When Ratzinger and Hayek Met

Since Pope Benedict XVI’s death on New Year’s Eve, much has naturally been written about his legacy. Much more will certainly be written about him in the coming decades and centuries. For he, Joseph Ratzinger, was truly a prophet of our time, a magisterial voice, and one of the greatest minds of the last centuries. What is less known about him is an encounter he had with another great mind of the twentieth century, the 1974 Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich August von Hayek in a little-known debate at the Salzburger Humanismusgespräche, the Humanities Discussions of Salzburg, in December 1976.