It was the battle of century and the topic was: is socialism a viable economic system. Mises had the first word but Hayek added the essays that drove the debate forward into the 1930s and beyond in the English speaking world. These essays are all collected in this book.
How does war fit in? The best-kept secret of the socialists is that they love wartime because its controlled economy provides a tableau of experimentation in the planned society. Hayek understood this from watching how this crew longs for control that wartime provides. For this reason, Hayek is here featured writing on the relationship between domestic socialism and imperialistic militarism.
Mises's and Hayek's contributions to the debate on socialism are substantively different, but the topic was fruitful for both because it allows them to theorize about the role of property and prices in a free society, and the path of economic and social development without and without the freedom to own, accumulate, trade, and innovate. For Hayek, the topic led him to recast the workings of society itself -- in a series of contributions that continues to provide insight to scholars in all fields.
The editor here is Bruce Caldwell, Professor of Economics and the Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He is the current General Editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek.
280 page, paperback, 2009, ISBN 978-0-86597-743-3