Source: Law & Liberty
by James R Rogers
“University of California-Berkeley economic historian J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Toward Utopia tells the story of the breathtaking economic growth the world experienced between 1870 and 2010. While he sets his ‘grand narrative’ against the twentieth century’s not-so-brilliant political (and military) history, it is the ‘forced marriage’ of Friedrich Hayek’s free markets and Karl Polanyi’s social democracy that, for Delong, accounted for the progress of this century. Yet for Delong there’s a Hayekian serpent lurking in the Edenic garden: The neo-liberal turn in the 1980s and 1990s unhitched the ruthless logic of the market system from its social democratic buffers. This, in turn, reestablished parallel conditions for a repeat of the nationalist (and fascist) ‘countermovement’ Polanyi identified as the populist reaction to the anti-human logic of the nineteenth century’s ‘autonomous’ market system. Paradise lost. Again.” (03/26/25)
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/hayek-polanyi-and-the-liberal-consensus/