Van den Hauwe, Ludwig --- "Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)" [1999] ELECD 37; in Backhaus, G. Jürgen (ed), "The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1999)

Book Title: The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics

Editor(s): Backhaus, G. Jürgen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781858985169

Section: Chapter 30

Section Title: Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)

Author(s): Van den Hauwe, Ludwig

Number of pages: 10

Extract:

30 Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)
Ludwig Van den Hauwe


Biographical note
Friedrich August von Hayek, a central figure in 20th-century economics and a
representative of the Austrian tradition, 1974 Nobel laureate in economics, was
born on 8 May 1899, in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian
empire. Following military service as an artillery officer in World War I, Hayek
entered the University of Vienna, where he attended the lectures of Friedrich von
Wieser and obtained doctorates in jurisprudence (1921) and political science
(1923). After spending a year in New York ( 1 9 2 3 4 , Hayek returned to Vienna
where he joined the famous Privatseminar conducted by Ludwig von Mises. In
1927, Hayek became the first director of the Austrian Institute for Business
Cycle Research. On an invitation from Lionel Robbins, he delivered four lec-
tures entitled `Prices and Production' at the London School of Economics in
1931 and subsequently accepted the Tooke Chair. He was a vigorous participant
in the heated debates that raged in England during the 1930s concerning mon-
etary, capital and business-cycle theories. Hayek was to become the only
intellectual opponent of John Maynard Keynes. As an outgrowth of his partici-
pation in the debate over the possibility of economic calculation under socialism,
the focus of Hayek's research shifted during the late 1930s and early 1940s to
the role of knowledge and discovery in market processes, and to the methodo-
logical underpinnings of the Austrian tradition, particularly subjectivism and
...