The Intellectuals and Socialism By F.A. Hayek
[Reprinted from The University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949), pp. 417-420, 421-423, 425-433, by permission of the author and the publisher, The University of Chicago Press; George B. de Huszar ed., The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait (Glencoe, Illinois: the Free Press, 1960) pp. 371-84. The pagination of this edition corresponds to the Huszar edited volume.]
In all democratic countries, in the United States even more than elsewhere, a strong belief prevails that the influence of the intellectuals on politics is negligible. This is no doubt true of the power of intellectuals to make their peculiar opinions of the moment influence decisions, of the extent to which they can sway the popular vote on questions on which they differ from the current views of the masses. Yet over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today in those countries. This power they wield by shaping public opinion.
In the light of recent history it is somewhat curious that this decisive power of the professional secondhand dealers in ideas should not yet be more generally recognized. The political development of the Western World during the last hundred years furnishes the clearest demonstration. Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program.
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