Interesting discussion on Hayek

atEconomist's View. George Orwell reviewed "The Road to Serfdom" along with another book soo after it appeared:Review by Orwell: The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek / The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus Observer, 9 April 1944. Excerpt:
"In the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.
Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter."

But this is not what hapenned. A more modern appraisal by his biographer Bruce Caldwell appeared in an interview in the Reason Magazine. Excerpts:
"Reason: Sometimes the moral of Serfdom is boiled down to what's called "the inevitability thesis": If you get a little planning, you'll get more planning, and then eventually you'll have full-blown socialist planning.

Caldwell: If you look at Hayek's preface to the 1976 version of the book, he says that can happen. But that's not the argument of the book. He did not say that as soon as you get some combination of markets and planning, you are immediately going to go down the slippery slope to socialism and all the restrictions it entails.
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Reason: Is it inevitable that top-down, central planning fails?

Caldwell: I don't think Hayek would say inevitably. It would depend on the specific question at hand. Hayek always wrote at a very high level of generalization, so it is difficult to get down to specifics with him, and that is one of the limitations I think of Hayek's particular approach.
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Reason: Beyond his critique of wide-scale social planning, what would you say are Hayek's other major contributions to 20th century thought?

Caldwell: Another very important one has to do with the role of prices in coordinating social action where knowledge is dispersed.
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Reason: What do you think Hayek's legacy in the 21st century will be?

Caldwell: To the extent that the ideas in papers like "The Theory of Complex Phenomena" get developed, that could be a big part of his legacy. He didn't get very far in developing the concept, but it's the basis for his claims that what we can know in the social sciences is ultimately very limited. It holds that pattern predictions are the best that we can often do when it comes to society. He suggested that it's better to provide explanations of the principle by which something works than to make precise predictions of how people will act.
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Understanding the limits of what we can do is an important legacy. And so is understanding that in trying to do too much, we often end up making situations much worse."

Coming back to the discussion in Economist's view, there are many interesting comments by erudite people, The one I liked best so far is by Denis Drew. Excerpts:
"Hayek’s criticism of central planning that “vital information about an economy is inherently local” and that central planners are too distant to be able to access that information in any nearly useful way can be flip-flopped on “dispersed planners” which is what we may fairly call the Hayeks and Milton Friedmans of the world.

Unfettered local economic actors (those countless hidden hands) are too far distant from the sight of the urgent central needs of society to leave the accomplishment of such goals to their shortsighted hands. Trusting the unfettered free market automatically to bring about the best overall (central?) social outcomes amounts magical thinking.

Neither local actors nor central planners know enough about each other’s milieu to act efficiently on each other’s behalf, so, we must choose a practical balance to get the best of both worlds – in a word “compromise” between giving all power to one or the other.
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Leading to the notion that where to come down should always and only be decided by what experience discovers works in the everyday world – theory corrected by experiment just like any other science –
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The motto of policy makers should be the same as doctors' (another group that has to come up with answers in real time; not in a hundred years when the perfect answer finally arrives): First, do no harm. IOW, if you haven’t enough (experimental?) practical success with some procedure, limit yourself to recommendations at most. For example, the IMF has no business forcing the Philippines into becoming a net importer of rice."