Few individuals did more to both extend our understanding of the economic processes of the free society and alert us to the dangers inherent in the growth of political power than the Nobel laureate economist and social theorist Friedrich A Hayek. In over half a century of writing and teaching, he showed why National Socialism was the very antithesis of capitalism, why communism was an economic and political philosophy ultimately doomed to failure, and why we must be wary of government intervention if we are to preserve the freedoms that make democracy and prosperity possible. In a life that spanned almost the entire 20th century, Hayak went from being dismissed, ridiculed and ignored, to being acclaimed as perhaps the century's most significant social scientist and philosopher.