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The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek was one of the most outstanding classical liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. After a first intellectual stage focused on the study of economics (especially until the mid-1940s), he devoted the second stage of his intellectual life to other fields of social sciences, including political philosophy. In several books, he analyzed how social institutions should be structured to safeguard individual liberty; especially notable are The Road to Serfdom ([1944] 2001), The Constitution of Liberty ([I960] 2011), and The Political Order of a Free People (1979), the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty.
Unlike other classical liberal thinkers (Nozick 1974; Rothbard 1982), Hayek did not limit himself to defending political institutions that protect the private property legitimately acquired by owners, but he also embraced a wide range of political interventions, including, among other ideas, guaranteeing a minimum income to those unable to integrate into a market economy: "The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born" (1979, 54). For this reason, many thinkers have concluded that Hayek was one of the earliest advocates of a "universal basic income." For example, the libertarian philosopher Kevin Vallier states that "on Hayek's view, the universal basic income is required as a condition of democratic legitimacy within the framework of a social contract" (2012). Also, the libertarian philosopher Matt Zwoliński says that "both Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek advocated for something like a Basic Income Guarantee as a proper function of government" (2013). And Andreas Bergh argues that "Hayek goes beyond the idea of income-tested support and argues for a basic income guarantee in Law, Legislation and Liberty' (2015, 24). The message that Hayek was a convinced advocate ofa universal basic income has also caught up with the proponents of this policy: for example, Michael Lewis, Steven Pressman, and Karl Widerquist assert that "mainstream economists have also endorsed a Basic...