If One Cannot Fight the Nazis One Ought at Least Fight the Ideas Which Produce Nazism

The expanded scope and the inherent difficulties of the material covered in the “Scientism” essay were partly responsible for the slowdown, but it was also due to Hayek’s decision to begin focusing on another project. He announced this in his holiday letter to Machlup, begun in December 1940 in Cambridge (where by this time Hayek had, with the assistance of John Maynard Keynes, secured rooms at King’s College) and finished on New Year’s Day 1941 in Tintagel on the Cornish coast: “at the moment I am mainly concerned with an enlarged and somewhat more popular exposition of the theme of my Freedom and the Economic System which, if I finish it, may come out as a sixpence Penguin volume.” By the summer Hayek would report that a “much enlarged” version of the pamphlet was “unfortunately growing into a full fledged book.” Finally, by October 1941 Hayek told Machlup that he had decided to devote nearly all of his time to what would become The Road to Serfdom:

It [the “Scientism” essay] is far advanced, but at the moment I am not even getting on with that because I have decided that the applications of it all to our own time, which should some day form volume II of The Abuse and Decline of Reason, are more important. . . . If one cannot fight the Nazis one ought at least fight the ideas which produce Nazism; and although the well-meaning people who are so dangerous have of course no idea of it, the danger which comes from them is none the less serious. The most dangerous people here are a group of socialist scientists and I am just publishing a special attack on them in Nature—the famous scientific weekly which in recent years has been one of the main advocates of “planning.”

Hayek’s change in course is understandable. He had begun his great book just as Europe was going to war. Western civilisation itself was at stake, and given that the British government would not allow him to participate directly, writing a treatise on how the world had come to such an awful state was to be Hayek’s war effort, the best he could do “for the future of mankind.” Two years later the prospects for the allies seemed brighter, but a new danger was looming. Hayek increasingly feared that the popular enthusiasm for planning, one that had only increased during the war, would affect postwar policy in England. The Road to Serfdom was intended as a counterweight to these trends. Working on it became his first priority, even if it meant delaying his more scholarly treatment of the historical origins and eventual spread of the doctrines that had in his estimation led to the abuse and decline of reason.

—Bruce Caldwell, ed., editor’s introduction to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 13, Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason: Text and Documents, by F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 6-8.