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Freedom to Choose Conference 2024
September 17 @ 8:30 am - 5:30 pm AWST
The Path to Freedom: The Enduring Relevance of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom
The FTC conference series places free-market ideas in their historical context and highlights the important role economists play in policy formation. The theme of FTC 2024 is “The Path to Freedom: The Enduring Relevance of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom”. The keynote speaker for this year’s conference is Eamonn Butler (Adam Smith Institute). Other speakers include Jeff Bennett (Australian National University), Elena Douglas (Knowledge Society), and Anthony Endres (University of Auckland).
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992), undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, hardly needs to be introduced. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Hayek’s receipt of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences ‘for [his] pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for [his] penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena’. In 1991 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush, with the citation acknowledging that he had ‘done more than any thinker of our age to explore the promise and contours of liberty’.
This year also marks the 80th anniversary of the publication of Hayek’s magnum opus titled The Road to Serfdom in 1944. This book is Hayek’s most famous work and is now regarded as a classic in the economic literature. Although the writing of The Road to Serfdom may be said to have constituted Hayek’s war effort, it is clear that he intended the work not merely as a tract for the time in which was written but, as he wrote over twenty years later, a ‘simple and non technical introduction to what I believe is still one of the most ominous questions which we have to solve’. Presumably Hayek would have said much the same thing if he were asked today.
FTC 2024 will engage with Hayek’s key ideas, especially those contained in The Road to Serfdom, and explore the relevance of his work for the issues currently faced by society.