The novelty of Friedrich Hayek's critique of modernity, The Road to Serfdom, lay in his argument that the demise of the liberal tradition was due to "foreign ideas"—extending and generalizing positions he had already advanced in the mid-1930s concerning the impact of centralized planning on economic life. There he had argued against the view, associated with the writings of Otto Neurath, Emil Lederer, and Walter Rathenau, that "deliberate regulation of all social affairs" was either practicable or efficient, echoing points made by von Mises in the 1920s. The Road to Serfdom was a political tract for the times, not a work of economic analysis; but as a political tract it was strangely silent on the contribution of democratic institutional developments to the demise of classical liberalism.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 381