In the de cades that followed, Hayek expressed dismay at the prevalence of this interpretation. He repudiated it in his book Law, Legislation and Liberty, inveighed against it in his introduction to the 1976 edition of The Road to Serfdom, and privately wrote Paul Samuelson in 1980 to excoriate him for propounding it in his widely read textbook Foundations of Economic Analysis. This “myth,” he told Samuelson, had “prevented people from taking my argument seriously.” As Hayek repeatedly reminded his interpreters, his book both renounced any claims to inevitability and assailed the “wooden insistence” with which previous generations of liberals had clung to laissezfaire. Like Walter Lippmann’s Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society before the war, The Road to Serfdom was premised on a belief that one could engage in a vigorous critique of planning without rejecting government intervention altogether.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 229