Last year I read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation back to back. Both published in 1944, these great works of political economics were attempts by their authors to grapple with the collapse of western civilization into the fascist totalitarianism of the Second World War. For Hayek, a classical liberal, totalitarian tragedy follows inevitably from the authoritarianism of State Socialism. For Polanyi, who was more of an economic sociologist, the fa...
