How do you tell a life?

You can start with birth.

Or better yet, with procreation.

Thus does Laurence Sterne in his Narrative of the Life and Views of Tristram Shandy: "I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, had considered what they did when they begot me." And so life takes Unfortunately, Tristram Shandys “imprudently” started his run.

Or rather, the novel never really gets beyond the act of procreation and its antecedents.

Rainer Hank

Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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But such a beginning is only possible in literature.

With real-life celebrities, biographers have to come up with something different.

For example, you can start at the end.

This is how Friedrich Wilhelm Graf does it in his recently published biography of the great scholar Ernst Troeltsch.

We readers gather on February 3, 1923, at 12 noon in the main hall of the crematorium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, watch the funeral procession of the educated people of the Weimar Republic and the obituaries and know immediately: an important man is buried here worn, whose life we ​​should be made curious about.

In comparison, the new biography of the great economist Friedrich August von Hayek, who is the subject of this column, starts comparatively conventionally: the two authors Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger begin with the wedding of Hayek's parents August and Felicitas on May 24th 1898 in Vienna.

Barely a year later, as befits the bourgeoisie, the first-born, Friedrich August von Hayek, was born.

His mother writes "Fritzerl's Diary" from the baby's perspective, notes that become the biographers' first source.

The child grows up in fin-de-siècle Vienna, the last phase of a golden age of stability.

What follows is what historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the "short 20th century": troubled decades of wars and disasters - humanitarian, political, economic.

And National Socialism and Communism, presumptuous large-scale attempts at collective megalomania, all of which have failed.

God bless us of “neoliberalism”

Hayek, who died in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1992, has been intellectually alert throughout this century: an economic thinker whose work extends far beyond the purely economic.

The crisis and depression of the 1920s and 1930s, the horrible war and development of welfare states in the 1950s and 1960s, and the repeated crisis of stagflation (similar to today's) after the oil price shock in the 1970s followed one another.

In the end, Hayek experienced the fall of the wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union with satisfaction.

If it is true that economic and political turning points need their intellectual pioneers, then Hayek's impact cannot be overestimated: as the spiritual father of the liberal revolution that took place in England (Margaret Thatcher) and the USA (Ronald Reagan) in the 1970s and 1980s ) overthrew the state from the command hills and let the free market flourish.