I first picked up F. A. Hayek sometime around 2010. Everyone was doing it; it was the right's Hayekian moment. I had not had occasion to read Hayek, having written my dissertation on Scholasticism. I was unable to find a Latin translation of The Road to Serfdom, so I had to settle for reading it in my native language, but I still managed to capture a bit of the heady sensation of stepping into a different world. Hayek introduced me to the logic of limited government. I still think he is as good an introduction as one can find, at least for readers too mature to be delighted by John Galt.

We are now living through a profoundly un-Hayekian moment on the right. The battle between liberals and post-liberals rages on with no real sign of abating. The Road to Serfdom turned 80 this year, and Hayek's fans noted the occasion, but much of the right today has become accustomed to talking as though Hayek, and classical liberalism generally, is archaic or discredited. The Hayekian moment feels like ancient history.

It's not, though. Hayek used to be cool. Today my enduring fondness for him marks me clearly as a rotting-flesh Reaganite, but in fact, I originally cracked the cover only to please my populist interlocutors, years after Reagan was cold in his grave. It really makes one think about the dizzying progression of fads American conservatism has been through in the twenty-first century. The volatility is depressing, and yet there is an interesting sense in which conservatism has been mapping the road to serfdom, exploring its highways and byways by aggressively testing the limits of Hayekian reasoning. I'm not sure we've found them yet, but we may have learned some things along the way.

Discrepancies in Diagnosis

Hayek was an incisive thinker, who understood that state programs could do tremendous harm to civil society by undermining more organic patterns of social order. His explanation of the knowledge problem is one of the best and most influential essays ever written in economics, while Road to Serfdom is an elegant work showing how the costs of state interference go far beyond the economic realm. The political, moral, and even spiritual state of a society is fundamentally changed when government assumes core social functions. People are fundamentally changed, because they learn to reorient their prudential reasoning around the tortuous and highly artificial logic of the ever-expanding state. Instead of building, exploring, and aspiring to excellence, they learn how to flatter bureaucrats and write grant applications. They are habituated in dishonesty, mediocrity, and a tortuous patronage system that inevitably favors the corrupt.

It's a devastatingly plausible diagnosis of modern societies. Hayek has the soul of a humanist, and a deep appreciation of the link between human dignity and human freedom. Aristotelians like me, who are largely repulsed by Ayn Rand, can still be profoundly moved by Hayek.