One hundred years after Hayek's birth

Abstract

Friedrich Augustus von Hayek was born on 8 May 1899 in Vienna, Austria. He was the son of Felicitas and Augustus, who was Professor of Botany at the University of Vienna and from whom he derived an early interest in that discipline.
Between 1910 and 1920 he not only had his first access to books on philosophy, logic and history, but for two years he was part of the Austrian army and fought on the Italian front. In 1918 he began his formal studies at the University of Vienna and the following year began studying at the University of Zurich.
In 1920 he worked in the laboratory of brain anatomist Constantin Monakow, a fact that later influenced some of his most important works. In 1921 and 1923 he obtained doctorates in law and political science at the University of Vienna, respectively. In the 1920s, Hayek began studies in Economics - in addition to continuing his law studies - under the direction of the famous Austrian economist Friedrich Wieser. At this time he developed his marginalist monetary theory, as well as using it to explain the decline of the American economy. In 1927 he became Director of the Austrian Institute for Economic Cycle Research, where he remained until 1931 and during that same period taught as Privatdozent at the University of Vienna. That Institute was the joint product of Hayek's work with renowned Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, whom Hayek said years later that "There is no other man I should more intellectually give to."