If you are interested in Hayek because he is an Austrian School economist, this expertly edited collection is indispensible. It places his work at the heart of the 20th century debates over economic science, representing the Austrian perspective.
It collects his writings on various Austrians such as Wieser, Mises, Schumpeter, Menger, Ropke, Leoni, and Strigl, as well as Mach, Clark, Mitchell, de Jouvenel, and Acton. It includes interpretative essays on the place of the Austrian School in the 1920s.
This volume appeared as the second in the collected works in 1989, after years of editing by Peter G. Klein, senior fellow of the Mises Institute. But when it appeared, it was very expensive and not widely distributed. It never received the attention it deserved.
So we can't be more pleased that this new edition is an incredibly great price. Perhaps it will help bring Hayek more attention as an extraordinary expositor of the unique perspective of the Austrian School.
His essays on other economists are some of the best he ever wrote. They are filled with excellent and accurate theoretical portraits, with surprising biographical detail unavailable anywhere else. The reader is given a close look at the events and ideas that shaped the most spectacular dissident intellectual movement of the 20th century.
Many essays were translated for the first time to appear in this book. It contributes as much to our understanding of this tradition of thought as any other work yet to appear apart from Guido Hulsmann's biography of Mises himself.