Critical Assessments of Contemporary Economists – serie

F.A. Hayek studied at the University of Vienna, where he became both a Doctor of Law and a Doctor of Political Science. After several years in the Austrian civil service, he was made the first diector of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. In 1931 he was appointed Tooke Professor of Economics and Statistics at the London School of Economics, and in 1950 he went to the University of Chicago as Professor of Social and Moral Sciences. He returned to Europe in 1962, to the chair of Economics at the University of Freiburg, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1967.The holder of numerous honorary doctorates, and a member of the British Academy, Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974. He was created Companion of Honour in 1984. He is the author of some fifteen books, including Prices and Production, The Pure Theory of Capital, The Road to Serfdom, The Counter-Revolution of Science, The Sensory Order, The Constitution of Liberty, Law, Legislation and Liberty, and The Fatal Conceit.

Hayek's reputation has gone through a remarkable cycle. An eminent exponent of the Austrian theory of business cycles in the 1930s, he was worsted in the controversy over Keynes' Treatise on Money (1930). Following this defeat, Hayek retreated into capital theory, an esoteric branch of economics in which few economists then took an active interest. He gave up economics altogether after the war and turned to psychology, political philosophy, philosophy of law and the history of ideas. However, in 1974 he won the Nobel Prize and returned to mainstream economics as a leading critic of Keynesianism and an advocate of free banking as the answer to inflation. Today Hayek reigns supreme as the kind of moral philosopher and political economist that economics has not seen since Adam Smith. Also forthcoming in this series is Paul A. Samuelson, 2nd Series (October 2004, 3 volumes, £425).

Sir John Hicks is one of the highest-regarded contemporary economists, and it is fitting that the new series of Critical Assessments of Contemporary Economists should commence with his work. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1972, Sir John Hicks’ work is extremely wide-ranging, with the list of topics reading almost like an agenda for the whole of modern economics: general equilibrium theory, welfare economics, problems of index numbers, trade cycles, wages and many others. He may, however, be best known to present day economists for having introduced IS-LM curves, now a standard means of Keynesian analysis. A comprehensive, scholarly work, this four-volume set gives students of economics and economic thought immediate access to Sir John Hicks' contributions and shows how his work has been received and modified by others.