Friedrich von Hayek

Friedrich von Hayek was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher whose defence of classical liberalism between the 1930s and the 1980s made him one of the most-influential economic thinkers of the 20th century. He was born Friedrich August von Hayek on May 8, 1899, in Vienna, into a family of academics; he served as an artillery officer on the Italian front in the First World War.

He took doctorates in law and political science at the University of Vienna in 1921 and 1923 and worked under Ludwig von Mises at the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. In 1931 he was appointed Tooke Professor at the London School of Economics, where his lectures (published as Prices and Production) opened the long debate with John Maynard Keynes that ran through the 1930s.

His 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, written for a general British audience and condensed by Reader's Digest, argued that central economic planning leads to political authoritarianism; it sold widely in Britain and the United States and made him a public figure. He moved in 1950 to the University of Chicago and in 1962 to the University of Freiburg in West Germany. His later work — The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and the three-volume Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–79) — set out a theory of a spontaneous order in markets, language and law.

He shared the 1974 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Gunnar Myrdal for work on monetary theory and the institutional analysis of economic and social phenomena. He was made a Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II in 1984 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. He died in Freiburg on March 23, 1992, at the age of 92.

His name Friedrich is the German form of Frederick, from the Old High German Fridurih — from fridu ("peace") and rīh ("ruler, power"), giving the sense "peaceful ruler." It is a masculine name.