What are we talking about when we speak about Political Economy? According to me we speak about Economy and about Politics. Hirschman made a point when tracking back the origins of economics to a political issue, the issue to free individuals from the arbitrary will of the Prince (HIRSCHMAN, 1980). Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the funding father of Political Economy is a philosopher from the British enlightenment, A. SMITH whose aim was to free people from the old regime of hierarchy. Indirectly, all economic approaches deal with politics and political philosophy when they postulate the behaviour of individual and then what they should do for reaching a better life. Then, we can understand the Paretian equilibrium in the Edgeworth box as a statement of what justice and freedom are, and how to deal with inequalities. The question of distribution and production is lesser a pure economic issue than a political or a moral one because it evolves a certain understanding of what justice is. Hayek is quite clear about the relation between economics and politics. According to him, economy is a mean to restrict the abusive power of politics and a mean to promote individual freedom and even though he considers that politics should be controlled by economy, nevertheless economy is a kind of mean for doing politics in Hayek’s economic philosophy. In this sense we can say that Hayek is a political economist and a political economy theorist. Unfortunately, the current understanding of economy is forgetting the genetic link between economy and politics, link not forgotten by Keynes or Hayek. One of the main development of modern economics is to try to become more a natural science with a strong mathematization and a strong compartmentalization of the field and therefore it loses its pluri-disciplinary approaches in favour to a more technical approach.

In this article I postulate the idea that Hayek, as well as Keynes, were among the last political economist of their time and that we can find it in their works. I will focus on Hayek’s theoretical corpus, especially on the question of individual freedom. I will show that he developed his concept of individual freedom relying his work on political science, philosophy and economics, and so his goal, when promoting individual freedom, is rather related to a political issue than to a pure economic one. Thus, I develop in this article the ontology of freedom that rests on his work and that support all his economic theory.