Biographical note
Friedrich August von Hayek, a central figure in twentieth-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 the First World War, 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 (1923-24), 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 lectures 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 monetary, capital and business cycle theories. Hayek was to become the only intellectual opponent of John Maynard Keynes (see Caldwell, 1995). As an outgrowth of his participation in the debate over the possibility of economic calculation under socialism (Hayek, 1948 [1980], 119-208), 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 methodological underpinnings of the Austrian tradition, particularly subjectivism and methodological individualism. In 1950, Hayek moved to the United States, joining the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research there engaged the broader issues of social, political and legal philosophy. He associated with such figures as Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, Aaron Director and, somewhat later, George Stigler. He returned to Europe in 1962, with appointments at the University of Freiburg, West Germany, and then, in 1969, at the University of Salzburg, Austria. However, in 1977, Hayek moved back to Freiburg, where he died on 23 March 1992.Hayek was a prolific author not only in the field of economics but also in the fields of political philosophy, psychology, epistemology and legal theory. However, his contributions to social and political philosophy and to legal theory emerged, to a significant degree, as extensions of his scholarship in the field of economics and its methodological foundations. The present entry is concerned mainly with Hayek’s contributions in the fields of legal theory and constitutional economics.1
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