I've not read Hayek (could you recommend a good starting book?)
It depends on what you want to read him for.
I started with The Road To Serfdom, which is probably his most famous book. It explains his thesis that a system based on economic planning will lead inevitably to totalitarianism. To him, Fascism and Soviet Communism are just two variations of the same planning-based socialist social order.
Then, because I was specifically interested in law, I read The Constitution of Liberty,, the three volume series, Law, Legislation and Liberty, and, for a good overview of his general political ideas, The Fatal Conceit, which, if you can only read one book by him, is the one to read. It was the last book he wrote before he died and a good summary of his overall philosophy. It is also the first book in the Collected Works series.
These lay out pretty completely his theories about law and politics. His is the first non-positivist theory of jurisprudence (some call him a "natural law" theorist, but that is not really accurate) which makes sense to me.
Right now, I'm working on the collected works, and I have on order Denationalization of Money and Prices and Production, which is an early work which lays out his theories about the business cycle. So, I'm getting further and further afield from where I started, deeper and deeper into his economic theories and away from the political stuff.
If you read volumes 3 and 4 of the Collected Works, they give a pretty good reading list of all the great political economists of the classical and Austrian traditions, with Hayek's summary of their contributions and citations to their major works.
All of these are a very good antidote for the sort of mathematical, pseudo-scientific economics that is done today. He is also the most uncompromising classical liberal I have ever read. Having read a couple of volumes by our mutual hero-worship-object, W. Brian Arthur, and his criticisms of equilibrium economics, I was very surprised to learn that Hayek's theories, apart from being very un-mathematical, do not rely on static equilibrium models (i.e., "perfect competition,") and and all their unrealistic assumptions (such as that old whipping boy, "perfect knowledge").
Just to give you the editor's take:
Hayek's ultimate endorsement of markets is not based on their alleged Pareto-efficiency characteristics. Rather, a system of free markets is one among a number of institutions that are vital for the discovery and creation of knowledge and for the coordination of agents' plans in a world in which knowledge is dispersed and error is possible.
B. Caldwell, ed., 10 Collected Works of F.A. Hayek 30 (1997) (introduction).
And, as an added bonus, Hayek is *the* libertarian author, so, if you really read all this stuff, you will be able to debate the merits and demerits of libertarianism with the best of 'em.
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