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Friederich A. Hayek — (1899-1992)
Economist and Philosopher
Among the most masterful and insightful of 20th Century economists, Friedrich A. von Hayek alone could have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his great rival, J.M. Keynes. Trained by Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk in the Austrian tradition at Vienna, F.A. Hayek nonetheless carved a distinct spot in the economic pantheon - in some ways more different from the Austrian School than that of his friend and intellectual companion, Ludwig von Mises.
Hayek presented his main treatise on monetary cycle theory in a slim book, Prices and Production (1931), in England and was immediately drafted by Lord Robbins to join the L.S.E. - where he would serve as that institution's answer to Cambridge's John Maynard Keynes who was then working on similar issues. Keynes did not take lightly the criticisms Hayek made of his Treatise on Money (1930), and thus Keynes and Sraffa joined forces to bury Hayek and his cycle theory in the Economic Journal in 1932.
Hayek turned in 1944 to the political arena with his Road to Serfdom, a polemical defense of laissez-faire - the work for which he is best known outside academia. His subsequent political activities include the foundation of the libertarian "Mont Pelerin Society" in the 1940s.
Hayek continued with his work on "evolving order", linking it with his work on political and legal theory (e.g. 1960, 1973). In tackling the evolution of political, social, legal and economic institutions, Hayek is rightly conceived as one of the founding fathers of "evolutionary economics".
Hayek shared the Nobel Prize with Gunnar Myrdal in 1974 in one of the more controversial and surprising awards ever made (controversial because Myrdal had called for the abolition of the Nobel prize as a result of it having been awarded to Hayek and Friedman, and surprising for, at that time, Hayek was virtually forgotten in the economics profession). Interest in Hayek and his work increased after the 1974 award (his Nobel speech being a reiteration of his Counterrevolution thesis) and has kept on that track until today - his stock being enormously boosted by the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.
Source: The History of Economic Thought Website
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