Wartime despair over collectivism’s ascendancy animated Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

Evidence

The sense of panic and dismay that isolation inspired was only enhanced by the per sis tent conviction that the ideological program they had discussed at the “Colloque Lippmann” remained unpop u lar and obscure. The “trend everywhere,” Röpke observed in 1939, “is decidedly in the direction of Collectivism and Totalitarianism,” such that even En gland was “highly pathological” and the United States perhaps even worse. Émigrés in the United States, like Machlup and Mises, reported that the “Veblen- Hansen ideology dominates public opinion in this country” and subsumed the entire generation of economists under the age of forty. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 203

Categorization

• XREF: Directly sets up The Road to Serfdom as a product of the Colloque Lippmann network’s wartime isolation — connects to the broader MPS origin story. — connects to: Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was a wartime campaign against socialist scientists in England — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 80; Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom to convert his Fabian colleagues at the LSE — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 239; Hayek saw collectivist mass politics as the long-standing destroyer of free markets. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 69 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was a wartime campaign against socialist scientists in England #expands (0.78) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 80
• Hayek saw collectivist mass politics as the long-standing destroyer of free markets. #qualifies (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 69
• Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom to convert his Fabian colleagues at the LSE #corroborates (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 239
• Readers have misread the polarities of Hayek’s wartime context and argument #responds-to (0.72) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 375