Hayek's Road to Serfdom (1944) is a work that has assumed a central intellectual and symbolic importance for British neoliberalism. It was written in Britain during the early 1940s while Hayek, then professor of economics at the London School of Economics, was teaching in the school's wartime home—Cambridge. All of these factors are of importance, positively or negatively; but most readers of the book have misread these polarities. Hayek's chief line of argument is that the classical liberalism on which the liberty and prosperity of nineteenth-century Britain was built was threatened by statist, German ideas that furthered increasingly deliberate regulation of all social life. But while invoking classical liberalism, Hayek signally failed to consider why, by the later nineteenth century, it had already been displaced in Britain by "new liberalism." By midcentury this was also a spent force, because the political forces that had converted "classical" into "new" liberalism—the extension of the franchise, the emergence of the Labour Party, and the political consequences of World War I—had in turn fatally undermined new liberalism by the later 1920s.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 375