ABSTRACT
The collapse of the Roman Empire entailed the collapse of the classical conception of law and the conception of individual liberty which it expressed. England plays a key role in Friedrich Hayek's account of the story of liberty. He gives decisive importance to the civil war in the seventeenth century, endorsing the traditional liberal view of its significance. Hayek, like Montesquieu and other observers at the time, considered the English eighteenth-century constitution to be much superior to the forms of government which had been established in the rest of Europe. Hayek is in some difficulty over the US Constitution, since it appears at first glance to be a product of rationalist constructivist liberalism, and owes little to evolutionary development. Hayek's response to the problems was to indulge in some new constitutional thinking of his own. Hayek falls back on his belief that liberal ideas will triumph because they are superior to collectivist ideas.
