My favorite book over the last twelve months, excluding arcane things normal people would never read, is Bruce Caldwell's Hayek's Challenge. Caldwell has an extremely engaging writing style, especially for someone writing in an area like History of Economic Thought. With Hayek's The Road to Serfdom still sitting comfortably in the Amazon.com top 100 nonfiction books for the last 269 days following Glenn Beck's pimping thereof, I hope Caldwell's book will generate more interest. To be honest, even though The Road to Serfdom was meant to be a work aimed at a popular (British) audience, the prose is pretty impenetrable. I also don't think Beck and other pundits/intellectuals are really right in pointing to Hayek's work as a relevant criticism of the Obama administration; The Road to Serfdom had a particular argument at a time when socialism meant something entirely different than it does today. Caldwell's accessible, academic, broad ranging work presents a much more effective overview of the meaning of Hayek's oeuvre and presents some very pertinent criticism of the status quo in academia.
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