Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 105 of the original 1951 University of Chicago Press edition of Michael Polanyi’s The Logic of Liberty:

Marxism offered them also a future, bearing unbounded promise to humanity. It predicted that historic necessity would destroy an antiquated form of society and replace it by a new one, in which the existing miseries and injustices would be eliminated. Though this prospect was put forward as a purely scientific observation, it endowed those who accepted it with a feeling of overwhelming moral superiority. They acquired a sense of righteousness, which in a paradoxical manner was fiercely intensified by the mechanical framework in which it was set.