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Discusses, after an introduction, Hayek’s life from his early Viennese upbringing and his education at Vienna University, plus his further work at New York University and the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago and several notable others. Covers his lecture in 1974 about the pretence of knowledge and his ideals. Declares that the lecture contains good advice in all sciences.

Hayek’s “Use of knowledge in society” is often misunderstood. Hayek’s point is not just that prices aggregate dispersed knowledge, but also that the knowledge embedded in prices would not exist absent the market process. Later, in The Constitution of Liberty, he argues that this same idea can also be applied to the study of political and collective choice phenomena. Democracy is not just about aggregating preferences. Absent the democratic process, the knowledge necessary to solve collective problems is not generated. We compare this perspective on democracy to Bryan Caplan’s and Helen Landemore’s theories, and we argue that Hayek’s account focused on “opinion falsification” is richer. Unlike Caplan or Landemore, who adopt a static perspective, Hayek is more interested in the long-term tendencies and feed-back mechanisms. For example, why do Western democracies seem to have gradually moved away from the most deleterious types of economic policies (such as price controls)? Hayek’s conjecture is that the democratic process itself is responsible for this. We connect Hayek’s conjecture about democracy to the broader argument made by Vincent Ostrom, who has claimed that public choice should study not just incentive structures, but also collective learning processes. We believe that this line of research, that is, comparative institutional analysis based on the collective learning capacities embedded in alternative institutional arrangements, merits a lot more attention than it has received so far. The question “Which collective choice arrangements have the best epistemic properties?” is one of the most important neglected questions in political economy.

The paper offers a number of vignettes surrounding Friedrich A. Hayek’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. It examines Hayek’s life before he got the prize, describes the events in Stockholm, and offers a summary of the main themes of his Prize Lecture. It then examines the subsequent impact on Hayek’s life and career. It concludes by looking at the impact of the Prize on scholarship about Hayek and the Austrian movement.

1. Reason as the Source of Knowledge For medieval men, the existence of a personal and acting God was beyond any doubt. They were convinced that God intervenes into and interferes with the course of the world. The acting of God was a main factor for the explanation of natural phenomena. But with the passing of time, the understanding of nature improved and more and more phenomena could be explained by appeal to reason only and without recourse to actions of God. It became the general opinion that natural phenomena are subject to invariable natural laws. This clear departure from the God‐related understanding of nature happened when modern philosophy emerged in the 17th and 18th century. This modern philosophy saw nature as a mechanic construction. One of the leading philosophers of that period, Rene Descartes, argued that the laws of mechanics are the laws of nature. Descartes, the founder of rationalistic philosophy, was no atheist, but when he referred to God, it was only to become sure that what is clear (and rational) is also true.

A successful scholarly movement must have thick vertical relationships, there must be an actual scholarly community comprising teacher/student relationships as well as regular seminars, conferences, journals, and book series. A successful movement must also have rich horizontal relationships, members in the community must have connections to others in the broader scholarly community. Boettke has argued that the Austrian tradition is failing to maximize its impact because, though rich in vertical relationships, it is short on horizontal relationships. Like Boettke, the author argues that our natural dialogical partners might not be economists but philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians. Moreover, the author argues, it is unclear that Austrian economists can expect to be influential, if by influential we mean acceptance by mainstream economists, without abandoning Austrian economics. As such, each Austrian economist should doggedly pursue the truth, even if it does not bring market share in the marketplace of ideas.

This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of the Austrian school of economics, with specific emphasis on post-WWII developments. We provide a brief history and overview of the original theorists of the Austrian school in order to set the stage for the subsequent development of their ideas by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. In discussing the main ideas of Mises and Hayek, we focus on how their work provided the foundations for the modern Austrian school, which included Ludwig Lachmann, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. These scholars contributed to the Austrian revival in the 1960s and 1970s, which, in turn, set the stage for the emergence of the contemporary Austrian school in the 1980s. We review the contemporary development of the Austrian school and, in doing so, discuss the tensions, alternative paths, and the promising future of Austrian economics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how critical management studies' (CMS) awkward relationship with the world of practice may have allowed it to become a dominated field in academia, which features a nearly exclusive focus on research for theory's sake, a lack of interest or discomfort with practical applications, and a devaluing of non‐academic pursuits. Despite research on oppression, resistance, and emancipation, CMS scholars do not tend to focus on the field's own domination or to ensure that its emancipatory agenda offers any practical impact.

The paper loosely draws on Bourdieu's notions of habitus and symbolic violence to make sense of his experience of attempting to fit in the CMS community as a scholar interested in practical applications of CMS insights.

The paper argues that CMS is uniquely positioned to help organization studies become a phronetic science, both practical and capable of addressing questions of power and values, essential to management practice.

The estrangement between theory and practice in CMS is symptomatic of the same phenomenon in the broader organization studies community.

The paper addresses not only how CMS can become a more phronetic science but also the benefits of phronetic research for the broader organization studies.

In this chapter it is argued that when the Austrian revival takes place in the 1970s and 1980s the image of economics as an analytical science which can be methodologically kept clean from value judgments, and the economist as a pure truth-seeker shapes modern Austrian economics at the expense of an idea of a socially involved, embedded scholar with a responsibility toward society which was characteristic of the pre-WWII Austrian school. The neglect of that part of the Austrian heritage is important not only for how we understand the role and responsibility of the social scientist but also because it alters what we consider to be relevant and valid economic knowledge. The chapter demonstrates that insight into economic processes was excluded from what was considered valid economic knowledge and how social relevance of knowledge was no longer a goal in the postwar Austrian School. The chapter identifies alternative currents in the modern Austrian school to this general trend and suggests ways forward to think about the appropriate institutions to promote relevance and the moral conduct of (Austrian) economics.