Even though I majored in Economics in college I was never exposed to Hayek (or Von Mises or any of the other Austrian School), until after I graduated. This was no doubt due to the fact that I went to "Buckethead State University" which was dominated by liberals (the Econ chair had been on Pres. Carter's Counsel of Wage and Price Stability). I discovered Hayek after college and have read (and reread) his works ever since.
I have the bad habit of underlining and/or marketing up many of the books I read to more easily find passages of particular significance and insight. Unforetunately, with my copy of "The Road to Serfdom" most of the entire book is underlined and highlighted because Hayek had so many profoundly important (and in many ways prophetic), things to say about where socialism would lead us.
If you have a F A Hayek ping list please add me to it!
Prophetic is right.
BTTT
Well, I didn't have one . . . but having googled FR to make sure this wasn't already posted, I had a ready source for one!
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".