ABSTRACT
Karl Popper severely condemned the vanguardist doctrines of Plato and Marx, according to which the best regime should be determined by a government of a group of specialists, the philosophers in Plato, and the leaders of the proletariat in Marx. Friedrich Hayek dedicated a great part of his work to this exact same problem, and was concerned to record the long process of limiting government that gradually led to the rise to modern liberal democracies, particularly in English-speaking countries. The issue of limited government clearly distinguishes the orientation of the British and American revolutions, on the one hand, and the French Revolution, on the other. Both Nazism and communism accused liberal democratic systems of becoming enmeshed in a web of legal constraints that supposedly condemned them to political paralysis and prevented governments from directly administrating 'urgent tasks' at hand.
