transition from the overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 to the overwhelming victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980 – two men with essentially the same programme and the same message.

The robber baron was a very honored and honorable person, but he was certainly not an honest person in the ordinary sense. The whole traditional concept of aristocracy, of which I have a certain conception – I have moved, to some extent, in aristocratic circles, and I like their style of life. But I know that in the strict commercial sense, they are not necessarily honest. They, like the officers, will make debts they know they cannot pay.²

you yourself have a preference for a certain kind of a society, which has a maximum amount of freedom in it. And I suppose you wouldn’t call that a socially just society, but what general term would you use to describe it?

There is still the strong innate need to know that one serves common, concrete purposes with one’s fellows. Now, this clearly is the thing which in a really Great Society is unachievable. You cannot really know. Whether people can learn this is still part of the emancipation from the feelings of the small face-to-face group, which we have not yet achieved. But we must achieve this if we are to maintain a large, Great Society of Free Men. It may be that our first attempt will break down.⁶

You see, I believe [Joseph] Schumpeter is right in the sense that while socialism can never satisfy what people expect, our present political structure inevitably drives us into socialism, even if people do not want it in the majority. That can only be prevented by altering the structure of our so-called democratic system. But that’s necessarily a very slow process, and I don’t think that an effort toward reform will come in time. So I rather fear that we shall have a return to some sort of dictatorial democracy, I would say, where democracy merely serves to authorize the actions of a dictator. And if the system is going to break down, it will be a very long period before real democracy can reemerge.⁷

My present aim is really to prevent the recognition of this turning into a complete disgust with democracy in any form, which is a great danger, in my opinion. I want to make clear to the people that it’s what I call unlimited democracy which is the danger, where coercion is not limited to the application of uniform rules, but you can take any specific coercive measure if it seems to serve a good purpose. And anything or anybody which will help the politician be elected is by definition a good purpose. I think people can be made to recognize this and to restore general limitations on the governmental powers; but that will be a very slow process, and I rather fear that before we can achieve something like this, we will get something like what [J. L.] Talmon [1960] has called ‘totalitarian democracy’ – an elective dictatorship with practically unlimited powers. Then it will depend, from country to country, whether they are lucky or unlucky in the kind of person who gets in power. After all, there have been good dictators in the past; it’s very unlikely that it will ever arise. But there may be one or two experiments where a dictator restores freedom, individual freedom.

Middle class liberalism had little appeal to a mass-electorate; and it fell to pieces in Germany as in every other country within a generation of the establishment of universal suffrage. (Taylor 1955, 150)

it is only natural that the development of the art of living and of the non-materialistic values should have profited most from the activities of those who had no material worries. [emphasis added] (von Hayek 2011 [1960], 190–193)

we owe our freedom to certain restraints on freedom. The belief that you can make yourself your own boss – and that’s what it comes to – is probably destroying some of the foundations of a free society, because a free society rests on people voluntarily accepting certain restraints¹⁰ ... After all, our whole moral world consists of restraints of this sort, and [Freud], in that way, represents what I like to call the scientific destruction of values, which are indispensable for civilization but the function of which we do not understand. We have observed them merely because they were tradition. And that creates a new task, which should be unnecessary, to explain why these values are good. [emphasis added] (von Hayek 1978)¹¹