Hayek’s essential political philosophy was that liberty is the supremacy of law. To some, this may appear a paradoxical conception of liberty, for li… - Alan O. Ebenstein

One of the paradoxes of Hayek is that he wrote better than he thought. That is, his writing is often more suggestive and stimulating than the thought that underlaid it. While his writing is, stylistically, difficult, it is also exceptionally profound, and its value lies in its profundity.

Hayek ripped G. W. F. Hegel in The Counter-Revolution of Science’s third part for his “historicism”—the idea, in Hayek’s terminology, that history moves in set and predictable stages. He considered this idea fatally flawed and societies that were based on it to be unsuccessful, unproductive, and unfree. Historicism denies free will. The future is what we make of it.

At the same time, as Hayek maintained elsewhere, the facts of the social sciences do not lend themselves to the same degree of prediction, or explanation, as the facts of the natural sciences—it is for this reason that there are degrees of prediction or explanation. Prediction may be expressed numerically, moreover, “not as a unique value or magnitude but as a range,” narrow in the natural sciences and potentially very broad in the social sciences. In the social sciences, Hayek modified the conception of a numerical range to a “range of phenomena to expect.” This was his concept of pattern prediction, or explanation of the principle, broad, general predictions.