Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich August von Hayek fought in World War I as a teenager, and the wreckage pulled him toward economics - he wanted to understand what had gone so wrong. He earned doctorates in law and political studies in Vienna in the early 1920s, then moved through Austria, Britain, and the United States, teaching at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago. In 1944 he published The Road to Serfdom, a warning about centralized planning that became his most widely read work and has stayed in print for eight decades. Thirty years later he shared the 1974 Nobel in economics with Gunnar Myrdal for his work on money, fluctuations, and the way economic and social phenomena knot together. He became a British citizen in 1938, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991, and spent his final years teaching in Salzburg and Freiburg. He died in 1992, having shaped the vocabulary of classical liberalism and market thought across the century.