Condensing Hayek’s text stripped out his qualifications and magnified his rhetoric.

Evidence

Both were drawn to the text in part for ideological reasons: Eastman was a recent convert from socialism and one of Stalinist Rus sia’s most prominent critics, while Wallace was a staunch anticommunist who had recently guided his magazine, as the sympathetic editor of the Saturday Review of Literature observed, on “a conspicuous list to the extreme Right.” In their reworking of The Road to Serfdom Hayek’s style was simplifi ed and dramatized, his observations were reordered and reconnected, and new sentences were written to impart an appearance of seamlessness to disconnected snippets. As a result, many of Hayek’s qualifi cations were lost. As one critic observed, the text itself had become an enactment of readers’ tendencies to take sentences out of context in order to support their own point of view. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 225

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates how a condens’ion process systematically stripped nuance, a mechanical account of how ‘Reader’s Digestification’ altered argumentative content.
• XREF: connects to: Friedman deliberately used unqualified rhetoric while Hayek stayed aloof from politics — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 559; Hayek’s own rhetoric invited the laissez-faire reading he later lamented — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 223