Friedrich Hayek
Chicago

In 1950, Hayek left the London School of Economics. After spending the 1949–1950 academic year as a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas, Hayek was conferred professorship by the University of Chicago, where he became a professor in the Committee on Social Thought. Hayek's salary was funded not by the university, but by an outside foundation, the William Volker Fund.

Hayek had made contact with many at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, with Hayek's The Road to Serfdom playing a seminal role in transforming how Milton Friedman and others understood how society works. Hayek conducted a number of influential faculty seminars while at the University of Chicago and a number of academics worked on research projects sympathetic to some of Hayek's own, such as Aaron Director, who was active in the Chicago School in helping to fund and establish what became the "Law and Society" program in the University of Chicago Law School. Hayek, Frank Knight, Friedman and George Stigler worked together in forming the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international forum for neoliberals. Hayek and Friedman cooperated in support of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an American student organisation devoted to libertarian ideas.

Although they shared most political beliefs, disagreeing primarily on the question of monetary policy, Hayek and Friedman worked in separate university departments with different research interests and never developed a close working relationship. According to Alan O. Ebenstein, who wrote biographies of both of them, Hayek probably had a closer friendship with Keynes than with Friedman.

Hayek received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954.

Another influential political philosopher and German-speaking exile at the University of Chicago at the time was Leo Strauss, but according to his student Joseph Cropsey who also knew Hayek, there was no contact between the two of them.

After editing a book on John Stuart Mill 's letters he planned to publish two books on the liberal order, The Constitution of Liberty and "The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization" (eventually the title for the second chapter of The Constitution of Liberty). He completed The Constitution of Liberty in May 1959, with publication in February 1960. Hayek was concerned that "with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society". Hayek was disappointed that the book did not receive the same enthusiastic general reception as The Road to Serfdom had sixteen years before.

He left Chicago mostly because of financial reasons, being concerned about his pension provisions. His primary source of income was his salary, and he received some additional money from book royalties but avoided other lucrative sources of income for academics such as writing textbooks. He spent a lot on his frequent travels. He regularly spent summers in Austrian Alps, usually in the Tyrolean village Obergurgl where he enjoyed mountain climbing, and also visited Japan four times with additional trips to Tahiti, Fiji, Indonesia, Australia, New Caledonia and Ceylon. After his divorce, his financial situation worsened.
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