Hayek was a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute until his death in 1992 and was our first distinguished lecturer in 1982. Among Cato’s earliest publications were U.S. editions of A Tiger by the Tail: The Keynesian Legacy of Inflation and Unemployment and Monetary Policy: Government as Generator of the “Business Cycle,” both first published by the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. We also published two exclusive interviews with Hayek in Cato Policy Report. Cato’s auditorium, which is named for Hayek, has hosted numerous events on Hayek’s work, including a lively 2011 forum on the publication of the definitive edition of The Constitution of Liberty featuring Caldwell, volume editor Ronald Hamowy, legal scholar Richard Epstein, and Open Society Foundations founder George Soros.

Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 for his “pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.”

Hayek may have made his greatest contribution to the fight against socialism and totalitarianism with his best‐​selling 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. Hayek warned that state control of the economy was incompatible with personal and political freedom and that statism set in motion a process whereby “the worst get on top.” But not only did Hayek show that socialism is incompatible with liberty, he showed that it is incompatible with rationality, with prosperity, and with civilization itself. His essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” published in the American Economic Review in 1945 and reprinted hundreds of times since, is essential to understanding how markets work.

“It is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century,” John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker. Hayek was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President George H. W. Bush. Margaret Thatcher reportedly slammed The Constitution of Liberty on the table at a meeting and declared, “This is what we believe.” Lawrence H. Summers, former secretary of the Treasury and president emeritus of Harvard, called him the author of “the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today.” His book The Road to Serfdom has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has never gone out of print.

Although sometimes characterized by his critics as a conservative, Hayek always maintained that he was in fact an old‐​fashioned liberal, a believer in individual liberty, constitutionally limited government, and the free market of ideas and of goods. He titled the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty, “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”

As Cato’s David Boaz wrote in 2015, “Hayek was not just an economist. He also published impressive works on political theory, psychology, and the methodology of the social sciences. He’s like Marx, only right.”