Dr Eamonn Butler is director of the Adam Smith Institute, a London-based think tank dealing in market economic policy. He has an MA in Economics and Psychology from the University of St Andrews, and a PhD in Philosophy from St Andrews.

This book is a straightforward guide to the ideas and influence of the Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), regarded by many as the twentieth century’s most important thinker on social and economic freedom.

This book is written for people who want to learn more about the case for individual freedom and free-market capitalism – and the deeply insightful case for liberalism put forward by one of its greatest exponents. (Throughout this book, ‘liberalism’ is used in the European sense of support for individual freedom and limited government.)

The book explains Hayek’s ideas on the nature of society and economics, and some of the criticisms that have been made of them. It aims to do so in plain language and without distortion. So there are no distracting academic-style footnotes or bibliography – just an essential reading list of Hayek’s main writings and important books about him.

At a conference in London in the early 1980s, the writings of F. A. Hayek were being discussed. The Alternative Bookshop had brought along a selection of Hayek’s books; but I could see that many of the people browsing through them were intimidated by the academic density of some of these works and did not know where to start. Hayek was one of my main intellectual inspirations – I knew him slightly and met him often at conferences – and I was familiar with his ideas. So I resolved to write a short book on those ideas to help others discover and understand them.