From the beginning, he found the textual life of The Road to Serfdom diffi cult to control. As he repeatedly observed, his message did not always align with its depiction in the hands of its advocates. In par tic u lar, he grew frustrated at a tendency among his more reactionary readers to disregard all his caveats and qualifi cations in order to represent the text as a call for a return to laissezfaire. It is not diffi cult to understand the source of this interpretation: much of The Road to Serfdom’s rhetorical force derived from its critique of central planning, and at various points Hayek did appear to advocate for the radical attenuation of the state. … Drawing on his background as an Austrian émigré, he argued that fascism was a “necessary outcome” of socialist trends that were now emerging in even the liberal bastions of the Anglo- American world, and he depicted any social philosophy that disrupted “freedom in economic affairs” as a step toward the arrival of a totalitarian state. Further, he appeared to reject the possibi lity of a middle way, arguing that both “competition and central direction become poor and ineffi cient tools if they are incomplete.” Such absolutist language led a substantial subset of his readers to derive the message that the government should abstain from intervention altogether.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 223