Hayek’s English-vs-German framing collapses when read through German interwar debates

Evidence

A great deal of the rhetorical force of Hayek’s book in the English-speaking world derives from this ostensibly “European” cast. Hayek in Road to Serfdom appears to defend an essentially English model of classical liberalism against the corrosive influence of “German ideas.” The road to serfdom, Hayek argues, is a German road, an idea simple to grasp during the early 1940s in more ways than one. Read from a German interwar perspective, however, the rhetorical force of this line of argument collapses. The general principles advanced by Hayek clearly derive from a body of continental interwar literature concerning parliamentary democracy and the state in the first German republic. When placed in this context, the arguments advanced in Road to Serfdom no longer seem so compelling or cogent. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 383

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the larger neoliberal historiography debate about whether Hayek’s rhetoric maps onto real intellectual genealogy — links to the Mont Pèlerin network origins theme of this book. — connects to: Hayek blamed Germanic ideas, not industrialization, for British statism — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 154; Readers have misread the polarities of Hayek’s wartime context and argument — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 375; Decontextualized polemic becomes misread as straightforward history (+2 more)
• QUESTION: What exactly did Hayek draw from the German interwar Staatsrechtslehre debates, and how does this bear on the standard ‘English liberalism’ self-presentation of the MPS?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 383

Broader Connections

• Heidegger’s apparent unreadability partly stems from translation friction between German and English #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 205
• Decontextualized polemic becomes misread as straightforward history #complicates (0.78)