Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is often read as a policy book and a political tract for its time. It is also often read as little more than a “slippery slope” argument, leading inevitably down a road from a free society to the gulag. In this paper, we counter the claim that The Road to Serfdom...

What explains the simultaneous critiques of economic theory and liberalism during the 1930s? Early neoclassical economists had a common understanding of the proper institutional context under-girding a liberal market order. From the marginal revolution emerged a growing emphasis on analyzing...