Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/322303 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
CHOPE Working Paper No. 2025-08
Publisher: 
Duke University, Center for the History of Political Economy (CHOPE), Durham, NC
Abstract: 
Early on Sunday morning, February 20, 1955, Friedrich Hayek and his wife Helene arrived at the airport in Cairo, Egypt, where he was greeted by the Director of Research of the National Bank of Egypt, Dr. Nikoli Koestner. Beginning the next evening and over the subsequent days, Hayek gave four lectures at the Bank. These were titled collectively The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law and published as a pamphlet later that year by the Bank (Hayek [1955] 2014a). This simple factual account raises several questions. Who was Dr. Koestner, and how did he and Hayek know each other? In the 1950s Hayek was a professor at the University of Chicago. Why go all the way to Egypt in the middle of the school term to give some lectures at a bank? Careful readers of his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty may recall that Hayek mentioned in the first note to chapter 11 that that chapter, and chapters 13 through 16, are based on the Cairo Lectures. So perhaps the lectures were prepared in anticipation of writing that book? That would be a reasonable inference, and the epigraph that begins this paper also suggests it is true, but Hayek's memory of things were a little faulty, and the situation more complicated. We will see, for example, that the main parts of the lectures were first prepared a few years earlier, in anticipation of a (never written) book on equality and justice.
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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