Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August von Hayek CH FBA (/ˈhaɪək/ HY-ək, German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈʔaʊɡʊst fɔn ˈhaɪɛk] ⓘ; 8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992), often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-British polymath, whose areas of interest included economics, political philosophy, psychology, and intellectual history.[2][3][4][5] Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.[6] His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as an important contribution to economics that led to him receiving the prize.[7][8][9]
Friedrich Hayek
23 March 1992 (aged 92)
Austrian (1899–1938)
British (1938–1992)
Christine Maria Felicitas von Hayek (daughter)
Laurence Hayek (son)[1]
August von Hayek (father)
Felicitas von Juraschek (mother)
- Gustav von Hayek (grandfather)
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (cousin)
- London School of Economics (1931–1950)
- University of Chicago (1950–1962)
- University of Freiburg (1962–1968; 1978–1992)
- University of Salzburg (1969–1977)
- Economics
- Political science
- Jurisprudence
- Philosophy
- Psychology
During his teenage years, Hayek fought in World War I. He later said this experience, coupled with his desire to help avoid the mistakes that led to the war, drew him into economics.[10][11] He earned doctoral degrees in law in 1921 and political science in 1923 from the University of Vienna.[10][12] He subsequently lived and worked in Austria, Great Britain, the United States, and Germany. He became a British citizen in 1938.[13] His academic life was mostly spent at the London School of Economics, later at the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg. He is widely considered a major contributor to the Austrian School of Economics.[14][15]
Hayek had considerable influence on a variety of political movements of the 20th century, and his ideas continue to influence thinkers from a variety of political backgrounds today.[16][17][18] Although sometimes described as a conservative,[19] Hayek himself was uncomfortable with this label and preferred to be thought of as a classical liberal.[20][21] As the co-founder of the Mont Pelerin Society he contributed to the revival of classical liberalism in the post-war era.[22] His most popular work, The Road to Serfdom, has been republished many times over the eight decades since its original publication.[23][24]
Hayek was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1984 for his academic contributions to economics.[25][26] He was the first recipient of the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize in 1984.[27] He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 from President George H. W. Bush.[28] In 2011, his article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" was selected as one of the top 20 articles published in the American Economic Review during its first 100 years.[29]
Life[edit]
Early life[edit]
Friedrich August von Hayek was born in Vienna to August von Hayek and Felicitas Hayek (née von Juraschek). Both of his parents had Czech family surnames and Czech ancestry.[30][31] The surname Hayek is the Germanized spelling of the Czech surname Hájek.[26] Hayek traced his paternal Czech ancestry to an ancestor with the surname "Hagek" who came from Prague in the 1500s.[32]
His father, born in 1871, also in Vienna, was a medical doctor employed by the municipal ministry of health.[33] August was a part-time botany lecturer at the University of Vienna.[6] Friedrich was the oldest of three brothers, Heinrich (1900–1969) and Erich (1904–1986), who were one-and-a-half and five years younger than he was.[34]
His father's career as a university professor influenced Hayek's goals later in life.[35] Both of his grandfathers, who lived long enough for Hayek to know them, were scholars.[36] Franz von Juraschek was a leading economist in Austria-Hungary and a close friend of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, one of the founders of the Austrian School of Economics.[37] 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, some of which are relatively well known.[38]
On his mother's side, Hayek was second cousin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.[39] His mother often played with Wittgenstein's sisters and had known him well. As a result of their family relationship, Hayek became one of the first to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when the book was published in its original German edition in 1921.[40] 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.[41] In his later years, Hayek recalled a discussion of philosophy with Wittgenstein when both were officers during World War I.[42] After Wittgenstein's death, Hayek had intended to write a biography of Wittgenstein and worked on collecting family materials and later assisted biographers of Wittgenstein.[43] He was related to Wittgenstein on the non-Jewish side of the Wittgenstein family. Since his youth, Hayek frequently socialized with Jewish intellectuals, and he mentions that people often speculated whether he was also 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.[44]
Hayek displayed an intellectual and academic bent from a very young age and read fluently and frequently before going to school.[13][45] However, he did quite poorly at school, due to the lack of interest and problems with teachers.[46] He was at the bottom of his class in most subjects and once received three failing grades, in Latin, Greek, and mathematics.[46] He was very interested in theater, even attempting to write some tragedies, and biology, regularly helping his father with his botanical work.[47] At his father's suggestion, as a teenager he read the genetic and evolutionary works of Hugo de Vries and August Weismann and the philosophical works of Ludwig Feuerbach.[48] He noted Goethe as the greatest early intellectual influence.[47] In school, Hayek was much taken by one instructor's lectures on Aristotle's ethics.[49] In his unpublished autobiographical notes, Hayek recalled a division between him and his younger brothers who were only a few years younger than him, but he believed that they were somehow of a different generation. He preferred to associate with adults.[45]
In 1917, Hayek joined an artillery regiment in the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought on the Italian front.[50] Hayek suffered damage to his hearing in his left ear during the war[51] and was decorated for bravery. He also survived the 1918 flu pandemic.[52]
Hayek then decided to pursue an academic career, determined to help avoid the mistakes that had led to the war. Hayek said of his experience: "The decisive influence was really World War I. It's bound to draw your attention to the problems of political organization". He vowed to work for a better world.[53]
Education[edit]
At the University of Vienna, Hayek initially studied mostly philosophy, psychology and economics.[15] 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.[54] 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.[55] He earned doctorates in law and political science in 1921 and 1923 respectively.[15]
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.[56] 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).[57][56] It located connective learning at the physical and neurological levels, rejecting the "sense data" associationism of the empiricists and logical positivists.[57] Hayek presented his work to the private seminar he had created with Herbert Furth called the Geistkreis.[58]
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.[48] 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.[59] 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.[60] He was influenced by Wesley Clair Mitchell and started a doctoral program on problems of monetary stabilization but didn't finish it.[61] 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.[62] His family's financial situation deteriorated significantly after the War.[63]
Initially sympathetic to Wieser's democratic socialism, Hayek found Marxism rigid and unattractive, and his mild socialist phase lasted until he was about 23.[64] Hayek's economic thinking shifted away from socialism and toward the classical liberalism of Carl Menger after reading von Mises' book Socialism.[59] 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.[65]
London School of Economics[edit]
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.[66] 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.[67]
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.[68][69] 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.[70] 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".[71]
Notable economists who studied with Hayek at the LSE in the 1930s and 1940s include Arthur Lewis, Ronald Coase, William Baumol, John Maynard Keynes, 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.[72][73][33] Some were supportive and some were critical of his ideas. Hayek also taught or tutored many other LSE students, including David Rockefeller.[74]
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.[75] 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.[76]
In 1947, Hayek was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.[77]
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: