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.
In this seventh volume, Leeson explores Hayek's encounters with fifty knowledge communities.

An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century.

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.

This latest volume in the Collaborative Biography of Hayek examines the interconnectedness between Hayek’s (1944) The Road to Serfdom and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); his relationship with Karl Popper and Karl Polanyi; and the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Mises had a ‘deep emotional attachment’ to the ‘free’ market and Hayek believed that ‘science’ was driven by shallow emotions.

Hayek gives the main arguments for the free-market case and presents his manifesto on the "errors of socialism." Hayek argues that socialism has, from its origins, been mistaken on factual, and even on logical, grounds and that its repeated failures in the many different practical applications of socialist ideas that this century has witnessed were the direct outcome of these errors. He labels as the "fatal conceit" the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes."