Friedrich Hayek’s personal copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, complete with pencilled annotations by the champion of free market economics, is to go on sale as part of a trove of personal items being sold by Hayek’s family.

Hayek’s typewriter, writing desk, photo albums, passports, a speech signed by former prime minister Margaret Thatcher and a set of cufflinks given to him by ex-US president Ronald Reagan are among the items set to go under the hammer in an online sale at Sotheby’s later this month.

The sale of the Austrian-born economist’s personal effects is timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the publication of his classic defence of unfettered competition, The Road to Serfdom, in which Hayek argued that central economic planning posed a grave threat to political freedom.

Later, at the height of the cold war, the book was used by Thatcher and Reagan to underpin their liberal free-market reforms of the 1980s and bolster their defence of western democracy.

In terms of value, the highlight of the auction is Hayek’s Nobel memorial prize medal for economic sciences, awarded in 1974, which the auction house has estimated at £400,000 to £600,000. Also included are a Presidential Medal of Freedom and Hayek’s award as a Companion of Honour, accompanied by a letter from Thatcher concerning her recommendation that he receive the royal honour.

“There’s been very little Hayek material at auction in the past,” said Gabriel Heaton, a Sotheby’s director.

The sale includes lower-value items that nonetheless shed light on aspects of Hayek’s work and his status as the doyen of rightwing policymakers. His copy of The Wealth of Nations — a plain 1911 Everyman edition with Hayek’s marginal notes and key passages underlined — is estimated at £3,000 to £5,000. “It’s one great economist reading another,” said Mr Heaton.

Hayek's copy of 'The Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith © Charlie Bibby/FT

He said it was not known whether the typewriter or desk were the ones on which Hayek composed The Road to Serfdom, but their presence in his life in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was an academic at the London School of Economics, places them in a key working period in his career.

Hayek’s life intersected with some of the key political moments of the 20th century. Growing up in fin-de-siècle Vienna in the era of Klimt and Freud, he served in the first world war (like his cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein), fighting on the Italian front.

In the 1920s, he witnessed first hand the economic collapse that followed the war, receiving 200 pay rises in a period of rampant inflation in 1923, before moving to Britain, where he became a naturalised citizen in 1938. He spent the war there before moving to Chicago in 1950. He died in 1992.

Hayek pictured around 1950

Mr Heaton said the family were selling the objects for personal reasons. The online sale will open on March 8 and end on March 19, with all the items placed on public exhibition at Sotheby’s London salerooms from March 15.

The auction house will also host a talk on Hayek on March 17, with Philip Booth of the Institute of Economic Affairs; Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute and Kwasi Kwarteng MP, Conservative MP for Spelthorne.

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