In The Road to Serfdom Hayek’s vigorous condemnations of laissezfaire had served to remind his readers that his argument was not a simple restatement of ideas that had long been out of fashion. He now wanted to move toward a more specifi c, visionary repre sen ta tion of his worldview. “What we lack is a liberal Utopia,” he wrote in the late 1940s, “a program which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism.”

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 275