Friedrich August Von Hayek

F. A. von Hayek (1899-1992) was a Nobel Prize winning economist, famous for promoting an Austrian version of classical liberalism. This multi-volume biography examines the evolution of his life and influence.

This tenth part of Robert Leeson's collaborative biography of Friedrich August von Hayek explores Hayek’s thought on the free market and democracy. Using an unparalleled array of archival materials, Leeson reconstructs Hayek’s thinking as the notorious economist and his acolytes set about reshaping the post-war economic order. Darker areas of Hayek’s thought are also explored, including the influence of eugenics on his thought and his support for radical right-wing dictatorships in South America.

On 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; on 29 April 1975, the United States scuttled from their Embassy in Saigon - optics that were interpreted as defeats for the ‘International Right’. Yet in 1975, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party; and in 1976 Ronald Reagan almost unseated a sitting Republican Party President. Pivotal to the ‘turn to the Right’ was Friedrich ‘von’ Hayek’s 1974 Nobel Prize for Economic Science - awarded for having used Austrian Business Cycle Theory to predict the Great Depression: ‘For him it is not a matter of a simple defence of a liberal system of society as may sometimes appear from the popularized versions of his thinking.’

This book discusses contemporary banking and monetary policy issues from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics. Based on the heritage of the Austrian school, leading scholars and practitioners offer a coherent diagnosis and analysis of the factors leading to Europe’s current financial crisis. The first part of the book discusses Ludwig von Mises’s and Friedrich August von Hayek’s ideas on banking and monetary policy from both historical and economic standpoints. It includes contributions on Austrian monetary dynamics and micro-foundational business cycle theory, von Mises’s concepts of liquidity and solvency of fractional-reserve banks, and liberalism of Austrian economics. The second part analyzes the measures taken by the European Central Bank (ECB) in light of the ideas of von Mises and Hayek. It includes contributions on non-neutrality of money, ECB monetary policy, and the future of the ECB. The third and final part presents discussions on monetary reforms, including contributions on Bitcoins, Cryptocurrencies and anti-deflationist Paranoia.