The Fortunes of Liberalism collects Hayek's 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.
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.
F. A. Hayek (1899–1992) is undoubtedly the most eminent of the modern Austrian economists, and a founding board member of the Mises Institute. Student of Friedrich von Wieser, protégé and colleague of Ludwig von Mises, and foremost representative of an outstanding generation of Austrian School theorists, Hayek was more successful than anyone else in spreading Austrian ideas throughout the English-speaking world. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with ideological rival Gunnar Myrdal "for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." Among mainstream economists, he is mainly known for his popular The Road to Serfdom (1944).
