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1 [Lord Acton, “Review of Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe” [1878], reprinted in The History of Freedom and Other Essays, op. cit., p. 62. —Ed.]

2 [Hayek alludes here to the trends he identified in his inaugural lecture at the LSE, “The Trend of Economic Thinking,” op. cit. —Ed.]

3 [The nineteenth century Liberal statesman Sir William Vernon Harcourt (1827–1904) originated the phrase, “We are all socialists now.” —Ed.]

4 As some people may think this statement exaggerated, the testimony of Lord Morley may be worth quoting, who in his Recollections speaks of the “acknowledged point” that the main argument of the essay On Liberty “was not original but came from Germany.” [Hayek quotes from John, Viscount Morley, Recollections, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1917), pp. 61–62. John Morley, First Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923), was an English statesman and man of letters. He wrote numerous biographies, the most famous of them a four volume work on William Gladstone. German poet, playwright, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was the author of Faust and The Sorrows of Young Werther. Philologist and statesman Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) was the first Prussian minister of education and founder of the University of Berlin. Essayist and man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), who through various publications helped introduce German culture and literature to English readers, is best known among economists for dubbing the classicals “the dreary professors of a dismal science.” English-born author and propagandist Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) who lived in Germany from 1885 and who wrote principally on music and philosophy, was known for his support for the doctrine of Aryan supremacy. Hayek’s note originally was placed after the name “Humboldt.” —Ed.]

5 That there did exist a certain kinship between socialism and the organization of the Prussian state, consciously organized from the top as in no other country, is undeniable and was freely recognized already by the early French socialists. Long before the ideal of running the whole state on the same principles as a single factory was to inspire nineteenth-century socialism, the Prussian poet Novalis had already deplored that “no other state has ever been administered so much like a factory as Prussia since the death of Frederick William,” in Novalis, Glauben und Liebe, oder der König and die Königin [1798] [The cited passage may be found in Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1981, p. 494), and reads “Kein Staat ist mehr als Fabrik verwaltet worden, als Preußen, seit Friedrich Wilhelm des Ersten Tode.” Novalis was the pen name of the Prussian poet and novelist Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), known as the “Prophet of Romanticism.” The work from which Hayek quotes may be translated as Faith and Love, or the King and the Queen. Novalis anticipated there a future in which universal human spirituality would eliminate the need for government. —Ed.]

ONE

THE ABANDONED ROAD

A program whose basic thesis is, not that the system of free enterprise for profit has failed in this generation, but that it has not yet been tried.

—F. D. Roosevelt1

When the course of civilization takes an unexpected turn—when, instead of the continuous progress which we have come to expect, we find ourselves threatened by evils associated by us with past ages of barbarism—we naturally blame anything but ourselves. Have we not all striven according to our best lights, and have not many of our finest minds incessantly worked to make this a better world? Have not all our efforts and hopes been directed toward greater freedom, justice, and prosperity? If the outcome is so different from our aims— if, instead of freedom and prosperity, bondage and misery stare us in the face—is it not clear that sinister forces must have foiled our intentions, that we are the victims of some evil power which must be conquered before we can resume the road to better things? However much we may differ