A great deal of the rhetorical force of Hayek’s book in the English-speaking world derives from this ostensibly “European” cast. Hayek in Road to Serfdom appears to defend an essentially English model of classical liberalism against the corrosive influence of “German ideas.” The road to serfdom, Hayek argues, is a German road, an idea simple to grasp during the early 1940s in more ways than one. Read from a German interwar perspective, however, the rhetorical force of this line of argument collapses. The general principles advanced by Hayek clearly derive from a body of continental interwar literature concerning parliamentary democracy and the state in the first German republic. When placed in this context, the arguments advanced in Road to Serfdom no longer seem so compelling or cogent.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 383