Too many on the left think of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek as "conservative," or at best "neoliberal." But Hayek was no conservative. He was a liberal, no "neo" about it. A new biography, Hayek: A Life, by the historians of economic thought Bruce Caldwell and Hansjörg Klausinger, tells the story of his first five decades in 824 pages of mind-stunning detail.
Hayek was a leader in the third generation of the so-called Austrian School of economics. Worldwide now, though a minority view, it did originate in Austria. Starting in the 1870s, the founder Carl Menger developed and defended a radical improvement in the English liberal economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and J.S. Mill.
