Lippmann railed against “Adam Smith fundamentalism,” which he identifi ed as a product of the distortionary excesses of the fi rst half of the nineteenth century and “a philosophy of neglect and refusal to proceed with social adaptation.” As Henry Steele Commager observed a de cade later, the book elaborates a perspective that is “closer to Huxley than to Spencer, to Ward than to Sumner,” and “its most deadly attack was leveled not against government but against that perversion of classical economics which masqueraded as liberalism.”

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 158