The Life of Nobel Prize Winner F.A. Hayek

Collection of Photographic Portraits, Estimate £1,000–1,500

Hayek was born at the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, then the city of Mahler, Klimt, Loos, and Freud. His family were part of Vienna’s intellectual elite: his father was a doctor with a keen scholarly interest in botany; both of his grandfathers were scholars; Ludwig Wittgenstein was a distant cousin.

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Collection of Personal and Commemorative Presentation Albums, Estimate £3,000–5,000

The civilisation of Hayek’s childhood disintegrated with World War One and his youth was inevitably marked by service in the artillery on the Italian Front. In later years Hayek preferred to recall these years by telling of his hapless attempt to deliver a transport of live eels to the front, but he also acknowledged how war shaped his outlook: “I saw, more or less, the great empire collapse over the nationalist problem. I served in a battle in which eleven different languages were spoken. It’s bound to draw your attention to the problems of political organisation.” (Hayek on Hayek, p.48).

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His typewriter, Corona ‘S’ Model, c. 1933/34, Estimate £1,000–1,500

By the early 1930s Hayek was on the faculty of the London School of Economics with a growing reputation as an economic theorist of formidable insight and rigour. His penetrating work on the business cycle brought him into conflict with John Maynard Keynes – the leading economist in Britain and perhaps the world – over the appropriate fiscal and monetary responses to the depression.

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20 translations of The Road to Serfdom, Estimate £1,000–1,500

The pivot on which Hayek’s career turned was The Road to Serfdom, published exactly 75 years ago in March 1944. At its heart is the economic calculation problem, to which Hayek returned in more detail in The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945). A nation’s economy is a system of incredible complexity in which information is naturally widely dispersed; pricing within a free market is an aggregation of knowledge that allows for self-organisation within a society where no one individual or group can have a full understanding of the determining factors. The Road to Serfdom was published on 10 March 1944. The first edition of 20,000 copies sold out almost immediately. Today it is estimated that the book has sold some 2 million copies in 20 languages.

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The Mont Pelerin Society, Commemorative 25th Anniversary ingot, 1972, Estimate £5,000–7,000

Hayek never tried to repeat the exposition of his ideas in popular book form, although he was a tireless letter-writer to newspapers, nor did he get involved directly in politics. Instead in 1947 he organised a conference in Mont Pèlerin which gathered together advocates of free market economics and open societies – attendees included Karl Popper, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Frank Knight, and George Stigler. The conference led to the foundation of the Mont Pelerin Society, the first of a series of think tanks that were to prove of inestimable importance to the spread of free market ideology.

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The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 1974, Estimate £400,000–600,000

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award the Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Hayek in 1974. In his Nobel lecture Hayek concluded: “The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

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Nobel Prize Ephemera from 1975 and 1975, Estimate £2,000–3,000

In his Nobel lecture Hayek concluded: “The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

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Margaret Thatcher, signed speech on Hayek, 2003, Estimate £1,500–2,000

The public accolade of the Nobel prize reinvigorated Hayek, as well as his ideas. He found fans and followers throughout conservative politicians, including Margaret Thatcher. There is a famous anecdote that during a Conservative Party policy meeting, Thatcher removed her copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty from her handbag, slammed it down on the table and declared, “This is what we believe.” Whether the story stands up to its own legend, the impact that Hayek’s writing had on Thatcher, her advisors, and her policies is undeniable. Thatcher herself wrote: “the most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state which I read at this time and to which I have returned so often since [is] F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom."

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Ronald Reagan, Signed Photograph and set of Presentation Presidential Cufflinks, 1983, Estimate £600–800

Across the pond, Hayek was cited as one of Reagan’s favourite thinkers. “Lee Edwards recalls being once left along in Reagan’s study while then-Governor Reagan went to the kitchen to prepare cocktails. Edwards began browsing Reagan’s bookshelves, and was astonished to find dense works of political economy by authors such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek heavily underlined and annotated in Reagan’s handwriting...“ (Steven Hayward, The Age of Reagan, 1964-1980).

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The Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by George H.W. Bush, 1991, Estimate £10,000–15,000

In 1991, Hayek was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H.W. Bush. The citation reads: “Friedrich August von Hayek has done more than any thinker of our age to explore the promise and contours of liberty. He grew up in the shadow of Hitler’s tyranny, and devoted himself at an early age to the nurture of institutions that preserve and expand freedom, the lifeblood of a full life…Future generations will read his works with the same sense of history and awe that inspire us today.”

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