Affluent society

Following World War II in the United States, there was something that could be called the free enterprise or market revival. It deeply engaged the conservative mind. Our con servatism is normally thought to depend on self-interest, moral indignation, vehement expression and something approximat ing religious revelation. This is unjust. The influence of ideas is ubiquitous and cannot be excluded anywhere.

The source of the ideas was a rediscovery of the Benthamite world of the nineteenth century as it was applied to economic policy by the classical economists and to sociology and politics by Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. In 1944, it derived a new scholarly sanction from F. A. von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, an alarming tract against socialism and the state which, as the name implies, it identified extensively with servitude. And, in the years following, it achieved consider ably more academic reputability from an energetic group of evangelists and scholars who gathered, along with von Hayek, at the University of Chicago with intellectual outriders in other academic centers.