Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian-born British economist and philosopher. He is known for his contributions to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history. 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. His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as an important contribution to economics that led to him receiving the prize. He was a major contributor to the Austrian school of economics.

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. He earned doctoral degrees in law in 1921 and political studies in 1923 from the University of Vienna. He subsequently lived and worked in Austria, Great Britain, the United States and Germany. He became a British national in 1938. He studied and taught at the London School of Economics and later at the University of Chicago, before returning to Europe late in life to teach at the Universities of Salzburg and Freiburg.

Hayek had considerable influence on a variety of political and economic movements of the 20th century, and his ideas continue to influence thinkers from a variety of political and economic backgrounds today. Although sometimes described as a conservative, Hayek himself was uncomfortable with this label and preferred to be thought of as a classical liberal or libertarian. His most popular work, The Road to Serfdom (1944), has been republished many times over the eight decades since its original publication.

Hayek was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1984 for his academic contributions to economics. He was the first recipient of the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize in 1984. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 from President George H. W. Bush. 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.

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 ministry of health. August was a part-time botany lecturer at the University of Vienna. 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.

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. 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. 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.

On his mother's side, Hayek was second cousin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. 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. 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.