Hayek's reputation has gone through a remarkable cycle. An eminent exponent of the Austrian theory of business cycles in the 1930s, he was worsted in the controversy over Keynes' Treatise on Money (1930). Following this defeat, Hayek retreated into capital theory, an esoteric branch of economics in which few economists then took an active interest. He gave up economics altogether after the war and turned to psychology, political philosophy, philosophy of law and the history of ideas. However, in 1974 he won the Nobel Prize and returned to mainstream economics as a leading critic of Keynesianism and an advocate of free banking as the answer to inflation. Today Hayek reigns supreme as the kind of moral philosopher and political economist that economics has not seen since Adam Smith.

Also forthcoming in this series is Paul A. Samuelson, 2nd Series (October 2004, 3 volumes, £425).