Unfinished Draft of a Sketch of a Biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

only 3 other examples recorded

One of only four known copies of this biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein by his cousin, the philosopher and economist Friedrich von Hayek.

Hayek (1899-1992) began the work in 1953 following his move to Chicago three-years before, where he went to take up the chair of social and moral science established by the interdisciplinary committee on social thought, a post he held until 1962 (ODNB). The text documents the life of the philosopher from Wittgenstein's (1889-1951) birth in Vienna on 26th April 1889 to his registration as a research student at Cambridge in 1929.

As Hayek explains, the text is largely a compilation of information which he had collected from those who knew Wittgenstein, and Hayek is assiduous at providing footnotes and headlines which reference his sources. These include his brother, Karl Wittgenstein's privately printed Zeitungsartikel und Vorträge, anecdotes by his students such as Wolfe Mays, and the diary of Wittgenstein's alleged lover David Hume Pinsent.

Hayek was ultimately forced to abandoned the project after Wittgenstein's executors refused him permission to quote from unpublished letters, which they intended to print themselves.

A typed-note to the final leaf gives the place and date that these carbon-copies were made, and explains:

'They have still not done so, but I am not now likely to return to a task which I undertook largely to collect the available information while Wittgenstein's friends were still alive. Some of them have since died and I can no longer submit to their approval what I have written. Beyond this point I have only disconnected notes which could be of little use to anybody else. Moreover the greater part of the remaining years of Wittgenstein's life are now fully covered by the recently published Memoir by Norman Malcolm. Chiacgo, November 1959'

This copy is sold with a loose typewritten letter dated 22nd April 1994 by the philosopher Sir Michael Dummett (1925-2011) addressed to a Mr Blackburn. It follows a standard form apologising for Dummett's failure to reply to correspondence, and was evidently one of a number sent out following his retirement from academic life in 1992.

We can trace only 3 other examples in institutional collection worldwide, at the University of Oxford, King's College, London, and The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki.

The text was published in 2019 from the copy held by Helsinki under the title Friedrich August von Hayek's Draft Biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein: the text and its history, ed. Christian Erbacher (Paderborn, Mentis, 2019).

Carbon copy of the amended typescript; folio (30 x 21.5 cm); typescript titled on first f., 45ff, typed text on recto only, unbound, paper slightly toned, loose typewritten letter addressed, signed and dated in pen by Sir Michael Dummett, photocopy of 'The Guardian', Friday, March 24th 1961 article on 'Wittgenstein's Manchester period' by W. Mays; loose within folding card cover.