Hayek claimed that a limited democracy might be better than other forms of limited government at protecting liberty but that an unlimited democracy was worse than other forms of unlimited government because " its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise ".

This is seen by the fact that authoritative sources on neoliberalism, such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, David Harvey and Noam Chomsky do not agree about the meaning of neoliberalism.

This problem of information flow implied that a decentralised system, in which information travelled freely and was freely determined at each localised point ( Hayek called this catallaxy ), would be much better than a central authority trying to do the same, even if it was completely efficient and was motivated to act in the public good.

The free banking movement got its modern start with The Denationalization of Money, by Friedrich Hayek, who advocated that national governments stop claiming a monopoly on the issuing of currency, and allow private issuers like banks to voluntarily compete to do so.

Economists who advocated these policies do not necessarily share principles, such as Nobel prize-winning economists Milton Friedman ( Monetarism school ), George Stigler ( Chicago School of Economics / Neo-Classical Economics ), Richard Posner ( Chicago School / Pragmatism ), and Friedrich Hayek ( Austrian School of Economics ), have sought substantially to limit economic regulation.

A number of Nobel Laureates in economics, such as Vernon Smith and Herbert A. Simon, recognize Hayek as the greatest modern economist.

The most important social structures, including the laws (" nomos ") governing the relations between individual persons, are emergent, according to Hayek.

While the idea of laws and markets as emergent phenomena comes fairly naturally to an economist, and was indeed present in the works of early economists such as Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Hayek traces the development of ideas based on spontaneous-order throughout the history of Western thought, occasionally going as far back as the presocratics.

In Why F A Hayek is a Conservative, British policy analyst Madsen Pirie believes Hayek mistakes the nature of the conservative outlook.

Eric Zencey wrote that the free market economy Hayek advocated is designed for an infinite planet, and when it runs into physical limits ( as any growing system must ), the result is a need for centralized planning to mediate the problematic interface of economy and nature.

It was the classical liberal F. A. Hayek in “ Freedom, Reason and Tradition ” who most systematically and relentlessly pursued the nature of a libertarian / traditionalist synthesis but was loath to give it a label.

" In the book, Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system, work-hours regulation, institutions for the flow of proper information, and other principles on which most members of a free society will tend to agree.

Hayek was concerned " with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society ".

Hayek argued that his ideal individualistic, free-market polity would be self-regulating to such a degree that it would be ' a society which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it '.

Hayek did not believe that a complete lack of coercion was possible, or even desirable, for a liberal society, and he argued that a set of traditions was absolutely necessary which allowed individuals to judge whether they would or would not be coerced.

In his " Opening Address to a Conference at Mont Pelerin " Hayek mentioned " two men with whom I had most fully discussed the plan for this meeting both have not lived to see its realisation ": Henry Simons ( who trained Milton Friedman, a future president of the society, at the University of Chicago ) and Sir John Clapham, a senior official of the Bank of England who from 1940 – 6 was the president of the British Royal Society.

Hayek stressed that the society was to be a scholarly community arguing against collectivism, while not engaging in public relations or propaganda.

However, the society has always been a focal point for an international think-tank movement ; Hayek himself used it as a forum to encourage members such as Antony Fisher to pursue the think-tank route.

It is a campus society and is named in honour of Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, who lectured at the London School of Economics from 1931 until 1950.

Hayek argued that the road to socialism leads society to totalitarianism, and argued that fascism and Nazism were the inevitable outcome of socialist trends in Italy and Germany during the preceding period.

Hayek saw the British philosophers Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke and William Paley as representative of a tradition that articulated beliefs in empiricism, the common law, and in traditions and institutions which had spontaneously evolved but were imperfectly understood.

The price conveys embedded information about the abundance of resources as well as their desirability which in turn allows, on the basis of individual consensual decisions, corrections that prevent shortages and surpluses ; Mises and Hayek argued that this is the only possible solution, and without the information provided by market prices socialism lacks a method to rationally allocate resources.

Part of the reason that Hayek stressed the knowledge problem was also because he was mainly concerned with debating the proposal for Market Socialism and the Lange Model by Oskar R. Lange ( 1938 ) and Hayek's student Abba Lerner ( 1934, 1937, 1938 ), which was developed in response to the calculation argument.

The global Great Depression formed a crucial backdrop against which Hayek formulated his positions, especially in opposition to the views of Keynes.

Although he spoke with apprehension at his award speech about the danger which the authority of the prize would lend to an economist, the prize brought much greater public awareness of Hayek and has been described by his biographer as " the great rejuvenating event in his life ".

In 1977, Hayek was critical of the Lib-Lab pact, in which the British Liberal Party agreed to keep the British Labour government in office.

In 1978, Hayek came into conflict with the Liberal Party leader, David Steel, who claimed that liberty was possible only with " social justice and an equitable distribution of wealth and power, which in turn require a degree of active government intervention " and that the Conservative Party were more concerned with the connection between liberty and private enterprise than between liberty and democracy.

Hayek stated that if the Conservative leader had said " that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot ".

In 1980, Hayek, a non-practicing Roman Catholic, was one of twelve Nobel laureates to meet with Pope John Paul II, " to dialogue, discuss views in their fields, communicate regarding the relationship between Catholicism and science, and ' bring to the Pontiff's attention the problems which the Nobel Prize Winners, in their respective fields of study, consider to be the most urgent for contemporary man.

In accordance with the reasoning later outlined in his essay The Use of Knowledge in Society ( 1945 ), Hayek argued that a monopolistic governmental agency like a central bank can neither possess the relevant information which should govern supply of money, nor have the ability to use it correctly.

Eager to promote alternatives to what he regarded as the narrow approach of the school of economic thought that then dominated the English-speaking academic world ( centered at the University of Cambridge and deriving largely from the work of Alfred Marshall ), Robbins invited Hayek to join the faculty at LSE, which he did in 1931.

Hayek viewed the free price system not as a conscious invention ( that which is intentionally designed by man ), but as spontaneous order or what he referred to as " that which is the result of human action but not of human design ".

In the latter half of his career Hayek made a number of contributions to social and political philosophy, which he based on his views on the limits of human knowledge, and the idea of spontaneous order in social institutions.

In his philosophy of science, which has much in common with that of his good friend Karl Popper, Hayek was highly critical of what he termed scientism: a false understanding of the methods of science that has been mistakenly forced upon the social sciences, but that is contrary to the practices of genuine science.

In The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology ( 1952 ), Hayek independently developed a " Hebbian learning " model of learning and memoryan idea which he first conceived in 1920, prior to his study of economics.

At the University of Chicago, Hayek was not part of the economics department and did not influence the rebirth of neoclassical theory which took place there ( see Chicago school of economics ).

Informal discussions with colleagues and friends stimulated a greater interest, which was reinforced by Friedrich Hayek's powerful book The Road to Serfdom, by my attendance at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, and by discussions with Hayek after he joined the university faculty in 1950.

Hayek wrote an essay, " Why I Am Not a Conservative " ( included as an appendix to The Constitution of Liberty ), in which he disparaged conservatism for its inability to adapt to changing human realities or to offer a positive political program, remarking, " Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves ".

* Fear the Boom and Bust – a 2010 hip-hop style music video produced by the Mercatus Center in which Keynes and Hayek take part in a rap battle

Many of his novels were first published in serialized form, including Children of Gebelawi and Midaq Alley which was adapted into a Mexican film starring Salma Hayek ( El callejón de los milagros ).

The term frequently implies a critique of the more extreme expressions of logical positivism and has been used by social scientists such as Friedrich Hayek, philosophers of science such as Karl Popper, and philosophers such as Hilary Putnam to describe the dogmatic endorsement of scientific methodology and the reduction of all knowledge to only that which is measurable.

While neoclassical theory uses the conditions of perfect markets to describe the conditions under which it will work, neoliberal theory rejects those in favour of ideas based largely on the work of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman and broadly argues that perfect markets occur naturally provided that economic and political freedoms are present and maintained.

( 1985 ) John Burnheim utilized the term " demarchy " ( created by Friederich A. Von Hayek in his Law, Legislation and Liberty ) to describe a political system without the state or bureaucracies, and based instead on randomly selected groups of decision makers.

Friedrich Hayek used the term catallaxy to describe " the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market.

The economist Friedrich von Hayek used the term “ obscurantism ” differently, to denote and describe the denial of the truth of scientific theory because of disagreeable moral consequences.