Another random thought about this - when people read the Road to Serfdom or rather interpretations of the book by morons like Beck, they are not reading it within it’s historical context. Much like Karl Polyani was in his book the Great Transformation (which if you listen to Pope Francis sounds familiar), I think Hayek was addressing a particular point in time and that was his historical moment - 1944, Europe. There is a reason that Timothy Snyder called central Europe in the late interwar period the bloodlands in his book - Ta-Nehisi Coates did a great meditation on the book recently.
You can imagine what Hayek (or Polyani) was thinking about as he wrote that book. With the rise of fascism in the interwar period and with Stalin on the scene, there was much handwringing and debating about the real or perceived (depending on where you stood) merits or evils of classical liberalism and enlightenment thought - this is still an undercurrent in holocaust studies, whether modernity leads to mass murder or if it leads to less violence. We know where Stephen Pinker stands on that but Hannah Arendt was less sure (as she famously called Eichmann a mid-level bureaucrat, in her “banality of evil” articles).
Much of the French Left, especially after Khrushchev’s secret speech in the mid 50s, came to be deeply disillusioned with the enlightenment. that’s when you get the post-modern turn in the humanities, with philosophers like Foucault who seem to have nothing but contempt for modernity and its consequences. I think maybe in some way, Hayek and Polyani are part of that conversation, as was Hannah Arendt, Foucault, etc. This carried over into the Cold War, though there was much less debate on these points in the US, in part because we benefited much more from the war than Europe did, as Europe, especially central Europe was ripped apart. We just didn’t have that debate in the same way here. We were focused on our internal issues and on the evils of communism. We essentially had a liberal consensus happening, and few disagreed on this being the obvious correct answer. Even the civil rights movement purged itself of the left for the most part.
I think people forget that even when economists are looking at the long view, and applying it historically, that doesn’t mean it can or should apply later on down the line. You get the same problem with Marxist, I think. Marx was writing in the 19th century, and though he is often writing history, he was doing it from his vantage point in time, late 19th century Europe that was deeply tumultuous. What he’d say today with the direction of the economy, we can really only speculate. I guess Howard Zinn did, but that’s Howard Zinn. He’s dead too. This is not to say that older writers can’t be useful, just that you need to understand why they were saying what they said and apply carefully.
I do find the debate about the enlightenment and modernity important. There is a strong case to be made the the proliferation of European countries as colonial powers has been historically deeply destructive. But even Zizek agrees that many of us have a much higher standard of living than our ancestors. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is the debate that the movement conservatives are trying to have.
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