Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek, a reserved Austrian economist, died in 1992. Though unrecognized for his views during his lifetime, he is today regarded as a visionary. In 1937, in the wake of the great Depression with communism and socialism on the ascendant, Hayek published his seminal work, The Road to Serfdom, damning communism and socialism and extolling the free market as the best way around which to organize a society. At the time, it discredited him completely. Today, with the fall of the USSR and the effective end of the communist/socialist state, Hayek does indeed seem like a visionary. His theories have finally been embraced by mainstream economists and his work is extolled by world leaders. In this first-ever biography, Alan Ebenstein limns the figure of Hayek from the shadows that surround him to take the true measure of his accomplishment. This is a monumental piece of work about one of the great thinkers of our time, and promises to become the standard work on Hayek for some time to come.