The road from serfdom: F.A. Hayek spent years in the wilderness for arguing that socialism was the road, not to prosperity and justice, but to tyranny

His true intellectual humility was in keeping with the title of his final, crowning volume, The Fatal Conceit, which deplores what he called in his Nobel Prize address "the pretense of knowledge" affected by socialist planners.

A perennial student, he never stopped learning. I recall the almost boyish excitement with which at the age of 77 he invited Arthur Seldon at the Institute of Economic Affairs to publish his radical proposal for competing private currencies. He explained how during a lecture in Switzerland he had suddenly found himself wondering why classical liberals--who grasped above all the scope for abuse of monopoly power--should ever have swallowed the idea that politicians could be trusted with control of national money. Thus was born The Denationalization of Money, which my new-found young economist friends in Moscow recently asked for permission (and a subsidy) to translate into Russian.

It was sad that by 1989 the great man had lost touch with affairs and was unable to grasp the magnitude of the counter-revolution in the old USSR, to which, I believe, he and his Mont Pelerin Society contributed more even than President Reagan and star wars.

Since his naturalization in 1938, Hayek was intensely proud of his British citizenship and returned regularly to London and the West Country from retirement in Freiburg. He rejoiced in Margaret Thatcher's determination to curb the legal privileges of trade unions and to make a start on the herculean task of restoring market forces after decades of cumulative state encroachment going back to the "Liberal" government of 1906. When I first introduced him to Mrs. Thatcher, he quietly reduced that formidable lady to unusual periods of silence.

He was almost casual about being summoned from the wilderness to become Nobel Laureate in 1974, partly because he shared the prize with a now forgotten Swedish collectivist, Gunnar Myrdal, and partly because he thought some previous winners had bordered on economic illiteracy. Of all his distinctions, he prized the Companion of Honor conferred by the Queen in 1984. He enjoyed telling that when the usher at Buckingham Palace asked how he should be announced, he startled that solemn dignitary by replying: "Hi-yek, as in high explosive." From that date he shyly let it be known that after a lifetime as "Fritz," since his days at the LSE with the egregious leftist Harold Laski, he preferred to be called "Friedrich," pronounced as in Fred.

I owe him a special debt for my life peerage, conferred by Mrs. Thatcher in recognition of the work of the Institute of Economic Affairs, which he had inspired Sir Antony Fisher to set up in 1957. His watchword was that intellectuals should proclaim a vision of the free society "without regard for what appears today as politically possible." The lesson from Britain--where the Labour Party has dropped socialism and now talks of markets without malignancy--shows that far more has become politically possible than the younger, persecuted Fritz could ever have dared to hope.