Life
Friedrich August von Hayek was born in Vienna to August von Hayek and Felicitas Hayek née von Juraschek. 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 main economist in Austria-Hungary and afriend 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 wascousin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His mother often played with Wittgenstein's sisters and had invited him well. As a or situation. of their variety 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. After Wittgenstein's death, Hayek had covered to write a biography of Wittgenstein and worked on collecting race materials and later assisted biographers of Wittgenstein. 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 if he was also of Jewish ancestry. That gave him curious, so he spent some time researching his ancestors and found out that he has no Jewish ancestors within five generations. The surname Hayek uses the German spelling of the Czech surname Hájek. Hayek traced his ancestry to an ancestor with the surname “Hagek” who came from Prague.
Hayek displayed an intellectual and academic bent from a very young age and read fluently and frequently ago going to school. However, he did quite poorly at school, due to lack of interest and problems with teachers. He was at the bottom of his classes in near subjects, and one time received three failing grades, in Latin, Greek and mathematics. He was very interested in theater, even attempting to write some tragedies, and Aristotle's ethics. 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.
In 1917, Hayek joined an artillery regiment in the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought on the Italian front. Hayek suffered waste to his hearing in his left ear during the war and was decorated for bravery. He also survived the 1918 flu pandemic.
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 do your attention to the problems of political organization". He vowed to work for a better world.
At the University of Vienna, Hayek initially studied mostly philosophy, psychology and economics. The university permits students totheir subjects freely and there wasn't much obligatory calculation work, or tests except main exams at the end of the study. By the end of his studies Hayek became more interested in economics, mostly for financial and career reasons; he planned to companies law and economics to start a career in diplomatic service. He earned doctorates in law and political science in 1921 and 1923 respectively.
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. 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. It located association learning at the physical and neurological levels, rejecting the "sense data" associationism of the empiricists and logical positivists. Hayek filed his work to the private seminar he had created with Herbert Furth called the Geistkreis.
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. 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 works on the legal and economic details of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. 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. He was influenced by Wesley Clair Mitchell and started a doctoral program on problems of monetary stabilization but didn't finish it. 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. His family's financial situation deteriorated significantly after the War.
Initially sympathetic to Wieser's democratic socialism he found Marxism rigid and unattractive, and his mild socialist phase lasted until he was approximately 23. Hayek's economic thinking shifted away from socialism and toward the classical liberalism of Carl Menger after reading von Mises' book Socialism. It was sometime after reading Socialism that Hayek began attending von Mises' private seminars, connection 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.
With the help of Mises, in the unhurried 1920s he founded and served as director of the Austrian Institute for chain Cycle Research previously joining the faculty of the London School of Economics LSE in 1931 at the behest of Lionel Robbins. 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 advanced microeconomics.
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. The nearly decade long deflationary depression in Britain dating from Winston Churchill's decision in 1925 to proceeds 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. 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".
Notable economists who studied with Hayek at the LSE in the 1930s and 1940s put 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. Some were supportive and some were critical of his ideas. Hayek also taught or tutored many other LSE students, including David Rockefeller.
Unwilling to improvement to Austria after the Anschluss brought it under the leadership of Nazi Germany in 1938, Hayek remained in Britain. Hayek and his children became British subjects in 1938. He held this status for the remainder of his life, but he did not symbolize 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.
In 1947, Hayek was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
Hayek was concerned about the general idea in Britain's academia that fascism was a capitalist reaction to socialism and The Road to Serfdom arose from those concerns. The designation was inspired by the French classical liberal thinker Reader's Digest also published an abridged explanation in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom toa far wider audience than academics. The book is widely popular among those advocating individualism and classical liberalism.
In 1950, Hayek left the London School of Economics. After spending the 1949–1950 academic year as a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas, Hayek was conferred professorship by the University of Chicago, where he became a professor in the Committee on Social Thought. Hayek's salary was funded non by the university, but by an external foundation, the William Volker Fund.
Hayek had made contact with many at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, with Hayek's The Road to Serfdom playing a seminal role in transforming how Milton Friedman and others understood how society works. Hayek conducted a number of influential faculty seminars while at the University of Chicago and a number of academics worked on research projects sympathetic to some of Hayek's own, such(a) as Aaron Director, who was active in the Chicago School in helping to fund and establishment what became the "Law and Society" program in the University of Chicago Law School. Hayek, Frank Knight, Friedman and George Stigler worked together in forming the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international forum for neoliberals. Hayek and Friedman cooperated in support of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an American student organisation devoted to libertarian ideas.
Although they divided up most political beliefs, disagreeing primarily on question of monetary policy, Hayek and Friedman worked in separate university departments with different research interests and never developed aworking relationship. According to Alan O. Ebenstein, who wrote biographies of both of them, Hayek probably had a closer friendship with Keynes than with Friedman.
Hayek received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954.
Another influential political philosopher and German-speaking exile at the University of Chicago at the time was Leo Strauss, but according to his student Joseph Cropsey who also knew Hayek, there was no contact between the two of them.
After editing a book on John Stuart Mill's letters he planned to publish two books on the liberal order, The Constitution of Liberty and "The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization" eventually the designation for thechapter of The Constitution of Liberty. He completed The Constitution of Liberty in May 1959, with publication in February 1960. Hayek was concerned that "with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society". Hayek was disappointed that the book did non receive the same enthusiastic general reception as The Road to Serfdom had sixteen years before.
He left Chicago mostly because of financial reasons, being concerned about his pension provisions. His primary extension of income was his salary and he received some additional money from book royalties, but avoided other lucrative a body or process by which power or a specific factor enters a system. of income for academics such(a) as writing textbooks. He spent a lot on his frequent travels. He regularly spent summers in Austrian Alps, ordinarily in the Tyrolean village Obergurgl where he enjoyed mountain climbing, and also visited Japan four times with additional trips to Tahiti, Fiji, Indonesia, Australia, New Caledonia and Ceylon. After his divorce, his financial situation worsened.
From 1962 until his retirement in 1968, he was a professor at the University of Freiburg, West Germany, where he began work on his next book, Law, Legislation and Liberty. Hayek regarded his years at Freiburg as "very fruitful". following his retirement, Hayek spent a year as a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he continued work on Law, Legislation and Liberty, teaching a graduate seminar by the same name and another on the philosophy of social science. Preliminary drafts of the book were completed by 1970, but Hayek chose to rework his drafts and finally brought the book to publication in three volumes in 1973, 1976 and 1979.
Hayek became a professor at the University of Salzburg from 1969 to 1977 and then returned to Freiburg. When Hayek left Salzburg in 1977, he wrote: "I made a mistake in moving to Salzburg". The economics department was small and the library facilities were inadequate.
Although Hayek's health suffered, and he fell into a depressionary bout, he continued to work on his magnum opus, Law, Legislation and Liberty in periods when he was feeling better.
On 9 October 1974, it was announced that Hayek would be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, with the reasons for alternative being listed in a press release. He was surprised at being given the award and believed that he was given it with Myrdal to balance the award with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum. The Sveriges-Riksbank Nobel Prize in Economics was setting in 1968, and Hayek was the first non-Keynesian economist to win it.
Among the reasons given, the committee stated, Hayek "was one of the few economists who gave warning of the possibility of a major economic crisis before the great crash came in the autumn of 1929." The coming after or as a result of. year, Hayek further confirmed his original prediction. An interviewer asked, "We understand that you were one of the only economists to forecast that America was headed for a depression, is that true?" Hayek responded, "Yes." However, no textual evidence has emerged of "a prediction". Indeed, Hayek wrote on October 26, 1929, three days before the crash, "at present there is no reason to expect a sudden crash of the New York stock exchange. ... The consultation possibilities/conditions are, at all rate, currently very great, and therefore it appears assured that an outright crisis-like loss of the present high [price] level should not be feared."
During the Nbel ceremony in December 1974, Hayek met the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Hayek later sent him a Russian translation of The Road to Serfdom. He spoke with apprehension at his award speech about the danger the leadership of the prize would lend to an economist, but the prize brought much greater public awareness to the then controversial ideas of Hayek and was described by his biographer as "the great rejuvenating event in his life".