Virginia Postrel, whose Dynamist blog is always available on the Berkeley Square Blogroll, has written an excellent piece in the Boston Globe: Friedrich the Great.
Hayek and his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, are heroes to me. Postrel's piece provides a good background to those who are unfamiliar with Hayek, and a great homage for those who dig him. I wonder how the readers of the Globe received the piece? That paper is noted for its left wing readership.
Postrel shines:
But Hayek turned out to be ahead of his time, not behind it. Arguing with the social engineers of the mid-20th century, he grappled with problems equally relevant to the 21st century. He anticipated today's rage for biological metaphors and evolutionary analysis, today's fragmented and specialized markets, today's emphasis on the legal institutions needed to make markets work, even today's multicultural challenges.[...]
As Hayek pointed out, the key thing is to have the decision rights and the information co-located," says Brynjolfsson. "There are at least two ways of achieving that. One is to move information to decision maker. The other is to move decision rights to where the information is."
This analysis, which applies as much to culture as to economics, informs Hayek's best-known work, "The Road to Serfdom," which he wrote as a wartime warning to a popular audience. Published in 1944 and dedicated "to the socialists of all parties," the book argued that the logic of socialist central planning implied the erosion of personal freedoms. Britain's well-intended socialists were headed down the same path as the National Socialists whose rise Hayek had witnessed in Austria.