Hayek on no-fault divorce

Friedrich Hayek, the famous liberal economist and Nobel laureate, anticipated in almost sixty years the enthusiasm of Portuguese Bloco de Esquerda for no-fault divorce. He actually did to his wife and children the same as Antonio did here.

He had married Hella in Catholic Austria in 1923. In 1931 they moved to London where they would live together for the next eighteen years. They had two children, one son and one daughter.

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In 1949 Hayek abandoned his wife and children in London and fled to the United States with a youth sweetheart from Viena named Helene, his second cousin. Before settling in Chicago where they would live for the next ten years, they went to Arkansas where they lived for a few months. The reason was that Arkansas was one of the few states in the US which had no-fault divorce legislation at the time. It was in Arkansas that he divorced from his wife of twenty-seven years against her will and married Helene.

Family friends in London were so upset that some of them never spoke to Hayek again. This was the case of Lionel Robbins, the famous British economist, who had hired him at the London School of Economics.