Friedrich August von Hayek was an 
economist and philosopher born in Austria. He is best known for his political economy/philosophy based defense of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism. In 1974, von Hayek received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (shared with Gunnar Myrdal) for his “pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and [his] penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.”
After having “converted” to liberalism, von Hayek began attending Ludwig von Mises’ somewhat exclusive private seminars, where also Fritz Machlup, Alfred Schutz, Felix Kaufmann,and Gottfried Haberler participated.
The Road to Serfdom was written between 1940–1943. The title was inspired by the French classical liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on the “road to servitude”. In it, von Hayek strongly opposes central planning, and also comes out moderately in favor of the free market system. However, he has much in common with modern institutionalists, and argues strongly for a large role for the central government than the minimalist state which Adam Smith favored.
by admin on June 23, 2010
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (15 July 1848 – 19 August 1923), born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, is one of the most important classical social theorists ever. He was an Italian industrialist, sociologist, economist, and philosopher.
His contributions to 
economics are many, but the most important concern the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals’ choices. He was influential in moving economics from a kind of social philosophy to a data intensive field of scientific research and mathematical equations. The concept of Pareto efficiency is still alive. He also discovered that income follows a Pareto distribution.
His contributions to sociology were equally important. Compendium of General Sociology was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and the Compendium has been published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Society, to Pareto, was governed principally by non-rational forces, and he was critical of all rational explanations and ideologies. He contributed to the development of functionalist and systems theories of social and economic life and was a major influence on the work of Talcott Parsons. He was also an advocate of empirical and experimental methods in the social sciences as well as of mathematical sociology and economics.
It is sad to notice that some of Vilfredo Pareto’s important works are almost impossible to get hold of. This concerns, for example, his Mind and Society
, where only part 2 is still available for a reasonable amount of money. The other parts are unfortunately very expensive.
“Natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” 
are terms often associated with Charles Darwin. However, “survival of the fittest” was actually coined by philosopher Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin. To Spencer, evolution and selection were linked, and selection took place both in nature and in the human realm.
Spencer emphasized three developmental tendencies shared by societies and organisms: (1) growth in size, (2) increasing complexity of structure, and (3) differentiation of function.
Various schools in social theory (population ecology, functional analysis, and others) have embraced some of the principles of evolutionary biology. However, use of explanations of social change in terms of natural selection (or simply selection) has always been controversial in the social sciences. A major reason would seem to be that it is very difficult to explain and empirically show exactly how selection takes place.
Even so, there is little doubt that selection does play a prominent part in social change, and that thinking in terms of selection and selection processes is valuable as a corrective to thinking that seeks to explain everything in terms of rational agency. The Principles of Sociology is a book that belongs in any library of social classics and still deserves to be read.
by admin on April 5, 2010
Georg Simmel, a contemporary of Max Weber, to my mind is a very underrated classical sociologist. In this very remarkable book Simmel discusses money from several angles. 
It was published in 1900, and is Georg Simmel’s magnum opus. It contains some of the key ideas of Simmel. The Philosophy of Money may be viewed as providing an alternative interpretation to that of Marx in Das Kapital, and discusses money from economic, philosophical, sociological and psychological perspectives in order to use this key phenomenon to develop a comprehensive sociological analysis.
Simmel sees money as an important medium in the creation of social ties. Through money, relationships between people are established and given content and form. At the same time, the money aspect of social ties provides a basis for intellectualization processes and the disintegration of substance into impersonal ties. Tendencies to calculation and numerical analyses, as well as money’s tendency to become an end in itself, give money based relationships a set of extremely dynamic properties.
The Philosophy of Money is a good book to start with for readers wanting to take a closer look at this original and important social theorist.
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