In a foreword to the 1956 American edition of The Road to Serfdom the Austrian economist explained that the book aimed to show that state economic controls and public monopolies could destroy the market economy and 'gradually smother the creative powers of a free civilization'. This threat, Hayek believed, long preceded the outbreak of World War II; everywhere, liberal ideals and free markets were threatened by the rise of collectivist mass politics, and only those who could remember the period before World War I knew what a liberal world was like.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 69