Friedrich Hayek

**Friedrich August von Hayek**, CH (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher. He became known because he strongly defended liberalism and free-market capitalism. He was against too much central control of the economy and society. He thought that forms of government like socialism were not good for the economy, and damaged freedom of the individual. Hayek's signature work, _The Road to Serfdom_, refers to the consequences of socialism.

He was one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the 20th century. He was one of the most important members of the Austrian School of economics. He also had many ideas in the fields of jurisprudence and cognitive science. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with his rival Gunnar Myrdal. The award was for their work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations; also for their analysis of the inter-dependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. He also received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. He is thought to be one of the major causes of change from the Keynesian policies of the first part of the 20th century. Instead of governments handling the details of the economy, they went back towards classical liberalism in the 1980s and later. This happened most clearly in the 1980s in the U.S.A. (under Ronald Reagan) and the U.K. (under Margaret Thatcher).

## Main books

- _Profits, interest and investment: and other essays on the theory of industrial fluctuations_, 1939.
- _The road to serfdom_, 1944.
- _Individualism and economic order_, 1948.
- _The counter-revolution of science: studies on the abuse of reason_, 1952.
- _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.

## Related pages

- Constitutional economics
- Political economy

## Infobox (philosopher)

- **color**: firebrick
- **region**: Western philosophy
- **era**: 20th-century philosophy
- **image**: Friedrich_Hayek_portrait.jpg
- **image size**: 200px
- **name**: Friedrich August von Hayek
- **birth**:
Vienna, Austria-Hungary
- **death**:
Freiburg, Germany
- **school tradition**: British Whig Party, Old Whig, Classical liberalism and Austrian School
- **main interests**: Economics, social philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of mind
- **influences**: Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, Lord Acton, Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper
- **influenced**: Karl Popper, Konrad Lorenz, Robert Nozick, Israel Kirzner, Murray Rothbard, John Hicks, George Stigler, Ben Reid, Milton Friedman, Michael Novak, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell, Sir Keith Joseph Margaret Thatcher, Bruno Leoni, Giovanni Sartori, Atilla Yayla, Bruce Caldwell, John Gray (LSE), John Gray, Jimmy Wales, Ludwig Erhard, Ron Paul, Alan Greenspan
- **notable ideas**: Economic calculation problem, Catallactics, Catallaxy, Extended order, Dispersed knowledge, Spontaneous order