"[N]o man or group of men possesses the capacity to determine conclusively the potentialities of other human beings and...we should certainly never trust anyone invariably to exercise such a capacity," Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1960's Constitution of Liberty. This skepticism of man's ability to order the affairs of other men would be later echoed in Hayek's last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, which is the subject of the first FlynnFiles book discussion, to begin tomorrow and end Friday.

Influenced by such towering thinkers as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and David Hume, and contemporaries Ludwig Mises and Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek projected his influence on conservatives the globe over. Along with Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind and Whittaker Chambers' Witness, Hayek's 1944 title, The Road To Serfdom, would become one of the seminal texts of the postwar conservative intellectual movement, but not before getting rejected by three publishing houses in America and receiving a paltry initial press run of 2,000 by the University of Chicago. To the rescue came some key positive reviews, and a condensed version published in Reader's Digest, both of which propelled the book to sell more than 250,000 copies and earn translation in nearly two dozen languages. As events discredited the overtly brutal socialisms of Germany and Russia, the Austrian emigre Hayek discredited the seemingly benign socialisms of the "civilized" West. His message was as clear as it was controversial: "democratic" socialism is an oxymoron that erodes freedom. The book's readers included a young Margaret Thatcher and a politician from Arizona named Barry Goldwater. Its popularity stemmed from simplifying concepts often made complicated: "[I]n the world as it is men are, in fact, not likely to give their best for long periods unless their own interests are directly involved."

Ironically, the man who penned one of the most important books of the postwar conservative intellectual movement ran from the "conservative" label. Liberals ran from him. In 1974, Hayek shared the Nobel Prize for economics with socialist Gunnar Myrdal, who allegedly gave Hayek the silent treatment at the award ceremony and later cracked that he would never have accepted had he known with whom he would be sharing the prize. But Hayek got the last laugh. Departing this world in 1992, he not only lived long enough to outlast the twin evils of our age, Soviet and National Socialism, but to see his ideas in ascendance too.