Friedrich August von Hayek (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian economist and philosopher. He is known for his contributions to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as an important contribution to economics that led to his receiving the prize. He was a notable member of the Austrian school of economics.
During his teenage years, Hayek fought in World War I. He later said this experience, coupled with his desire to help avoid the mistakes that led to the war, drew him into economics. He earned doctoral degrees in law in 1921 and political studies in 1923 from the University of Vienna. He subsequently lived and worked in Austria, Great Britain, the United States and Germany. He became a British national in 1938. He studied and taught at the London School of Economics and later at the University of Chicago, before returning to Europe late in life to teach at the Universities of Salzburg and Freiburg.
Hayek had considerable influence on a variety of political and economic movements of the 20th century, and his ideas continue to influence thinkers from a variety of political and economic backgrounds today. Although sometimes described as a conservative, Hayek himself rejected this label and preferred to be thought of as a classical liberal or libertarian. His most popular work, The Road to Serfdom (1944), has been republished many times over the eight decades since its original publication.
Hayek was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1984 for his academic contributions to economics. He was the first recipient of the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize in 1984. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 from President George H. W. Bush. In 2011, his article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945) was selected as one of the top 20 articles published in the American Economic Review during its first 100 years.
Friedrich August von Hayek was born in Vienna to August von Hayek and Felicitas Hayek (née von Juraschek). The surname Hayek is derived from the Czech surname Hájek and can be traced to an ancestor with the surname "Hagek" who migrated from Prague in the 1500s.
His father, born in 1871, also in Vienna, was a medical doctor employed by the municipal health ministry. August was a part-time botany lecturer at the University of Vienna. Friedrich had two brothers, Heinrich (1900–1969) and Erich (1904–1986), who were one-and-a-half and five years younger than he.
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. His maternal grandfather, Franz von Juraschek, was an economist in Austria-Hungary and a close friend 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.
On his mother's side, Hayek was second cousin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His mother knew Wittgenstein well and often played with his sisters. As a result of the family relationship, Hayek was among the first to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when that 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 intended to write a biography of him; he worked on collecting family 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 had frequently socialized with Jewish intellectuals, and he mentioned that people often speculated as to whether he too was of Jewish ancestry. That made him curious, so he spent some time researching his ancestors and found out that he had no Jewish ancestors within five generations.
Hayek displayed an intellectual and academic bent from a very young age and was an avid reader before entering school. However, he did quite poorly at school, due to his lack of interest and problems with teachers. He was at the bottom of his class in most subjects and once received failing grades in Latin, Greek and mathematics. He was very interested in theater, even attempting to write some tragedies, and in biology, regularly helping his father with botanical work. At his father's suggestion, as a teenager he read the genetic and evolutionary works of Hugo de Vries and August Weismann and the philosophical works of Ludwig Feuerbach, noting Goethe as his greatest early intellectual influence. In school, Hayek was much taken by one instructor's lectures on Aristotle's ethics. In his unpublished autobiographical notes, Hayek recalled a division between him and his younger brothers, whom he regarded as somehow of a different generation, despite their having been born only a few years after he was. 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 damage to his hearing in his left ear during the war and was decorated for bravery.
Hayek's pursuit of an academic career was influenced by a desire to help avoid the mistakes that he saw as having led to the war. Hayek said of his experience: "The decisive influence was really World War I. It's bound to draw your attention to the problems of political organization".
At the University of Vienna, Hayek initially studied mostly philosophy, psychology and economics. The university allowed students to choose their subjects freely and there was not much obligatory written 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 combine 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 connective learning at the physical and neurological levels, rejecting the "sense data" associationism of the empiricists and logical positivists. Hayek presented 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 working 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.