Hayek: A Life is the first volume of a definitive biography of one of the last century’s most important thinkers, co-authored by Bruce Caldwell, the general editor of Friedrich Hayek’s general works. It ends in 1950 and leaves the reader waiting (impatiently) for the second volume, which will cover the half of Hayek’s career that produced The Constitution of Liberty, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Denationalisation of Money, A Tiger by the Tail, The Fatal Conceit, and his 1974 Nobel Economics Prize.

It is easy to lionize great thinkers like Hayek and see them as something approaching superhuman. However, as Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger show in heartbreaking detail, Hayek was all too human.

Formative years / Hayek was a member of Austria’s lesser nobility—hence Friedrich August von Hayek—and the son of a highly educated father who loved botany and took his family on weekly hikes in the countryside. It would be generous to describe him as a “mediocre student”—his brilliance was anything but evident from his shoddy schoolwork—and he dove into political activism at the University of Vienna after his stint in the military.

Caldwell and Klausinger describe Hayek’s “initial political leanings [as] progressive/​liberal, democratic, and anti-racist.” His antiracism was not low-risk virtue signaling: Jews were unable to get jobs in the Austrian government and Austrian academia. Later, he would fight to get the eventual Nobel laureate W. Arthur Lewis a job at the London School of Economics over racists’ objections.

Unfortunately, Hayek’s liberal views did not extend to gender. Caldwell and Klausinger explain that he embraced the misogyny of his time. (This is reflected in a cringe-worthy exchange regarding Hayek’s student Vera Smith during an interview with Armen Alchian, video of which can be found on YouTube.) Nonetheless, he was a member of Mises’s privatseminar in Vienna, unique among similar groups in that it admitted women.

Hayek’s relationship with Mises is especially interesting. Mises put himself in an “impossible position” in Austria because his refusal to leave the Jewish community disqualified him from government and academic jobs. Later, when a cash-strapped Mises moved to the United States, Hayek was barred by law from sending him money, so he ingeniously bought valuable books in Europe and sent them to Mises to sell. Hayek’s relationship with Mises deserves a book of its own.

Hayek shows that there is no one right way to be a great scholar. The authors describe him as a “puzzler” who read widely and looked for connections that might not be obvious (like his mentor, Friedrich von Wieser) rather than a “master of a subject” (like Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk). This includes a ray of hope for puzzlers who make plans and think big, but then find their work seemingly has yielded “dry holes”: “It is a characteristic of Hayek’s career that he would start projects that he would not finish, and that parts of those same projects would nonetheless find their way into other contributions.” Some of Hayek’s most interesting contributions (like The Sensory Order) stayed in a desk drawer for a long time before finding their way into print.

Knowledge and the economic order / If Hayek’s work has a single uniting theme, it’s the knowledge problem. Hayek: A Life discusses his analysis of knowledge and business cycles, socialism, and the scientific enterprise. Since this is only the first volume and ends in 1950, I expect we will read more about knowledge and constitutions in the second volume.

Hayek developed the most mature statement of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory by extending Mises’s insight that monetary expansion reduces interest rates and systematically distorts the price structure. His most famous article is his 1945 contribution to the American Economic Review, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” It builds on Mises’s argument about the possibility of economic calculation in a socialist society by explaining that a centrally planned economy could not effectively use the decentralized knowledge of “the particular circumstances of time and place.” This insight is often misunderstood; Mises and Hayek’s critique of socialism is epistemic, not computational: markets communicate things no central planner can know. In the early to mid-20th century, this was an iconoclastic if not heretical view. As Caldwell and Klausinger put it,

If there were two propositions that nearly everyone, and certainly virtually all intellectuals, could agree on in England in the mid-1930s, they were that liberalism was well and truly dead and that some form of planning was needed to take its place.

Expert consensus did not deter Hayek. His apostasy culminated in The Road to Serfdom, the book that made him a celebrity after Reader’s Digest published a condensed version of it in April 1945. Contrary to popular belief, The Road to Serfdom was not a slippery-slope prediction that any planning would lead to totalitarian horror. Rather, Hayek described how totalitarian regimes had emerged and how they might again.

Dejected by the political direction of the Western world and concerned for the future of free society, he gathered the liberal remnant at a resort on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in the shadow of Mont Pèlerin, for a long conference on the future of the liberal order. After rejecting several names, they decided to call the group the Mont Pelerin Society. Just like medieval monasteries preserved classical learning through the Dark Ages, the Mont Pelerin Society carried the classical liberal tradition through the heady days of technocratic Keynesianism and socialism.

Personal life / Hayek’s relationship with his third cousin Lenerl lurks in the background for most of the book, and then comes to the foreground toward the end when Hayek decides he can no longer stand being apart from her. She was Hayek’s lost love, and he later admitted to his wife, Hella, that he had married her on the rebound after learning that Lenerl had married someone else.

Hayek’s relationship with his family was marked by a certain cluelessness bordering on callousness. He brought his daughter Christine to a summer school and arranged for her to share a room with Lenerl. As Christine later remarked, “You do not invite your daughter to join you at the summer school and arrange for her to share a room with your mistress!” And yet, that’s the kind of thing Hayek did.

Things came to a head in the late 1940s when Hayek decided to leave his family for Lenerl. Divorcing Hella was a complicated project that required no small amount of legal maneuvering. After researching where it was easiest to get a divorce, he interrupted his transition from the London School of Economics to the University of Chicago by taking a one-year visiting professorship at the University of Arkansas, in a state with more permissive divorce laws. It was a huge gamble: he would not have been able to secure the divorce without persuading the courts that he planned to make a permanent home in Arkansas, but his plan worked. He eventually got the divorce, but it cost him his friendship with Lionel Robbins and caused great pain to his family.

Conclusion / Hayek: A Life is the first half of a complicated story about a complicated man who was one of the great minds of the 20th century. Thomas Sowell has written that it is a measure of a scholar’s greatness that people still grapple with his ideas long after they stop citing him because those ideas have simply become part of society’s intellectual fabric. That’s how Sowell described Hayek in his 1980 classic Knowledge and Decisions, and it’s appropriate.

Caldwell and Klausinger masterfully weave Hayek’s intellectual life together with his personal life. Seasoned Hayek scholars, people who are new to Hayek, and people who are just interested in the lives of notable people will profit from reading Hayek: A Life. The book is an important contribution to the literature on Hayek, economics, classical liberalism, and intellectual history, and it should find a large audience.