It should be noted, however, that neither Knight nor Simons listed Hayek among those who advocated “extreme” policies in support of laissezfaire. At the time The Good Society was written, Hayek was beginning to turn away from his earlier focus on capital theory and toward the development of a broader social philosophy. To an extraordinary degree, The Good Society established the framework for the arguments adopted by market advocates in the subsequent de cade, and in par tic u lar for the po liti cal project that Hayek began to conceive in the wake of its publication. “No human mind has ever understood the whole scheme of a society,” Lippmann stated in The Good Society, in a critique of socialscientifi c rationalism that would become central to Hayek’s thought in the ensuing de cades. “At best a mind can understand its own version of the scheme, something much thinner, which bears to reality some such relation as a silhouette to a man.” He attributed this basic insight to eighteenthcentury intellectuals, most notably Adam Smith, whose thought he sought to protect from the parodies that had emerged in the intervening years. Presaging Hayek’s essays of the early 1940s, he disparaged Spencer and Mill, and contrasted the failures of nineteenthcentury laissezfaire with what he perceived to be the richer and more nuanced conception of liberty that emerged in the Scottish Enlightenment. And, foreshadowing Hayek’s central argument in The Constitution of Liberty, Lippmann argued that the power structure of the modern state should center not on a managerial bureaucracy, but rather on a carefully delimited and constantly evolving network of established laws.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 163