ABSTRACT
By the period of the so called ‘post-war consensus’, Hayek (1967g, p. 220) reflected that the threat of ‘hot socialism’ had receded, writing in 1956 that ‘future historians will probably regard the period from the revolution of 1848 to about 1948 as the century of European socialism.’ 1 Yet the drive for socialism had been replaced with something equally as pernicious to his mind, the pursuit of ‘social justice’. For Hayek (Hayek, 1978b), the concept was nothing more than a ‘mirage’, ‘social’ was a ‘weasel word’ that could be used by those who wanted to enforce a particular pattern of distribution that conformed to their own moral vision, with market freedom as the first casualty. Yet not only did social justice legitimise redistribution, it also, he argued, engendered a new morality, inculcating dependence on the state. Furthermore, growing expectations of the state inevitably led to the proliferation of government agencies and thus expanded the potential for the exercise of arbitrary power by the new bureaucrats who staffed them.
