Bruce Caldwell, an economic historian, took over Bartley’s editorship, published the intellectual biography Hayek’s Challenge (2004), and has now cowritten with Hansjoerg Klausinger the first volume of what’s intended to be the “definitive” biography. Bartley embarked upon an edition of Hayek’s collected works, to be accompanied by a biography, but died before he could finish them. While his great rival, John Maynard Keynes, has attracted several biographical studies, notably the brilliant three-volume treatment by Robert Skidelsky, Hayek’s life has remained comparatively obscure. Although Hayek’s standing among professional economists had waned long before the outbreak of World War II, The Road to Serfdom found a receptive audience in the general public: he lived long enough to receive a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974 and to count Margaret Thatcher among his most ardent acolytes. Socialists branded him a reactionary for his espousal of nineteenth-century liberalism opponents of FDR’s New Deal embraced him as their savior. The Road to Serfdom (1944), his most famous book, was dismissed on publication by most of the British and American intelligentsia, a predictable response in view of Hayek’s taunt that intellectuals had played a leading part in the “totalitarian transformation of society.” Isaiah Berlin struggled with the book, referring to “the awful Dr. Friedrich Hayek, the Austria-born economist, has always aroused strong feelings in both his admirers and his detractors.
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