He was also a bit of an historian. Every time some Leftie argues that the Nazis were "right wing", I throw his passage on Nazis, Communists, and Socialists, left-wing all, at them. After all, he was there, watching it all from Europe, at the time.
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
His "liberal of the old type" is of course what we would call a classical liberal, not a modern "liberal", who is a socialist who has Orwellianly appropriated the word "liberal".
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.Here Hayek nails the "Orwellian" (Hayek's notes have Orwell reviewing Serfdom, in late '44, and Orwell chose the date 1984 by inverting the last two digits of the year of publication - 1948. So Orwell cannot be said to have invented the concept of word-meaning inversion - or at least not as late as the publication date of 1984) "Newspeak."The worst sufferer in this respect is the word ‘liberty’. It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a ‘collective freedom’, which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. ‘Collective freedom’ is not the freedom of the members of society, but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme.
It is however ironic that Hayek, in a preface to a later edition of the full Serfdom text, discusses the American inversion of the word "liberalism" defensively. He mentions there his 'regret' at using so liberally a word which was perfectly understood in Britain at that time but which in America at that same time meant "very nearly its opposite" of the old British meaning.
It will take you a long way in translating leftist Newspeak if, whenever you hear the word "social" as a word or the root of a word, or you hear the word "public," you mentally pencil in the word "government" as a possible replacement. Thus "socialism" is accurately translated into "governmentism" - which is, aptly a synonym for "tyranny." And thus when the leftist says, "society should feed its children" no one can seriously question that someone in society should and must - but the leftist actually means nothing other than that the government should do it. "The public sector" is a circumlocution for "the government," too - and (as Milton Friedman vigorously asserts) a "public school" is a government school.