Friedrich A. Hayek

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. Originally published in 1944—when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program— The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945, Reader’s Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best seller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century.With this new edition, The Road to Serfdom takes its place in the series The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. The volume includes a foreword by series editor and leading Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought. Caldwell has also standardized and corrected Hayek's references and added helpful new explanatory notes. Supplemented with an appendix of related materials ranging from prepublication reports on the initial manuscript to forewords to earlier editions by John Chamberlain, Milton Friedman, and Hayek himself, this new edition of The Road to Serfdom will be the definitive version of Hayek's enduring masterwork.

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.""The achievement of The Fatal Conceit is that it freshly shows why socialism must be refuted rather than merely dismissed—then refutes it again."—David R. Henderson, Fortune."Fascinating. . . . The energy and precision with which Mr. Hayek sweeps away his opposition is impressive."—Edward H. Crane, Wall Street JournalF. A. Hayek is considered a pioneer in monetary theory, the preeminent proponent of the libertarian philosophy, and the ideological mentor of the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions."

In this collection of writings, Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek discusses topics from moral philosophy and the methods of the social sciences to economic theory as different aspects of the same central issue: free markets versus socialist planned economies. First published in the 1930s and 40s, these essays continue to illuminate the problems faced by developing and formerly socialist countries.F. A. Hayek, recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, taught at the University of Chicago, the University of London, and the University of Freiburg. Among his other works published by the University of Chicago Press is The Road to Serfdom, now available in a special fiftieth anniversary edition.

In this classic work Hayek restates the ideals of freedom that he believes have guided, and must continue to guide, the growth of Western civilization. Hayek's book, first published in 1960, urges us to clarify our beliefs in today's struggle of political ideologies.

Undated pamphlet (1980 is just a guess). Hayek sets forth arguments in favor of an individualistic, rational free market that will produce a peaceful objectively freer society. Reprint of 1945 article from the American Economic Review. 17 pages.

In this groundbreaking work, first published in 1976, Friedrich von Hayek argues that the government monopoly of money must be abolished to stop recurring bouts of inflation and deflation. Abolition is also the cure for the more deep-seated disease of the recurring waves of depression and unemployment attributed to ‘capitalism’.

This volume represents the first section of F. A. Hayek's comprehensive three-part study of the relations between law and liberty. Rules and Order constructs the framework necessary for a critical analysis of prevailing theories of justice and of the conditions which a constitution securing personal liberty would have to satisfy.

F. A. Hayek made many valuable contributions to the field of economics as well as to the disciplines of philosophy and politics. This volume represents the second of Hayek's comprehensive three-part study of the relations between law and liberty. Here, Hayek expounds his conviction that he continued unexamined pursuit of "social justice" will contribute to the erosion of personal liberties and encourage the advent of totalitarianism.

Combines all three volumes of Hayek's comprehensive study of the basic principles of the political order of free Rules and Order, The Mirage of Social Justice and The Political Order of a Free Society. 'A careful and brilliant statement of the conditions of human freedom. It is a major work of political and economic philosophy which sets terms that neither its friends or critics can ignore.' - THES

The views generally held about the rise of the factory system in Britain derive from highly distorted accounts of the social consequences of that system—so say the distinguished economic historians whose papers make up this book. The authors offer documentary evidence to support their conclusion that under capitalism the workers, despite long hours and other hardships of factory life, were better off financially, had more opportunities, and led a better life than had been the case before the Industrial Revolution.

Early in the last century the successes of science led a group of French thinkers to apply the principles of science to the study of society. These thinkers purported to have discovered the supposed 'laws' of society and concluded that an elite of social scientists should assume direct control of social life. The Counter-Revolution of Science is Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek's forceful attack on this abuse of reason.

Never underestimate the influence of intellectuals, because the theories they are promoting today will be the basis of tomorrow's political programmes. This was the warning which Friedrich Hayek, the great architect of the 20th-century revival of classical liberal ideas, issued in 1949 with this essay. Hayek described intellectuals as 'professional second-hand dealers in ideas', people who are in a position to become familiar with new ideas and to promote them through their writings and speeches.He believed the importance of this class had been ignoted by supporters of the free market, with serious consequences. For example, socialism had never, and nowhere, been at first a working-class movement. It adoption by policy makers had been preceded by a long period in which it had been of interest only to intellectuals, who had promoted it relentlessly.Hayek believe that the classical liberal ideal of liberty and free markets had lost its appeal for young, intelligent the challenge was to 'make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure'. Hayek ended the essay by 'Will it be in time?' A foreword by Edwin J. Feulner, President of the Heritage Foundation, and an introduction by John Blundell, General Director of the IEA, testify to the impact of this essay, together with Hayek's other writings, in stimulating the backlash against socialism through the many institutes founded by those who were won over to classical liberal ideas - just in time.

Incisive, straightforward, and eloquent, this third and concluding volume of F. A. Hayek's comprehensive assessment of the basic political principles which order and sustain free societies contains the clearest and most uncompromising exposition of the political philosophy of one of the world's foremost economists.

Here are two of Hayek's greatest essays in one small and beautiful volume at a very low price. It is a perfect way to introduce yourself and others to this giant of the 20th century. The book begins with Hayek's most excellent essay on money. It is also his most radical. He plainly says that central banks cannot be reformed. There can never be sound money so long as they are in charge. He calls for their complete abolition, no compromises accepted. He wants the market in charge of money from top to bottom. His words predicting crisis followed by wild swings in valuation are up to the minute. He also relates the quality of money with the recurrence of crisis, showing an excellent application of Austrian theory.Hayek was deeply influenced by Mises, and this shows here in the area of money.The second essay is "The Pretense of Knowledge," his shocking Nobel speech that explained why the very idea of government in our times is unintellectual, presumptuous, and untenable. He is as critical of socialism as he is of interventionism. He shows that the state is not capable of doing all that it is charged with doing, and why conceding it any role in social and economic management is dangerous to liberty.It was not the speech everyone expected. But it lived up to Hayek's lifelong commitment to telling truth to power. This small book is really a first in the Hayekian literature: small form, powerful words, and by the great man himself.[Description taken from Mises.org]

Friedrich von Hayek's Nobel Prize lecture.

The Sensory Order , first published in 1952, sets forth F. A. Hayek's classic theory of mind in which he describes the mental mechanism that classifies perceptions that cannot be accounted for by physical laws. Hayek's substantial contribution to theoretical psychology has been addressed in the work of Thomas Szasz, Gerald Edelman, and Joaquin Fuster."A most encouraging example of a sustained attempt to bring together information, inference, and hypothesis in the several fields of biology, psychology, and philosophy."— Quarterly Review of BiologyF. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, taught at the University of London, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg.

Hayek was not only a leading champion of liberty in the 20th century. As this massive book reveals, he was also a great economist whose elaboration on monetary theory and the business cycle made him the leading foe of Keynesian theory and policy in the English-speaking world. Here his most important works are collected, re-typeset, indexed for the first time, and beautifully bound in a 536-page hardbound book for the ages.The theory here is the subject of a massively popular video rap song -- one that was oddly accurate! However, to truly understand the nuts and bolts, there is no substitute for Hayek's own works. Together they constitute a complete presentation of Hayekian money and business-cycle theory. Even more, they work together as an excellent elucidation of Austrian macroeconomic theory, which is why this book has already been adopted in some classrooms.The timing could not be better. The entire world economy is now suffering from the effects of bad monetary policy, and with results that Hayek explains in great detail. With "countercyclical" policy again revealed as unworkable, and politicians plotting to make matters worse, the contents of this book have direct bearing on present and future monetary policy.Hayek was barely out of his twenties in 1929 when he published the German versions of the first two works in this collection, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle and “The Paradox of Saving." The latter article was a long essay that was to become the core of his celebrated book and the third work in this volume, Prices and Production, the publication of which two years later made him a world-renowned economist by the age of thirty-two.But the young Hayek did not pause to savor his success. He was already hard at work on "Reflections on the Pure Theory of Money of Mr. J.M. Keynes," a lengthy critical review of John Maynard Keynes’s two-volume Treatise on Money, which had been published in 1930. Hayek’s two-part review appeared in late 1931 and 1932.There followed within a few years the other three works collected in this volume. "The Mythology of Capital" appeared in 1936 and was a response to Frank Knight’s hostile criticisms of the Austrian theory of capital. A short article on "Investment That Raises the Demand for Capital" and the monograph "Monetary Nationalism and International Stability" were published in 1937.These seven works taken together represent the first integration and systematic elaboration of the Austrian theories of money, capital, business cycles, and comparative monetary institutions, which constitute the essential core of Austrian macroeconomics.These works have profoundly influenced postwar expositions of Austrian or capital-based macroeconomics down to the present day. The creation of such an oeuvre is a formidable intellectual feat over an entire lifetime; it is an absolute marvel when we consider that Hayek had completed it in the span of eight years (1929–1937) and still well shy of his fortieth birthday. Hayek’s amazingly precocious intellect and creative genius are on full display in these works."The re-publication of these works in a single volume is a magnificent event that fills a yawning gap in the Austrian macroeconomic literature and provides modern Austrians with a model of how to advance economic theory through reasoned debate and criticism."-Joseph T. Salerno, from the introduction"I congratulate the Ludwig von Mises Institute for bringing back into print Hayek’s writings on business cycles. This collection will be a critical touchstone for future thinking in the area."-Danny Quah, London School of Economics, from the preface.

The Road to Serfdom is a book written by the Austrian-born economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) between 1940-1943, in which he -warned of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning.- He further argues that the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism inevitably leads to a loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, the tyranny of a dictator, and the serfdom of the individual. Significantly, Hayek challenged the general view among British academics that fascism (and National Socialism) was a capitalist reaction against socialism. He argued that fascism, National Socialism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and empowering the state over the individual. Since its publication in 1944, The Road to Serfdom has been an influential and popular exposition of market libertarianism. It has sold over two million copies. The Road to Serfdom was to be the popular edition of the second volume of Hayek's treatise entitled -The Abuse and Decline of Reason-, and the title was inspired by the writings of the 19th century French classical liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville on the -road to servitude-. The book was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944, during World War II, and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it -that unobtainable book-, also due in part to wartime paper rationing. It was published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press in September 1944 and achieved great popularity. At the arrangement of editor Max Eastman, the American magazine Reader's Digest published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom to reach a wider popular audience beyond academics. The Road to Serfdom has had a significant impact on twentieth-century conservative and libertarian economic and political discourse, and is often cited today by commentators.

The crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the iron curtain, and the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions" all owe a tremendous debt to F. A. Hayek. Economist, social and political theorist, and intellectual historian, Hayek passionately championed individual liberty and condemned the dangers of state control. Now Hayek at last tells the story of his long and controversial career, during which his fortunes rose, fell, and finally rose again.Through a complete collection of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches and a wide selection of interviews, Hayek on Hayek provides the first detailed chronology of Hayek's early life and education, his intellectual progress, and the academic and public reception of his ideas. His discussions range from economic methodology and the question of religious faith to the atmosphere of post-World War I Vienna and the British character.Born in 1899 into a Viennese family of academics and civil servants, Hayek was educated at the University of Vienna, fought in the Great War, and later moved to London, where, as he watched liberty vanish under fascism and communism across Europe, he wrote The Road to Serfdom. Although this book attracted great public attention, Hayek was ignored by other economists for thirty years after World War II, when European social democracies boomed and Keynesianism became the dominant intellectual force. However, the award of the Nobel Prize in economics for 1974 signaled a reversal in Hayek's fortunes, and before his death in 1992 he saw his life's work vindicated in the collapse of the planned economies of Eastern Europe.Hayek on Hayek is as close to an autobiography of Hayek as we will ever have. In his own eloquent words, Hayek reveals the remarkable life of a revolutionary thinker in revolutionary times."One of the great thinkers of our age who explored the promise and contours of liberty....[Hayek] revolutionized the world's intellectual and political life"—President George Bush, on awarding F. A. Hayek the Medal of FreedomF. A. Hayek, recipient of the Medal of Freedom 1991 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and the principal proponent of the libertarian philosophy. Hayek is the author of numerous books in economics, as well as books in political philosophy and psychology.

LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com.The pathbreaking book first appeared in 1976, during an inflationary bout in the United States. Hayek argued that it is crucial to the health of the market as a whole to bring the forces of competition to bear in currency markets, not just between countries but within them as well.All people should be free to use any currency of their own choosing, Hayek contended, even if that means rejecting the favored domestic one. This provides a check against inflation, permitting citizens to keep assets denominated in any unit.Governments will thus have greater incentive to avoid inflating because a depreciating unit will lead people to flee to other currencies. At least this would work as some check, and it would be a great improvement over the existing system in which citizens in a currency region are caged sheep led to the slaughter.This book is an important work in part because it represents a reform that could take place right now, one that would change the institutional incentives faced by central banks. This is not Hayek's full plan for sound money but rather a creative idea to diminish the total power of central banks within individual countries. It was a good idea in 1976, and it's still a good idea in the 21st century.

F.A. Hayek said that his biggest regret in a lifetime of writing was that he never wrote a book-length refutation of Keynesian economics. He seriously doubted that Keynesian style planning would ever captivate governments, so he focused on different things.Economist Sudha Shenoy decided to rectify the problem. As a Hayek scholar, she noted that Hayek had in fact addressed Keynesian policy in scattered places throughout 40 years of writing. She decided to select the most poignant passages. She linked them all together with marvelous commentary and analysis.And voila! Here is the book on Keynesian economics that Hayek never wrote.It first came out in 1972, to wide acclaim. The Hayek parts are fantastic, of course. The surprise is the expert editing job by Professor Shenoy, which adds enormous value. In 192 pages, the book ended up being a total demolition by Hayek of the most baneful influence on economic science in the 20th century.It was published by the Institute of Economic Affairs but fell out of print. The Mises Institute cooperated with IEA to completely reset the book and publish it anew. It adds something even more wonderful: a massive introduction by monetary theorist Joseph T. Salerno.In total, then, this is a priceless collection, one that will enlighten and save you from hopping up and down to your bookshelf. It strikes you as you read what a brilliant mind Hayek had, how tough minded he really was, and just how off base is Keynesian theory.You can get the metaphor from the title. What Keynesianism unleashes is wicked inflation that no one can control. This might be the essential guide to our future.

Book by Friedrich A. Hayek

In this collection of essays, some of which appear here in English for the first time, F. A. Hayek traces his intellectual roots to the Austrian School. The Fortunes of Liberalism: Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom also links the Austrian School to the modern rebirth of classical liberal thought.F. A. Hayek (1899–1992) was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 and the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and was one of the leading Austrian economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century.Peter G. Klein is Associate Professor in the Division of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Missouri and Associate Director of the Contracting and Organizations Research Institute. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Olin School of Business.

Following on F. A. Hayek's previous work Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1967), New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas collects some of Hayek's most notable essays and lectures dealing with problems of philosophy, politics and economics, with many of the essays falling into more than one of these categories. Expanding upon the previous volume the present work also includes a fourth part collecting a series of Hayek's writings under the heading 'History of Ideas.'Of the articles contained in this volume the lectures on 'The Errors of Constructivism' (chapter 1) and 'Competition as a Discovery Procedure' (chapter 12) have been published before only in German, while the article on 'Liberalism' (chapter 9) was written in English to be published in an Italian translation in the Enciclopedia del Novicento by the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana at Rome.

Contra Keynes and Cambridge is composed of three parts: Part I consists of two essays, the first being a recollection by Hayek of his time at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, followed by his contribution to an early debate about the paradox of saving; Part II reprints the full debates between Hayek and Keynes in Economica in the early 1930s, and Hayek's exchanges with Sraffa that followed; Part III includes some of Hayek's reminiscences on Keynes. F. A. Hayek challenged one of the world's leading economists, John Maynard Keynes, and his economic theories, which sparked a spirited debate that has influenced economic policy in democractic countries for decades.F. A. Hayek (1899–1992) was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 and the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and was one of the leading Austrian economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century.Bruce Caldwell is Professor of Economics and the Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He is the current General Editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek.

"Every price is the knowledge and values of millions boiled down to a single number."The distinguished economist F.A. Hayek (1899-1992) also noted the strong association among prosperity, freedom, and personal responsibility. In “The Moral Element in Free Enterprise” (included), he writes:"Free societies have always been societies in which the belief in individual responsibility has been strong. They have allowed individuals to act on their knowledge and beliefs and have treated the results achieved as due to them. The aim was to make it worthwhile for people to act rationally and reasonably..."The importance of individuals acting on their knowledge was the theme of Hayek’s groundbreaking article “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (included). Hayek asks, how are the innumerable scarce resources in a global economy to be used to best satisfy human wants? Of all the practically infinite possible ways of combining them, which is to be chosen?Every tiny detail about the economy is relevant to this question. This includes every single preference of every single soul, and every relevant fact about every material resource. Existing knowledge about those myriad details is dispersed among billions of minds. How can all those bits of knowledge be integrated and utilized to inform the use of society’s resources? A central planning board could not possibly hope to gather and get a handle on so many bits, much less keep up with constant changes in knowledge and values. For a central planner to think otherwise would be “The Pretense of Knowledge” (which is the title of Hayek’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, also included).Hayek argues that the market price system is the only way that humanity has discovered to meaningfully cope with “the knowledge problem.” Every resource price is essentially the knowledge and values of millions of minds concerning that resource boiled down to a single number. All individuals can use these simple, yet information-rich prices to guide their economic choices. Describing what he calls the “marvel” of the market price system, Hayek writes:“In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.”

Published originally in 1929, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle is the first essay Friedrich A. Hayek wrote. It serves as a primer into Hayek’s monetary and capital theories. In it, he takes the time to dismember opposing monetary theories of the trade cycle, discarding faulty analysis and maintaining sound foundations, as to lead to his own monetary theory of the trade cycle.Hayek’s trade cycle theory is largely based on the headway made in capital theory by Wicksell and Böhm-Bawerk, and Ludwig von Mises’s spectacular insights on monetary theory (The Theory of Money and Credit), and was later further developed in Prices & Production, published in 1931.

The Pure Theory of Capital , F. A. Hayek’s long-overlooked, little-understood volume, was his most detailed work in economic theory. Originally published in 1941 when fashionable economic thought had shifted to John Maynard Keynes, Hayek’s manifesto of capital theory is now available again for today’s students and economists to discover.With a new introduction by Hayek expert Lawrence H. White, who firmly situates the book not only in historical and theoretical context but within Hayek’s own life and his struggle to complete the manuscript, this edition commemorates the celebrated scholar’s last major work in economics. Offering a detailed account of the equilibrium relationships between inputs and outputs in an economy, Hayek’s stated objective was to make capital theory—which had previously been devoted almost entirely to the explanation of interest rates—“useful for the analysis of the monetary phenomena of the real world.” His ambitious goal was nothing less than to develop a capital theory that could be fully integrated into the business cycle theory.