HAYEK, FRIEDRICH VON

born May 8, 1899, Vienna, Austria died March 23, 1992, Freiburg, Ger. Friedrich von Hayek, 1975. also called Friedrich A. Hayek, in full Friedrich August von Hayek Austrian-born British economist noted for his conservative views and criticisms of the Keynesian welfare state. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize for Economics with the Swedish economic liberal Gunnar Myrdal. Hayek studied law and psychology, then economics, at the University of Vienna, receiving a doctorate in 1923. After studying at New York University (192324), he became director of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research and then in 1931 moved to London, where he held positions at the University of London and the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1938 he became a naturalized British citizen. From 1950 to 1962 he was a professor of social and moral science at the University of Chicago. Upon reaching retirement age, he accepted a chair at the University of Freiburg, retiring in 1968. Hayek's conservative thesis was that governmental control of or intervention in a free market only forestalls such economic ailments as inflation, unemployment, recession, or depression. In the foreword to his 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argues that, the unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand. Hayek's other works include Prices and Production (1931), The Pure Theory of Capital (1941), The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1978), and Unemployment and Monetary Policy: Government as Generator of the Business Cycle (1979).