Friedrich Hayek

Early life

Friedrich August von Hayek was born in Vienna to August von Hayek and Felicitas Hayek (née von Juraschek). The surname Hayek is derived from the Czech surname Hájek and can be traced to an ancestor with the surname "Hagek" who migrated from Prague in the 1500s.

His father, born in 1871, also in Vienna, was a medical doctor employed by the municipal health ministry. August was a part-time botany lecturer at the University of Vienna. Friedrich had two brothers, Heinrich (1900–1969) and Erich (1904–1986), who were one-and-a-half and five years younger than he.

His father's career as a university professor influenced Hayek's goals later in life. Both of his grandfathers, who lived long enough for Hayek to know them, were scholars. His maternal grandfather, Franz von Juraschek, was an economist in Austria-Hungary and a close friend of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, one of the founders of the Austrian School of Economics. Hayek's paternal grandfather, Gustav Edler von Hayek, taught natural sciences at the Imperial Realobergymnasium (secondary school) in Vienna. He wrote works in the field of biological systematics.

On his mother's side, Hayek was second cousin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His mother knew Wittgenstein well and often played with his sisters. As a result of the family relationship, Hayek was among the first to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when that book was published in its original German edition in 1921. Although he met Wittgenstein on only a few occasions, Hayek said that Wittgenstein's philosophy and methods of analysis had a profound influence on his own life and thought. In his later years, Hayek recalled a discussion of philosophy with Wittgenstein when both were officers during World War I.

After Wittgenstein's death, Hayek had intended to write a biography of him; he worked on collecting family materials and later assisted biographers of Wittgenstein. He was related to Wittgenstein on the non-Jewish side of the Wittgenstein family. Since his youth, Hayek had frequently socialized with Jewish intellectuals, and he mentioned that people often speculated as to whether he too was of Jewish ancestry. That made him curious, so he spent some time researching his ancestors and found out that he had no Jewish ancestors within five generations.

Education

At the University of Vienna, Hayek initially studied mostly philosophy, psychology and economics. The university allowed students to choose their subjects freely and there was not much obligatory written work, or tests except main exams at the end of the study. By the end of his studies Hayek became more interested in economics, mostly for financial and career reasons; he planned to combine law and economics to start a career in diplomatic service. He earned doctorates in law and political science in 1921 and 1923 respectively.

For a short time, when the University of Vienna closed he studied in Constantin von Monakow's Institute of Brain Anatomy, where Hayek spent much of his time staining brain cells. Hayek's time in Monakow's lab and his deep interest in the work of Ernst Mach inspired his first intellectual project, eventually published as The Sensory Order (1952). It located connective learning at the physical and neurological levels, rejecting the "sense data" associationism of the empiricists and logical positivists. Hayek presented his work to the private seminar he had created with Herbert Furth called the Geistkreis.

During Hayek's years at the University of Vienna, Carl Menger's work on the explanatory strategy of social science and Friedrich von Wieser's commanding presence in the classroom left a lasting influence on him. Upon the completion of his examinations, Hayek was hired by Ludwig von Mises on the recommendation of Wieser as a specialist for the Austrian government working on the legal and economic details of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Between 1923 and 1924, Hayek worked as a research assistant to Professor Jeremiah Jenks of New York University, compiling macroeconomic data on the American economy and the operations of the Federal Reserve. He was influenced by Wesley Clair Mitchell and started a doctoral program on problems of monetary stabilization but didn't finish it. His time in America wasn't especially happy. He had very limited social contacts, missed the cultural life of Vienna, and was troubled by his poverty. His family's financial situation deteriorated significantly after the War.

Initially sympathetic to Wieser's democratic socialism, Hayek found Marxism rigid and unattractive, and his mild socialist phase lasted until he was about 23. Hayek's economic thinking shifted away from socialism and toward the classical liberalism of Carl Menger after reading von Mises' book Socialism. It was sometime after reading Socialism that Hayek began attending von Mises' private seminars, joining several of his university friends, including Fritz Machlup, Alfred Schutz, Felix Kaufmann and Gottfried Haberler, who were also participating in Hayek's own more general and private seminar. It was during this time that he also encountered and befriended noted political philosopher Eric Voegelin, with whom he retained a long-standing relationship.

Career

London School of Economics

With the help of Mises, in the late 1920s, he founded and served as director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research before joining the faculty of the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1931 at the behest of Lionel Robbins. Upon his arrival in London, Hayek was quickly recognised as one of the leading economic theorists in the world and his development of the economics of processes in time and the co-ordination function of prices inspired the ground-breaking work of John Hicks, Abba P. Lerner and many others in the development of modern microeconomics.

In 1932, Hayek suggested that private investment in the public markets was a better road to wealth and economic co-ordination in Britain than government spending programs as argued in an exchange of letters with John Maynard Keynes, co-signed with Lionel Robbins and others in The Times. The nearly decade long deflationary depression in Britain dating from Winston Churchill's decision in 1925 to return Britain to the gold standard at the old pre-war and pre-inflationary par was the public policy backdrop for Hayek's dissenting engagement with Keynes over British monetary and fiscal policy. Keynes called Hayek's book Prices and Production "one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read", famously adding: "It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end in Bedlam".

Notable economists who studied with Hayek at the LSE in the 1930s and 1940s include Arthur Lewis, Ronald Coase, William Baumol, CH Douglas, John Kenneth Galbraith, Leonid Hurwicz, Abba Lerner, Nicholas Kaldor, George Shackle, Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jha, Arthur Seldon, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan and Oskar Lange. Some were supportive and some were critical of his ideas. Hayek also taught or tutored many other LSE students, including David Rockefeller.

In 1937, Hayek gave a summer course at the Geneva Graduate Institute, then a stronghold of neoliberal thought that was home to Ludwig von Mises. Unwilling to return to Austria after the Anschluss brought it under the control of Nazi Germany in 1938, Hayek remained in Britain. Hayek and his children became British subjects in 1938. He held this status for the remainder of his life, but he did not live in Great Britain after 1950. He lived in the United States from 1950 to 1962 and then mostly in Germany, but also briefly in Austria.

In 1947, Hayek was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

The Road to Serfdom

Hayek was concerned about the general view in Britain's academia that fascism was a capitalist reaction to socialism and The Road to Serfdom arose from those concerns. In the book, Hayek "[warns] of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning." He further argues that the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism inevitably leads to a loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, the tyranny of a dictator, and the serfdom of the individual. Hayek challenged the view, popular among British Marxists, that fascism (including Nazism) was a capitalist reaction against socialism. He argued that fascism, Nazism, and state-socialism had common roots in central economic planning and empowering the state over the individual.

The title was inspired by the French classical liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on the "road to servitude". It was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944 and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it "that unobtainable book" also due in part to wartime paper rationing. When it was published in the United States by the University of Chicago in September of that year, it achieved greater popularity than in Britain. At the instigation of editor Max Eastman, the American magazine Reader's Digest also published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom to reach a far wider audience than academics. The book is widely popular among those advocating individualism and classical liberalism.

Chicago

In 1950, Hayek left the London School of Economics. After spending the 1949–1950 academic year as a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas, Hayek became a professor at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. Hayek's salary was funded not by the university but by an outside foundation, the William Volker Fund.

Hayek had made contact with many at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, with Hayek's The Road to Serfdom playing a seminal role in transforming how Milton Friedman and others understood the workings of society. Hayek conducted a number of influential faculty seminars while at the University of Chicago, and a number of academics worked on research projects sympathetic to Hayek's own, such as Aaron Director, who was active in the Chicago School in helping to fund and establish what became the University of Chicago Law School's "Law and Society" program. Hayek, Frank Knight, Friedman and George Stigler worked together in forming the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international forum for neoliberals. Hayek and Friedman cooperated in support of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an American student organisation devoted to libertarian ideas.

Although they shared most political beliefs, disagreeing primarily on monetary policy, Hayek and Friedman worked in separate university departments with different research interests and never developed a close working relationship. According to Alan O. Ebenstein, who wrote biographies of both of them, Hayek may have had a closer friendship with Keynes than with Friedman. Another influential political philosopher and German-speaking exile at the University of Chicago at the time was Leo Strauss, but according to his student Joseph Cropsey, who also knew Hayek, there was no contact between the two.

Hayek received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954.

After editing a book on John Stuart Mill's letters, he planned to publish two books on the liberal order, The Constitution of Liberty and "The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization" (eventually the title for the second chapter of The Constitution of Liberty). He completed The Constitution of Liberty in May 1959, with publication in February 1960. Hayek was concerned with "that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society" and was disappointed that the book received a poor reception.

Freiburg and Salzburg

From 1962 until his retirement in 1968, he was a professor at the University of Freiburg, West Germany, where he began work on his next book, Law, Legislation and Liberty. Hayek regarded his years at Freiburg as "very fruitful". Following his retirement, Hayek spent a year as a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continued work on Law, Legislation and Liberty, teaching a graduate seminar by the same name and another on the philosophy of social science. Preliminary drafts of the book were completed by 1970, but Hayek chose to rework his drafts and finally brought the book to publication in three volumes in 1973, 1976 and 1979.

Hayek became a professor at the University of Salzburg from 1969 to 1977 and then returned to Freiburg. When Hayek left Salzburg in 1977, he wrote: "I made a mistake in moving to Salzburg". The economics department was small, and the library facilities were inadequate.

Although Hayek's health suffered, and he fell into a depressive bout, he continued to work on his magnum opus, Law, Legislation and Liberty in periods when he was feeling better.

Nobel Memorial Prize

On 9 October 1974, it was announced that Hayek would be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. He was surprised at being given the award and believed that he was given it with Myrdal to balance the award with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

Among the reasons given, the committee stated, Hayek "was one of the few economists who gave warning of the possibility of a major economic crisis before the great crash came in the autumn of 1929." The following year, Hayek further confirmed his original prediction. An interviewer asked, "We understand that you were one of the only economists to forecast that America was headed for a depression, is that true?" Hayek responded, "Yes." However, no textual evidence has emerged of "a prediction". Indeed, Hayek wrote on 26 October 1929, three days before the crash, "at present there is no reason to expect a sudden crash of the New York stock exchange. ... The credit possibilities/conditions are, at any rate, currently very great, and therefore it appears assured that an outright crisis-like destruction of the present high [price] level should not be feared."

During the Nobel ceremony in December 1974, Hayek met the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Hayek later sent him a Russian translation of The Road to Serfdom. He spoke with apprehension at his award speech about the danger the authority of the prize would lend to an economist, but the prize brought much greater public awareness to the then controversial ideas of Hayek and was described by his biographer as "the great rejuvenating event in his life".

British politics

In February 1975, Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the British Conservative Party. The Institute of Economic Affairs arranged a meeting between Hayek and Thatcher in London soon after. During Thatcher's only visit to the Conservative Research Department in the summer of 1975, a speaker had prepared a paper on why the "middle way" was the pragmatic path the Conservative Party should take, avoiding the extremes of left and right. Before he had finished, Thatcher "reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting our pragmatist, she held the book up for all of us to see. 'This', she said sternly, 'is what we believe', and banged Hayek down on the table".

Despite the media depictions of him as Thatcher's guru and power behind the throne, the communication between him and the Prime Minister was not very regular, they were in contact only once or twice a year. Besides Thatcher, Hayek also had a significant influence on Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe and John Biffen.

Hayek gained some controversy in 1978 by praising Thatcher's anti-immigration policy proposal in an article which ignited numerous accusations of antisemitism and racism because of his reflections on the inability of assimilation of Eastern European Jews in the Vienna of his youth. He defended himself by explaining that he made no racial judgements, only highlighted the problems of acculturation.

In 1977, Hayek was critical of the Lib–Lab pact in which the British Liberal Party agreed to keep the British Labour government in office. Writing to The Times, Hayek said: "May one who has devoted a large part of his life to the study of the history and the principles of liberalism point out that a party that keeps a socialist government in power has lost all title to the name 'Liberal'. Certainly no liberal can in future vote 'Liberal'". Hayek was criticised by Liberal politicians Gladwyn Jebb and Andrew Phillips, who both claimed that the purpose of the pact was to discourage socialist legislation.

Jebb pointed out that the German Free Democrats were in coalition with the German Social Democrats. Hayek was defended by Professor Antony Flew, who stated that—unlike the British Labour Party—the German Social Democrats had since the late 1950s abandoned public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and had instead embraced the social market economy.

Recognition

In 1980, Hayek was one of twelve Nobel laureates to meet with Pope John Paul II "to dialogue, discuss views in their fields, communicate regarding the relationship between Catholicism and science, and 'bring to the Pontiff's attention the problems which the Nobel Prize Winners, in their respective fields of study, consider to be the most urgent for contemporary man'".

Hayek was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 1984 Birthday Honours on the advice of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his "services to the study of economics". Hayek had hoped to receive a baronetcy and after being awarded the CH sent a letter to his friends requesting that he be called the English version of Friedrich (i.e. Frederick) from now on. After his twenty-minute audience with the Queen, he was "absolutely besotted" with her according to his daughter-in-law Esca Hayek. Hayek said a year later that he was "amazed by her. That ease and skill, as if she'd known me all my life". The audience with the Queen was followed by a dinner with family and friends at the Institute of Economic Affairs. When later that evening Hayek was dropped off at the Reform Club, he commented: "I've just had the happiest day of my life".

In 1991, President George H. W. Bush awarded Hayek the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the two highest civilian awards in the United States, for a "lifetime of looking beyond the horizon".

Personal life

In August 1926, Hayek married Helen Berta Maria von Fritsch (1901–1960), a secretary at the civil service office where he worked. They had two children together. Upon the close of World War II, Hayek restarted a relationship with an old girlfriend, who had married since they first met, but kept it secret until 1948. Hayek and Fritsch divorced in July 1950 and he married his third cousin Helene Bitterlich (1900–1996) just a few weeks later, after moving to Arkansas to take advantage of permissive divorce laws. His wife and children were offered settlement and compensation for accepting a divorce. The divorce caused a scandal at LSE, where some academics refused to have anything to do with Hayek. In a 1978 interview to explain his actions, Hayek stated that he was unhappy in his first marriage and as his wife would not grant him a divorce he had taken steps to obtain one unilaterally.

For a time after his divorce, Hayek rarely visited his children, but kept up more regular contact with them in his older years after moving to Europe. Hayek's son, Laurence Hayek (1934–2004) was a distinguished microbiologist. His daughter Christine was an entomologist at the British Museum of Natural History, and she cared for him during his last years, when he had declining health.

Hayek had a lifelong interest in biology and was also concerned with ecology and environmental protection. After being awarded his Nobel Prize, he offered his name to be used for endorsements by World Wildlife Fund, National Audubon Society, and the National Trust, a British conservationist organisation. Evolutionary biology was simply one of his interests in natural sciences. Hayek also had an interest in epistemology, which he often applied to his own thinking, as a social scientist. He held that methodological differences in the social sciences and in natural sciences were key to understanding why incompetent policies are often allowed.

Hayek was brought up in a non-religious setting and decided from age 15 that he was an agnostic.

Hayek died on 23 March 1992, aged 92, in Freiburg, Germany, where he had lived since leaving Chicago in 1961. Despite his advanced age by the 1980s, he continued to write, even purportedly finishing a book, The Fatal Conceit, in 1988, although its actual authorship is unclear.

Work and views

Business cycle

Ludwig von Mises had earlier applied the concept of marginal utility to the value of money in his Theory of Money and Credit (1912) in which he also proposed an explanation for "industrial fluctuations" based on the ideas of the old British Currency School and of Swedish economist Knut Wicksell. Hayek used this body of work as a starting point for his own interpretation of the business cycle, elaborating what later became known as the Austrian theory of the business cycle. Hayek spelled out the Austrian approach in more detail in his book, published in 1929, an English translation of which appeared in 1933 as Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle. There, Hayek argued for a monetary approach to the origins of the cycle. In his Prices and Production (1931), Hayek argued that the business cycle resulted from the central bank's inflationary credit expansion and its transmission over time, leading to a capital misallocation caused by the artificially low interest rates. Hayek argued that "the past instability of the market economy is the consequence of the exclusion of the most important regulator of the market mechanism, money, from itself being regulated by the market process".

Hayek's analysis was based on Eugen Böhm von Bawerk's concept of the "average period of production" and on the effects that monetary policy could have upon it. In accordance with the reasoning later outlined in his essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), Hayek argued that a monopolistic governmental agency like a central bank can neither possess the relevant information which should govern supply of money, nor have the ability to use it correctly.

In 1929, Lionel Robbins assumed the helm of the London School of Economics (LSE). Eager to promote alternatives to what he regarded as the narrow approach of the school of economic thought that then dominated the English-speaking academic world (centred at the University of Cambridge and deriving largely from the work of Alfred Marshall), Robbins invited Hayek to join the faculty at LSE, which he did in 1931. According to Nicholas Kaldor, Hayek's theory of the time-structure of capital and of the business cycle initially "fascinated the academic world" and appeared to offer a less "facile and superficial" understanding of macroeconomics than the Cambridge school's.

Also in 1931, Hayek crititicised John Maynard Keynes's Treatise on Money (1930) in his "Reflections on the pure theory of Mr. J.M. Keynes" and published his lectures at the LSE in book form as Prices and Production. For Keynes, unemployment and idle resources are caused by a lack of effective demand, but for Hayek they stem from a previous unsustainable episode of easy money and artificially low interest rates. Keynes asked his friend Piero Sraffa to respond. Sraffa elaborated on the effect of inflation-induced "forced savings" on the capital sector and about the definition of a "natural" interest rate in a growing economy (see Sraffa–Hayek debate). Others who responded negatively to Hayek's work on the business cycle included John Hicks, Frank Knight and Gunnar Myrdal, who, later on, would share the Sveriges-Riksbank Prize in Economics with him. Kaldor later wrote that Hayek's Prices and Production had produced "a remarkable crop of critics" and that the total number of pages in British and American journals dedicated to the resulting debate "could rarely have been equalled in the economic controversies of the past".

Central banking

Hayek was a staunch critic of central banking stating, "I doubt whether it has ever done any good except to the rulers and their favorites," and concluding that "money is certainly too dangerous an instrument to leave to the fortuitous expediency of politicians." As alternative systems, Hayek supports free banking and a free and private market in currency which would tend to naturally emphasize sound money over fiat currency. Hayek offered praise to the gold standard stating,

"With the exception only of the 200 year period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money in order to defraud and plunder the people."

Following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the 1970s inflation surge, Hayek stated that he hoped for, "complete freedom to deal in any money one likes [to] be regarded as the essential mark of a free country."

"The Denationalisation of Money" is one of his literary works, in which he advocated the establishment of competitions in issuing moneys.

Economic calculation problem

Building on the earlier work of Mises and others, Hayek also argued that while in centrally planned economies an individual or a select group of individuals must determine the distribution of resources, these planners will never have enough information to carry out this allocation reliably. This argument, first proposed by Max Weber and Ludwig von Mises, says that the efficient exchange and use of resources can be maintained only through the price mechanism in free markets (see economic calculation problem).

In 1935, Hayek published Collectivist Economic Planning, a collection of essays from an earlier debate that had been initiated by Mises. Hayek included Mises's essay in which Mises argued that rational planning was impossible under socialism.

Socialist Oskar Lange responded by invoking general equilibrium theory, which they argued disproved Mises's thesis. They noted that the difference between a planned and a free market system lay in who was responsible for solving the equations. They argued that if some of the prices chosen by socialist managers were wrong, gluts or shortages would appear, signalling them to adjust the prices up or down, just as in a free market. Through such a trial and error, a socialist economy could mimic the efficiency of a free market system while avoiding its many problems.

Hayek challenged this vision in a series of contributions. In "Economics and Knowledge" (1937), he pointed out that the standard equilibrium theory assumed that all agents have full and correct information, and how, in his mind, in the real world different individuals have different bits of knowledge and furthermore some of what they believe is wrong.

In "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), Hayek argued that the price mechanism serves to share and synchronise local and personal knowledge, allowing society's members to achieve diverse and complicated ends through a principle of spontaneous self-organization. He contrasted the use of the price mechanism with central planning, arguing that the former allows for more rapid adaptation to changes in particular circumstances of time and place. Thus, Hayek set the stage for Oliver Williamson's later contrast between markets and hierarchies as alternative co-ordination mechanisms for economic transactions. He used the term catallaxy to describe a "self-organizing system of voluntary co-operation". Hayek's research into this argument was specifically cited by the Nobel Committee in its press release awarding Hayek the Nobel prize.

Investment and choice

Hayek made breakthroughs in the choice theory, and examined the inter-relations between non-permanent production goods and "latent" or potentially economic permanent resources, building on the choice theoretical insight that "processes that take more time will evidently not be adopted unless they yield a greater return than those that take less time".

Philosophy of science

During World War II, Hayek began the Abuse of Reason project. His goal was to show how a number of then-popular doctrines and beliefs had a common origin in some fundamental misconceptions about the social science.

Ideas were developed in The Counter-Revolution of Science in 1952 and in some of Hayek's later essays in the philosophy of science such as "Degrees of Explanation" (1955) and "The Theory of Complex Phenomena" (1964).

In Counter-Revolution, for example, Hayek observed that the hard sciences attempt to remove the "human factor" to obtain objective and strictly controlled results: [T]he persistent effort of modern Science has been to get down to 'objective facts', to cease studying what men thought about nature or regarding the given concepts as true images of the real world, and, above all, to discard all theories which pretended to explain phenomena by imputing to them a directing mind like our own. Instead, its main task became to revise and reconstruct the concepts formed from ordinary experience on the basis of a systematic testing of the phenomena, so as to be better able to recognize the particular as an instance of a general rule.

Meanwhile, the soft sciences are attempting to measure human action itself: The social sciences in the narrower sense, i.e., those which used to be described as the moral sciences, are concerned with man's conscious or reflected action, actions where a person can be said to choose between various courses open to him, and here the situation is essentially different. The external stimulus which may be said to cause or occasion such actions can of course also be defined in purely physical terms. But if we tried to do so for the purposes of explaining human action, we would confine ourselves to less than we know about the situation.

He notes that these are mutually exclusive and that social sciences should not attempt to impose positivist methodology, nor to claim objective or definite results:

Psychology

Hayek's first academic essay was a psychological work titled "Contributions to the Theory of the Development of Consciousness" (Beiträge zur Theorie der Entwicklung des Bewußtseins) In The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (1952), Hayek independently developed a "Hebbian learning" model of learning and memory—an idea he first conceived in 1920 prior to his study of economics. Hayek's expansion of the "Hebbian synapse" construction into a global brain theory received attention in neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science and evolutionary psychology by scientists such as Gerald Edelman, Vittorio Guidano and Joaquin Fuster.

The Sensory Order can be viewed as a development of his attack on scientism. Hayek posited two orders, namely the sensory order that we experience and the natural order that natural science revealed. Hayek thought that the sensory order actually is a product of the brain. He described the brain as a very complex yet self-ordering hierarchical classification system, a huge network of connections. Because of the nature of the classifier system, richness of our sensory experience can exist. Hayek's description posed problems to behaviorism, whose proponents took the sensory order as fundamental.

International relations

Hayek was a lifelong federalist. He joined several pan-European and pro-federalist movements throughout his career, and called for federal ties between the U.K. and Europe, and between Europe and the United States. After the 1950s, when the Cold War began in earnest, Hayek largely kept his federalist proposals out of the public sphere, although he did propose to federate Jerusalem as late as the 1970s.

Hayek argued that closer economic ties without closer political ties would lead to more problems because interest groups in nation-states would best be able to counter the internationalisation of markets that comes with closer economic ties by appealing to nationalism. Much of his time in the pro-federalist and pan-European groups was spent arguing with pro-federal and pan-European democratic socialists over the proper extent of a world federal government. Hayek argued that such a world government should do little more than act as a negative check on national sovereignties and serve as a focal point for collective defense.

As the Cold War heated up, Hayek grew more hawkish and he pushed his federal proposals onto the backburner in favour of more traditional public policy proposals that acknowledged and respected the sovereignty of nation-states. Yet Hayek never disavowed his famous call for "the abrogation of national sovereignties" and his lifetime of work in the area of international relations continues to attract attention from scholars searching for federalist answers to contemporary problems in international relations.

Social and political philosophy

In the latter half of his career, Hayek made a number of contributions to social and political philosophy which he based on his views on the limits of human knowledge and the idea of spontaneous order in social institutions. He argues in favour of a society organised around a market order in which the apparatus of state is employed almost (though not entirely) exclusively to enforce the legal order (consisting of abstract rules and not particular commands) necessary for a market of free individuals to function. These ideas were informed by a moral philosophy derived from epistemological concerns regarding the inherent limits of human knowledge. Hayek argued that his ideal individualistic and free-market polity would be self-regulating to such a degree that it would be "a society which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it".

Hayek discusses the contrasting traditions of liberty—British and French—in the theory of freedom. The British tradition, influenced by thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith, emphasises the organic growth of institutions and the spontaneous evolution of society. It recognises that political order arises from the cumulative experience and success of individuals, rather than from deliberate design. In contrast, the French tradition, rooted in Cartesian rationalism, seeks to construct a utopia based on a belief in the unlimited powers of human reason. The French tradition, that Hayek called constructivist rationalism, gained influence over time, partly due to its assumptions about human ambition and pride. However, according to Hayek, the British tradition, with its emphasis on the gradual development of civilization and the role of individual freedom, provides a more valid theory of liberty.

Hayek viewed the free price system not as a conscious invention (that which is intentionally designed by man), but as spontaneous order or what Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson referred to as "the result of human action but not of human design". For instance, Hayek put the price mechanism on the same level as language, which he developed in his price signal theory.

Hayek attributed the birth of civilisation to private property in his book The Fatal Conceit (1988). He explained that price signals are the only means of enabling each economic decision maker to communicate tacit knowledge or dispersed knowledge to each other to solve the economic calculation problem. Alain de Benoist of the Nouvelle Droite (New Right) produced a highly critical essay on Hayek's work in an issue of Telos, citing the flawed assumptions behind Hayek's idea of "spontaneous order" and the authoritarian and totalising implications of his free-market ideology.

Influence and recognition

Hayek's influence on the development of economics is widely acknowledged. With regard to the popularity of his Nobel acceptance lecture, Hayek is the second-most frequently cited economist (after Kenneth Arrow) in the Nobel lectures of the prize winners in economics. Hayek wrote critically there of the field of orthodox economics and neo-classical modelisation. A number of Nobel Laureates in economics, such as Vernon Smith and Herbert A. Simon, recognise Hayek as the greatest modern economist. Economic historian Douglass North, also a Nobel Laureate, claimed in a lecture that "Hayek talked about most of the interesting problems of our time" and that he considered him "the most interesting economist of the 20th century". Another Nobel winner, Paul Samuelson, believed that Hayek was worthy of his award, but nevertheless claimed that "there were good historical reasons for fading memories of Hayek within the mainstream last half of the twentieth century economist fraternity. In 1931, Hayek's Prices and Production had enjoyed an ultra-short Byronic success. In retrospect hindsight tells us that its mumbo-jumbo about the period of production grossly misdiagnosed the macroeconomics of the 1927–1931 (and the 1931–2007) historical scene". Despite this comment, Samuelson spent the last 50 years of his life obsessed with the problems of capital theory identified by Hayek and Böhm-Bawerk, and Samuelson flatly judged Hayek to have been right and his own teacher Joseph Schumpeter to have been wrong on the central economic question of the 20th century, the feasibility of socialist economic planning in a production goods dominated economy.

Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that Hayek was "the most powerful intellect on the right".

In 1944, he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy after he was nominated for membership by Keynes.

Harvard economist and former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers explains Hayek's place in modern economics: "What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy".

By 1947, Hayek was an organiser of the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of classical liberals who sought to oppose socialism. Hayek was also instrumental in the founding of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the right-wing libertarian and free-market think tank that inspired Thatcherism. He was in addition a member of the conservative and libertarian Philadelphia Society.

Relation to conservatism

Hayek received new attention in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of conservative governments in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. After winning the 1979 United Kingdom general election, Margaret Thatcher appointed Keith Joseph, the director of the Hayekian Centre for Policy Studies, as her secretary of state for industry in an effort to redirect parliament's economic strategies. Likewise, David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's most influential financial official in 1981, was an acknowledged follower of Hayek.

Although usually identified as a conservative liberal or a liberal conservative, Hayek published an essay, "Why I Am Not a Conservative" (included as an appendix to The Constitution of Liberty), in which he criticized certain aspects of conservatism from a liberal perspective. Edmund Fawcett summarizes Hayek's critique as follows:

Conservatives, on Hayek's account, suffered from the following weaknesses. They feared change unduly. They were unreasonably frightened of uncontrolled social forces. They were too fond of authority. They had no grasp of economics. They lacked the feel for "abstraction" needed for engaging with people of different outlooks. They were too cozy with elites and establishments. They gave in to jingoism and chauvinism. They tended to think mystically, much as socialists tended to overrationalize. They were, last, too suspicious of democracy.

Hayek identified himself as a classical liberal but noted that in the United States it had become almost impossible to use "liberal" in its original definition and the term "libertarian" was used instead. He also found libertarianism as a term "singularly unattractive" and offered the term "Old Whig" (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke) instead. In his later life, he said: "I am becoming a Burkean Whig". Whiggery as a political doctrine had little affinity for classical political economy, the tabernacle of the Manchester School and William Gladstone.

In his 1956 preface to The Road to Serfdom, Hayek summarized all his disagreements with conservatism in this way:

Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and poweradoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.

Policy discussions

Hayek's ideas on spontaneous order and the importance of prices in dealing with the knowledge problem inspired a debate on economic development and transition economies after the fall of the Berlin wall. For instance, economist Peter Boettke elaborated in detail on why reforming socialism failed and the Soviet Union broke down. Economist Ronald McKinnon uses Hayekian ideas to describe the challenges of transition from a centralized state and planned economy to a market economy. Former World Bank Chief Economist William Easterly emphasizes why foreign aid tends to have no effect at best in books such as The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, there is a renewed interest in Hayek's core explanation of boom-and-bust cycles, which serves as an alternative explanation to that of the savings glut as launched by economist and former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. Economists at the Bank for International Settlements, e.g. William R. White, emphasize the importance of Hayekian insights and the impact of monetary policies and credit growth as root causes of financial cycles. Andreas Hoffmann and Gunther Schnabl provide an international perspective and explain recurring financial cycles in the world economy as consequence of gradual interest rate cuts led by the central banks in the large advanced economies since the 1980s. Nicolas Cachanosky outlines the impact of American monetary policy on the production structure in Latin America.

In line with Hayek, an increasing number of contemporary researchers sees expansionary monetary policies and too low interest rates as mal-incentives and main drivers of financial crises in general and the subprime market crisis in particular. To prevent problems caused by monetary policy, Hayekian and Austrian economists discuss alternatives to current policies and organizations. For instance, Lawrence H. White argued in favor of free banking in the spirit of Hayek's "Denationalisation of Money". Along with market monetarist economist Scott Sumner, White also noted that the monetary policy norm that Hayek prescribed, first in Prices and Production (1931) and as late as the 1970s, was the stabilization of nominal income.

Hayek's ideas find their way into the discussion of the post-Great Recession issues of secular stagnation. Monetary policy and mounting regulation are argued to have undermined the innovative forces of the market economies. Quantitative easing following the financial crises is argued to have not only conserved structural distortions in the economy, leading to a fall in trend-growth. It also created new distortions and contributes to distributional conflicts.

Central European politics

In the 1970s and 1980s, the writings of Hayek were a major influence on some of the future postsocialist economic and political elites in Central and Eastern Europe. Supporting examples include the following:

There is no figure who had more of an influence, no person had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published by the underground and black market editions, read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The most interesting among the courageous dissenters of the 1980s were the classical liberals, disciples of F.A. Hayek, from whom they had learned about the crucial importance of economic freedom and about the often-ignored conceptual difference between liberalism and democracy.

Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar came to my office the other day to recount his country's remarkable transformation. He described a nation of people who are harder-working, more virtuous—yes, more virtuous, because the market punishes immorality—and more hopeful about the future than they've ever been in their history. I asked Mr. Laar where his government got the idea for these reforms. Do you know what he replied? He said, "We read Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek."

I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of post-graduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics.

Legacy and honours

Hayek's intellectual presence has remained evident in the years following his death, especially in the universities where he had taught, namely the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago and the University of Freiburg. His influence and contributions have been noted by many. A number of tributes have resulted, many established posthumously:

The Hayek Society, a student-run group at the London School of Economics, was established in his honour.

The Oxford Hayek Society, founded in 1983, is named after Hayek.

The Cato Institute named its lower level auditorium after Hayek, who had been a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Cato during his later years.

The auditorium of the school of economics in Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala is named after him.

The Hayek Fund for Scholars of the Institute for Humane Studies provides financial awards for academic career activities of graduate students and untenured faculty members.

The Ludwig von Mises Institute holds a lecture named after Hayek every year at its Austrian Scholars Conference and invites notable academics to speak about subjects relating to Hayek's contributions to the Austrian School.

George Mason University has an economics essay award named in honour of Hayek.

The Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank also at George Mason University, who has a philosophy, politics and economics program of study named for Hayek.

The Mont Pelerin Society has a quadrennial economics essay contest named in his honour.

Notable works

The Road to Serfdom, 1944.

Individualism and Economic Order, 1948.

The Constitution of Liberty, 1960. The Definitive Edition, 2011. Description and preview.

Law, Legislation and Liberty (3 volumes)

Volume I. Rules and Order, 1973.

Volume II. The Mirage of Social Justice, 1976.

Volume III. The Political Order of a Free People, 1979.

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988. The authorship of The Fatal Conceit is under scholarly dispute. The book in its published form may actually have been written entirely by its editor W. W. Bartley III and not by Hayek.