Abstract

The topic of the article is the confrontation of the vision of surveillance capitalism, as outlined by Shoshana Zuboff in 2019, with Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal doctrine. The main research goal is to answer the questions whether Hayek has been rightly accused by Zuboff as being responsible for the rise of this threatening form of capitalism and for his alleged hostility to democracy. Similar objections against Hayek have also been raised by Andrzej Szahaj. The juxtaposition of the characteristics of surveillance capitalism with the analysis of some selected threads, inherent in Hayek’s socio-economic conception, leads to the conclusion that Zuboff’s and Szahaj’s critical arguments do not seem thoroughly justified.