Hayek's Divorce and Move to Chicago

The personal life of a great intellectual is not always highly pertinent. Although Friedrich Hayek may have been, in his son's words, "the great philosopher with feet of clay" (L. Hayek 1994-1997), his clay feet would not necessarily detract from his scholarly contributions. But since Hayek was a moral philosopher-his title at the University of Chicago was Professor of Social and Moral Science-his personal life may be more relevant than would be the case for intellectuals in other fields. The history of Hayek's personal life has not always, to this point, been accurately told. The story of his divorce and move to Chicago has often been presented as one in which he discovered after World War II on a visit to Vienna to see his mother and other family members that a distant cousin of his, Helene Bitterlich, with whom he had a relationship as a young man, felt free to marry him. After Helene's husband died, she and Hayek decided to marry, requiring Hayek to divorce his first wife, the former Hella Fritsch. At the same time, it has been suggested, he began to feel out of place in England in the immediate postwar era as a result of the policies of the first Labour Party government. He relocated to America, having first sought a post in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago and then, after being turned down by it as a result of The Road to Serfdom (1944), having been offered a position in the Committee on Social Thought. But almost no aspect of this presentation is entirely correct, much of it is factually inaccurate, and much else is omitted. During the 26 years since he died in 1992, considerable information has become available about Hayek's personal life. This includes material on his divorce, second marriage, relocation from the London School of Economics to the Committee on Social Thought, and relationship with the Chicago Economics Department. The purpose of this article is to present much of this information-building largely on extensive archival research by a number of scholars and the memoir of Hayek's last and longtime secretary, Charlotte Cubitt (2006), which is essential reading for anyone interested in the life of Hayek. Together with information this writer has collected, it is now possible to portray Hayek's divorce and move to Chicago more accurately than has previously been the case.