Friedrich A. Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992) was an Austrian-British economist and one of the most influential free-market thinkers of the 20th century. Converted from youthful socialist sympathies by reading Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism (1922), he joined Mises’s private seminar and co-founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research in 1927. The Road to Serfdom (1944), an analysis of totalitarianism written during World War II, made him internationally known, and in 1947 he convened 39 economists and scholars at Vevey, Switzerland, founding the Mont Pèlerin Society. He taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and Freiburg, and wrote across economics, law, political philosophy, and psychology.