I have interviewed several students and teachers who were at LSE during the 1930s and 1940s, and none of them volunteered comments attesting to Hayek’s impact in lecture room or seminar. Nor when directly asked did their remarks suggest that Hayek was a prominent person in the school. The dominating figures were Lionel Robbins and the (subsequently more obscure) Arnold Plant. This is also plain from the correspondence of representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, whose financial support was so important to the school. Given Hayek’s later eminence, his admirers have assumed that he must have been “always already famous” and their recollections adjusted themselves to suit this assumption.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 455