ABSTRACT
F. A. Hayek was born Friedrich August von Hayek on May 8, 1899, in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He died on March 23, 1992, in the city of Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany, a country only recently reunified following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Hayek joined a field artillery regiment in March 1917, before he had completed his education at the Gymnasium. Hayek returned from the war with a knowledge of Italian and a severe infection of malaria. He took up several branches of study at the University of Vienna and fully participated in the social and cultural life of the period, though on alternate nights he would be laid up with fever. Hayek's father was a doctor and botanist who had hoped to obtain a full university chair in botany. The dominant influence on the intellectual life of the period was Ernst Mach.
