The Law of a Free Society Emerges like the Laws of Economics: F.A. Hayek from The Road to Serfdom to Law, Legislation, and Liberty
In 1974, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for economics to Gunnar Myrdal and F.A. Hayek: not, as hitherto, for “pure economics” alone, but also “for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.” It is well taken that this is how the work of both will best be known.
Friedrich August von Hayek—F.A. Hayek in his Anglo-American émigré career—was a descendant and interpreter of the “Austrian school” of economics. Other emigrant scholars representative of this school were also very prominent in the United States in the 1930s, during the war years, and after. These scholars included Gottfried Haberler at Harvard, Fritz Machlup and Oskar Morgenstern at Princeton, and Paul Rosenstein Rodan at MIT. Hayek’s early work in economics was eclipsed during much of this time—the heyday of Keynesian economics—especially in the United States.