ALTHOUGH the essays collected in this volume may at first apn pear to be concerned with a great variety of topics, I hope that he reader will soon discover that most of them treat of closely connected problems. While they range from discussions of moral philosophy to the methods of the social sciences and from problems of economic policy to pure economic theory, these questions are treated in most of the essays as different aspects of the same central issue. This

connection will be seen most readily in the first six essays, yet in some measure the three on the problem of socialist calculation which follow them may be regarded as an application of the same ideas to a particular problem, although when I wrote these I did not yet quite see it in that light. Only the last three essays deal with somewhat different points of theory or policy; but, since I believe that the problems with which they are concerned will be discussed even more in the future than they have been in the past, I have taken this opportunity to make them available in a more convenient form.

哈耶克在本书的序言中这样谈这本文集的内容的：“初看上去，收集在本书中的这些论文所关注的论题似乎是各不相同的，但是我希望读者很快就能够发现，其中大多数论文所讨论的问题实际上是密切相关的。的确，这些论文涉及的范围相当广泛，从道德哲学的问题到社会科学研究方法的问题；从经济政策的问题到纯经济理论的问题；但需要指出的是，在大多数论文中，我却是把上述问题当作同一个核心问题的不同方面来看的。