ABSTRACT
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to
Serfdom were both published in 1944. Hayek, an Austrian economist
trained at the feet of Ludwig von Mises but forever associated with a largely non-economic corpus produced at the London School of Economics and
the universities of Chicago and Freiburg between 1940 and 1980, is widely
recognized as one of the leading intellectual architects of the neoliberal
counter-revolution. Margaret Thatcher pronounced that ‘‘this is what we
believe’’ as she slammed a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty onto
the table at Number 10 Downing Street during a Tory Cabinet meeting.
Hayek’s critique of socialism – that it destroys morals, personal freedom
and responsibility, impedes the production of wealth and sooner or later leads to totalitarianism – is the urtext for market utopians. Collectivism was
by definition a made rather than a grown order: it was, Hayek said, con-
structivist rather than evolutionary, organized not spontaneous, a ‘‘taxis’’ (a
made order) rather than a ‘‘cosmos’’ (a spontaneous order), an economy
rather than a ‘‘catallaxy,’’ coerced and concrete rather than free and abstract
(see Gamble 1996: 31-2). Its fatal conceit was that socialism (and social
democracy for that matter) admitted the ‘‘reckless trespass of taxis onto the
proper ground of cosmos’’ (Anderson 2005: 16). The other half of Hayek’s project was a robust defense of western
civilization – that is to say of liberty, science and the spontaneous orders
that co-evolved to form modern society (‘‘Great Society’’ as he termed it). It
was a buttressing of the liberal (unplanned) market order from which the
preconditions of civilization – competition and experimentation – had
emerged. Hayek, like Weber, saw this world as an iron cage constituted by
impersonality, a loss of community, individualism and personal responsi-
bility. But (unlike Weber) Hayek saw these structures, properly understood, as expressions of liberty. From the vantage point of the 1940s this (classical)
liberal project was, as Hayek saw it, under threat; what passed as liberalism
was a travesty, a diluted and distorted body of ideas corrupted by con-
structivist rationalism (as opposed to what he called ‘‘evolutionary ration-
alism’’). The ground between liberalism and much of what passed as
Keynesianism or social democracy was, on the Hayekian account, catastrophically slight. What was required, as he made clear at the founding of
the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, was a restoration, a purging of true lib-
eralism (the removal of ‘‘accretions’’). There was to be no compromise with
collectivism; the seized territory had to be regained. In his writing and his
promotion of think-tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs in Britain –
the brains trust for the likes of Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher –
Hayek aggressively launched a cold war of ideas. He was part of the quartet
of European theorists (Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Michael Oakeshott were the others) whose ideas, while standing in a tense relationship to one
another, came to shape a large swath of the intellectual landscape of the
early twenty-first century (see Anderson 2005). Hayek was neither a simple
conservative or libertarian, nor a voice for laissez-faire (‘‘false rationalism’’
as he saw it). He identified himself with the individualist tradition of Hume,
Smith, Burke and Menger, thereby providing a bridge that linked his short-
term allies (conservatives and libertarians) to classical liberals in order to
make common cause against collectivism (Gamble 1996: 101). To roll back the incursions of taxis required a redesign of the state. A powerful chamber
was to serve guardian of the rule of law (striking all under 45 years off the
voting roll), protecting the law of liberty from the logic of popular sover-
eignty. As Anderson (2005: 17) notes, the correct Hayekian formula was
‘‘demarchy without democracy.’’
