SOURCE: “A Road to Hell Paved With Good Intentions,” in Forbes, Vol. 153, No. 2, January 17, 1994, pp. 60-4.

In the following essay, Sowell discusses the role played by Hayek and his Road to Serfdom in gaining support for free markets in the aftermath of World War II and the ensuing Cold War.

The 20th century looked for many decades as if it were going to be the century of collectivism, and for a while totalitarianism seemed like “the wave of the future,” as it was called back in the 1930s. Fascism in Italy, communism in the Soviet Union, and Nazism in Germany looked like only the beginning, momentous as those beginnings were. Fascist and semi-fascist regimes sprang up from Spain to Eastern Europe, even before World War II began, and Japan's evolution in Asia carried the same hallmarks of fanatically nationalistic despotism, tinged with racism.

Even the military defeat of...