Introduction

Any book about freedom should also be one about power. Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) was the 20th century’s most significant free market theorist and over the course of his long career he developed an analysis of the danger that state power can pose to individual liberty. ¹ In rejecting much of the liberal tradition’s concern for social justice and democratic participation, Hayek would help clear away many of the intellectual obstacles to the emergence of neoliberalism in the last quarter of the 20th century. Before him, the political was accorded primacy over the economic. After him, the logic of the market came to permeate all aspects of social life, very frequently under the banner of promoting greater personal freedom. Power, however, cannot be abolished. At best, it can be countered, and it can be made accountable. In this book I hope to show how Hayek’s focus on the hazards of state power led him to neglect the danger that private power also poses to freedom. In this way, I will illustrate the limits of his conception of liberty. Determining those limits does not, however, mean that what lies within them lacks value.