ABSTRACT
Hayek’s understanding of freedom emerged from his economic theory. For the first 20 years of his career he worked as an economist, concerned with technical issues relating to the role of money in the business cycle. Hayek (2014) conceived of the economy in abstract terms and considered it to be self-correcting and tending towards equilibrium over time: that in the absence of exogenous shocks, supply and demand would gravitate towards a balanced state, even if they never reached the idealised perfect state of equilibrium central to neoclassical economics (Hayek, 1948b; Caldwell, 1988).
