SOURCE: “The Road Not Taken: Hayek's Slippery Slope to Serfdom,” in The National Interest, No. 51, Spring, 1998, pp. 56-66.

In the following essay, McInnes argues that Hayek's Road to Serfdom had less impact on political thought and practice than his supporters have claimed.

This is another story about a book, a curious book that went from bestseller to oblivion and back several times over. The millions of copies it sold in a score of languages “completely discredited” its author, exactly as he foresaw it would. Although he was regarded as one of the leading theoretical economists of the century, the economists of the University of Chicago (whose university press had published the offending book) refused to have him on their faculty. No matter, by living to be over ninety he buried not only them but also the very notion of a planned economy, which had been the target of...