Friedrich Hayek

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was a philosopher, Austrian School economist, and classical liberal. He became a prominent figure in the Austrian School of economic thought and is best known for his work on praxeology. Fearing a Nazi takeover of Europe, Mises emigrated to the United States in... 1940. Mises had a significant influence on the libertarian movement in the United States in the mid-20th century. Ludwig von Mises was born to wealthy Jewish parents in the city of Lemberg, in Galicia, Austria-Hungary . The family of his father Arthur Edler von Mises had been elevated to the Austrian nobility in the 19th century, and was involved in building and financing railroads. Ludwig's mother, Adele , was a niece of Dr. Joachim Landau, a Liberal Party deputy to the Austrian Parliament. Arthur was stationed there as a construction engineer with Czernowitz railway company. At the age of twelve Ludwig spoke fluent Yiddish, German, Polish, and French, read Latin, and could understand Ukrainian.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a Prussian philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin, which was named after him in 1949. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy... of language and to the theory and practice of education. In particular, he is widely recognized as having been the architect of the Prussian education system which was used as a model for education systems in countries such as the United States and Japan. Humboldt was born in Potsdam, Margraviate of Brandenburg, and died in Tegel, Province of Brandenburg. His younger brother, Alexander von Humboldt, was equally famous, as a geographer. Humboldt was a philosopher of note and wrote On the Limits of State Action in 1791-2 , one of the boldest defences of the liberties of the Enlightenment. It influenced John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty through which von Humboldt's ideas became known in the English-speaking world.
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Michael Polanyi, FRS was a Hungarian–British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argues that positivism gives a false account of knowing, which, if taken seriously, undermines our highest achievements as human beings.... Polanyi, born Mihály Polányi in Budapest, was the fifth child of Mihály and Cecília Pollacsek, secular Jews from Ungvár and Vilnius in Lithuania, respectively. His father's family were entrepreneurs, while his mother's father was the chief rabbi of Vilnius. The family moved to Budapest and Magyarized their surname to Polányi. His father built much of the Hungarian railway system, but lost most of his fortune in 1899 when bad weather caused a railway building project to go over budget. He died in 1905. Cecília Polanyi established a salon that was well known amongst Budapest's intellectuals and which continued until her death in 1939. His older brother was Karl Polanyi, the political economist.
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David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George... Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist. Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the skeptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas," which are copied from impressions.
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John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, CB FBA was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern... macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments. He greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and advocated the use of fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, as well as its various offshoots. In the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, overturning the older ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. Keynes instead argued that aggregate demand determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Following the outbreak of World War II, Keynes's ideas concerning economic policy were adopted by leading Western economies.
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