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By Root 6508 0

become for me the starting point of more than thirty years’ work in a new field. This first attempt in the new direction was caused by my annoyance with the complete misinterpretation in English “progressive” circles of the character of the Nazi movement, an annoyance which led me from a memorandum to the then director of the London School of Economics, Sir William Beveridge, through an article in the Contemporary Review for 1938, which at the request of Professor Harry G. Gideonse of the University of Chicago I enlarged for publication in his Public Policy Pamphlets,1 and which, finally and reluctantly, when I found that all my more competent British colleagues were preoccupied with more urgent problems of the conduct of the war, I expanded into this tract for the times. In spite of the wholly unexpected success of the book—in the case of the initially not-contemplated American edition even greater than in that of the British one—I felt for a long time not altogether happy about it. Though I had frankly declared at the outset of the book that it was a political one, I was made to feel by most of my fellow social scientists that I had used my abilities on the wrong side, and I was myself uncomfortable about the possibility that in going beyond technical economics I might have exceeded my competence. I will not speak here about the fury which the book caused in certain circles, or of the curious difference between its reception in Great Britain and that in the United States—about that I did say something twenty years ago in the Preface to the first American paperback edition. Just to indicate the character of a widespread reaction, I will mention merely that one well-known philosopher, who shall be nameless, wrote to another to reproach him for having lauded this scandalous book, which “of course [he] had not read”!2

But though I tried hard to get back to economics proper, I could not free myself of the feeling that the problems on which I had so undesignedly embarked were more challenging and important than those of economic theory, and that much that I had said in my first sketch needed clarification and elaboration. When I wrote the book, I had by no means sufficiently freed myself from all the prejudices and superstitions dominating general opinion, and even less had I learned to avoid all the prevalent confusions of terms and concepts of which I have since become very conscious. And the discussion of the consequences of socialist policies which the book attempts is of course not complete without an adequate account of what an appropriately run market order requires and can achieve. It was to the latter problem that the further work I have since done in the field was mainly devoted. The first result of these efforts of explaining the nature of an order of freedom was a substantial book called The Constitution of Liberty (1960) in which I essentially attempted to restate and make more coherent the doctrines of classical nineteenth-century liberalism. The awareness that such a restatement left certain important questions unanswered led me then to a further effort to provide my own answers in a work of three volumes entitled Law, Legislation, and Liberty, of which the first volume appeared in 1973.3

In the last twenty years, I have, I believe, learned much about the problems discussed in this book, though I don’t think I ever reread the book during this time. Having done so now for the purpose of this Preface, I feel no longer apologetic, but for the first time am rather proud of it—and not least of the insight which made me dedicate it “To the Socialists of All Parties.” Indeed, though I have in the interval learned much that I did not know when I wrote it, I was now often surprised by how much I did already see at the beginning of my efforts that later work has confirmed; and though my later efforts will, I hope, be more rewarding to the expert, I am now prepared unhesitatingly to recommend this early book to the general reader who wants a simple and nontechnical introduction to what I believe is still one of the