F.A. Hayek

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Economist F.A. Hayek, 1950.

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F.A. Hayekwas an Austrian-born British economist noted for his criticisms of the Keynesian welfare state and of totalitarian socialism. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize for Economics with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal.

(Read Milton Friedman’s Britannica entry on money.)

Hayek’s father, August, was a physician and a professor of botany at the University of Vienna. His mother, Felicitas, was the daughter of Franz von Juraschek, a professor and later a prominent civil servant. Because his mother’s family was relatively wealthy, Hayek and his two younger brothers had a comfortable childhood in Vienna, which was then capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During World War I Hayek served in a field artillery battery on the Italian front, and after the war he enrolled at the University of Vienna. Hayek was attracted to both law and psychology in his early university years, but he settled on law for his first degree in 1921. Among his classmates were a number of people who would become prominent economists, including Fritz Machlup, Gottfried von Haberler, and Oskar Morgenstern. In 1923, his last year at the university, Hayek studied under the Austrian economist Friedrich von Wieser and was awarded a second doctorate in political economy. He also began working at a temporary government office, where he met Ludwig von Mises, a monetary theorist and author of a book-length critique of socialism. (Von Mises’s book was originally published as Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus in 1922 and translated as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis in 1936.)

Von Mises quickly became Hayek’s mentor. After a trip to the United States in 1923–24, Hayek returned to Vienna, married, and with von Mises’s assistance became the director of the newly founded Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. Hayek also became a regular attendee at von Mises’s biweekly seminar, passed his Habilitation (an oral examination that is a necessary step toward becoming a university teacher), and published his first book, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, in 1929.

In early 1931 Hayek was invited to England by Lionel Robbins to present four lectures on monetary economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The lectures would ultimately lead to his appointment the following year as the Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics at LSE, where Hayek remained until 1950, having become a naturalized British subject in 1938. Immediately upon arriving in England, Hayek became embroiled in a debate with University of Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes over their respective theories about the role and effect of money within a developed economy. Hayek wrote a lengthy critical review of Keynes’s 1930 book, A Treatise on Money, to which Keynes forcefully replied, in the course of which he attacked Hayek’s own recent book, Prices and Production (1931). Both economists were criticized by other economists, and this caused each to rethink his framework. Keynes finished first, publishing in 1936 what would become perhaps the most famous economics book of the century, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Hayek’s own book, The Pure Theory of Capital, did not appear until 1941, and both World War II and the book’s opaqueness caused it to be much less noticed than Keynes’s work.

In the mid-1930s Hayek also participated in a debate among economists on the merits of socialism. Those discussions would help shape his later ideas on economics and knowledge, eventually presented in his 1936 presidential address to the London Economic Club. During the war years LSE evacuated to Cambridge. There Hayek worked on his Abuse of Reason project, a wide-ranging critique of an assortment of doctrines that he lumped together under the label of “scientism,” which he defined as “the slavish imitation of the method and language of Science” by social scientists who had appropriated the methods of the natural sciences in areas where they did not apply. Although the project as originally envisioned was never completed, it became the basis for a number of essays and also led to the 1944 publication of Hayek’s most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, which became an immediate best-seller. In the same year Hayek was elected as a fellow of the British Academy.

At the end of World War II, Hayek began work on a theoretical psychology book based on an essay he had written during his student days in Vienna. In 1947 he organized a meeting of 39 scholars from 10 countries at Mont Pèlerin, on Lake Geneva in the Swiss Alps. This was the beginning of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an organization dedicated to articulating the principles that would lead to the establishment and preservation of free societies. Von Mises, Robbins, and Machlup were among the original attendees, as were Milton Friedman, Frank Knight, George Stigler, Aaron Director, Michael Polanyi, and the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. Hayek had been instrumental in bringing Popper from New Zealand to LSE at war’s end, and he had also secured a publisher for Popper’s book The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper and Hayek would remain lifelong friends.

In 1950 Hayek left LSE for a position on the newly formed Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In 1952 his book on psychology, The Sensory Order, was published, as was a collection of his essays from the Abuse of Reason project under the title The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. Hayek would spend 12 years at Chicago. While there he wrote articles on a number of themes, among them political philosophy, the history of ideas, and social science methodology. Aspects of his wide-ranging research were woven into his 1960 book on political philosophy, The Constitution of Liberty.

In 1962 Hayek left Chicago for the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in West Germany. He remained there until his retirement in 1968, when he accepted an honorary professorship at the University of Salzburg in Austria. In 1974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, which, ironically, he shared with Gunnar Myrdal, whose political and economic views were often opposed to his.

Hayek returned to Freiburg permanently in 1977 and finished work on what would become the three-part Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–79), a critique of efforts to redistribute incomes in the name of “social justice.” Later in the 1970s Hayek’s monograph The Denationalization of Money was published by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, one of the many classical liberal think tanks that Hayek, directly or indirectly, had a hand in establishing.

In the early 1980s Hayek began writing what would be his final book, a critique of socialism. Because his health was deteriorating, another scholar, philosopher William W. Bartley III, helped edit the ultimate volume, The Fatal Conceit, which was published in 1988. Hayek died four years later, having lived long enough to see the reunification of Germany.