The excitement of cognitive psychology as a viable paradigm for contemporary research and application developed from a number of trends deeply imbedded in psychology’s past. In the twentieth century, these influences were clearly evident among the functionalists, the Gestalt movement, Tolman’s purposive behaviorism, as well as in the extended subfields of psychology, such as developmental, social, personality and clinical. In the latter part of the twentieth century, such specified advances as Bartlett’s schema theory, Hebb’s neural networks, and Broadbent’s filter model of attention provided cognitive psychology with substantive direction. The question of artificial intelligence contributed to a paradigm shift through the efforts of pioneers such as Turing and the logical theorist studies of Newell, Shaw and Simon, leading to what is described by some as the cognitive revolution. The seminal research of George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Ulric Neisser gave cognitive science its form and substance. The question of the sustainability of the cognitive paradigm remains a topic for reflection.

In the framework of a critical illustration of the contemporary history of economics, this chapter provides an (original) illustration of Hayek’s thought: his formative years, his contributions to the theory of the trade cycle and the theory of capital and the subsequent debates with Sraffa and Kaldor, his theory of the spontaneous order and of the market as a mechanism of knowledge diffusion, his political individualism and the similarities to and differences from the notions of methodological individualism, liberism and liberalism, his thesis on the denationalization of money.