ABSTRACT
Railroads were entwined with the state – as indeed were more than half the top United States engineering schools, funded by law grants through the Morrill Land Grant Colleges Act. Scenic nationalism and ‘monumentalism’ came together with the self-seeking interests of railroads to make the case for the National Parks. Alongside his unlikely bedfellows, Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson, Friedrich Von Hayek was destined to tear down the intellectual fabric of American rational planning –just as other rising nations were discovering for themselves the power of plans. In many respects America has long functioned as a developmental state, with proactive planning and government. Planning had not led to dictatorship, as Hayek believed, although dictatorship had certainly led to planning. And planning, to invert Hayek, had proved to be, in an almost literal sense, the road from serfdom.
