Rafe Champion . Age Monthly Review, 1985
Among people of the Left, F. A. Hayek probably rates with Milton Friedman as the person most hated, on a level with Reagan and Thatcher who were usually depicted as dancing to tunes composed by Hayek and Friedman. In 1944 Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, a tract against the times, warning of the likely consequences of central planning if wartime practices were consolidated and extended in the post-war period. In due course, state intervention continued under both Labor and Conservative governments, bringing in its train both inflation and unemployment, adroitly blamed on the deficiencies of inadequately restrained capitalism. Hayek has been vindicated but the Left persist in calling for more of the addictive drug of state intervention to cure the evils caused by de facto socialisation of industries by protection, subsidy and centralised wage fixing systems.
Friedrich August Hayek devoted much of his career to keeping alive the ideas of classical liberalism. After studying law, he did most of his work in economics for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1974. In 1948 he convened a meeting of liberal scholars at Mont Pelerin in Italy to plan for the ideological war that he anticipated (despite the 'end of ideology' pronouncements of American liberals during the 1950s).
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THE BOOK- COMMENTARY ON HAYEK
The Road to Serfdom: Forty Years On
Hayek's 'Serfdom' Revisited:
Essays by economists, philosophers and political scientists on 'The Road to Serfdom' .
