The Road to Serfdom was, as noted earlier, a political, not an economic, tract. Hayek was a professor of economics, but in constructing his argument he made no use of economic reasoning even in its broadest sense. The classical liberalism that the book invoked promoted above all a conception of political freedom, underpinned by a parallel, but weaker, conception of economic liberty. Free markets, in this classical view, were a corollary of political liberty, and not the other way around.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 391