Friedrich August von Hayek, Socialism, Liberalism and the Young (1985)

Hayek’s foreword to a collection arranged by Arthur Seldon presents a generational turn toward classical liberalism as grounds for renewed political hope. Its scope is introductory and personal: it welcomes essays by young economists, political scientists, and philosophers, situating their intellectual development within Hayek’s recollection of changing attitudes toward socialism. The argument proceeds from decades of youthful confidence in state action, through the apparent isolation of liberal ideas, to an international revival of interest in markets. Its central claim is that young people’s disillusionment with socialism creates an opportunity to recover and apply classical liberal principles.

In my lifetime I have witnessed a remarkable reverse in the attitude of young people to the conflicting appeals of socialism and liberalism.

This opening makes intellectual change, rather than a systematic exposition of economic doctrine, the foreword’s subject. Hayek traces the attraction of the political Left from the 1920s through admiration for Soviet communism, the wartime state economy, post-war economic optimism, and Keynesian full employment. In his account, these experiences encouraged the young to look to government while neglecting the market. He places his own books within that history: The Road to Serfdom encountered older critics without winning much youthful agreement, and The Constitution of Liberty did little to alter the trend. His recollection that liberalism seemed scarcely heard in the early 1970s heightens the significance of the subsequent reversal, which he identifies across several countries rather than as a narrowly British development.

Now young people are anxious to learn the forgotten truths of the classical economists. They are increasingly studying liberalism in the universities. And they want to hear how the classical principles can be applied to the contemporary anxieties of their day.

The movement described here combines recovery with application. Hayek treats classical economics as a neglected intellectual resource, but the young seek answers to present concerns, not simply historical instruction. Seldon’s collection becomes evidence of this renewed inquiry. Hayek welcomes its contributors’ movement away from the Left as a loss of faith in the state, and connects their experience to his own early attraction to socialism. That autobiographical identification gives his endorsement a particular force: conversion to liberalism appears as a recognisable process of intellectual reassessment.

The concluding section shifts from recollection to polemic. Hayek invokes the impossibility of economic calculation under collectivism, rejects claims for markets under socialism, and asserts the incompatibility of liberty with state direction of the economy. These are stated as established defeats for socialism rather than demonstrated within the foreword. His optimism therefore remains qualified by the persistence of socialist allegiance and resistance to liberal arguments.

The argument is being won by the new liberals of the late 20th century. But many people still do not understand it. And most on the Left continue to resist it.

The final appeal makes education politically consequential. Hayek mentions his work on The Fatal Conceit and contrasts the critics’ label “the New Right” with the collection’s The New Enlightenment. This naming presents the revival as clarification rather than reaction. The foreword’s relevance lies in its compact statement of how Hayek connects intellectual renewal among the young with the future of liberty: hope depends on exposing socialism’s pretensions and making liberal ideas understood, while political action remains capable of frustrating that possibility.