Friedrich August Hayek (1899-1992)
Autograph manuscript signed (‘F.A. Hayek’), ‘Notes for lectures’, n.d.
In English. 3 pages, 209 x 150mm, pages numbered 1-3 in autograph, signed on the final page, signature and title added later in black ink, pencil annotations in another hand. Provenance: Sotheby's New York, 26 June 1998, lot 454.

Notes for lectures given by the Nobel prizewinner in Economics, F.A. Hayek. Each page is partially dated and titled as follows: ‘1) 15-3 The Miscarriage of the Democratic Ideal’; ‘2) 16-3 The Generation of Wealth’; and ‘3) 17-3 The Signals of the Market’. The first of these is the title of a chapter in Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973-9).

The 1974 Nobel committee that awarded Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal their joint medal in Economics pointed to ‘their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena’. An intellectual iconoclast to the end, Hayek attracted fervent support and loud criticism in equal measure throughout his career: he never ceased commenting on topical economic issues, in the 1970s proposing free competition between national and privately-issued currencies, and his last major work of social philosophy, Law, Legislation and Liberty, saw his previous supporter Norman Barry complain that Hayek's critical rationalism had been 'almost completely jettisoned in favour of a curious, neo-Darwinistic form of social evolutionism'.