F.A. Hayek, Socialism into Fascism

 

This above is the cover of a book I’ve had for years by this acclaimed Austrian economist, though I’ve only just now started to read it. This all very much syncs with a couple of pieces I’ve written on this, the summary piece here on how socialist fantasy meets reality, and then unites with existent power structures like big business and the state, and thus morphs into fascism: https://wwwinabstentia-andrewk.blogspot.com/2023/09/socialist-fantasy-meets-reality_27.html .

I probably bought it largely cos of the unusual choice of its striking cover, from Hieronymus Bosch’s great painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Hayek received a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, but this more political book, written in England, between 1940 and 1943, struck out beyond his more usual confines. He wrote it, he says in the 1970s foreword, because of:

“my annoyance with the complete misinterpretation of the character of the Nazi movement in English “progressive” circles. . . . Few are ready to recognise that the rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.. . . Many who think  themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realisation would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.

The conflict in existence between the National-Socialist “Right” and the “Left” in Germany is always the kind of conflict that will arise between rival socialist factions.

Liberalism in the old sense had been driven out of Germany by socialism” [prior to and paving the way for the Nazis].