realated to Henry: George Reisman (Economist), Frank Chodorov (Writer)

• 1969 Man vs. the Welfare State (Book)
• 1964 The Foundations of Morality (Book)
• 1959 The Failure of the New Economics (Book)
• 1946 Economics in One Lesson (Book)
• 1922 The Way to Willpower (Book)

• Wikipedia