Hayek was decidedly not making the historical claim that, no matter what future moves were made in Britain and America, there was no turning back, that a socialist future that would end in totalitarianism was inevitably coming. This kind of inevitability thesis was, after all, exactly what Hayek was criticizing in his essay “Scientism and the Study of Society,” when he attacked historicism, the belief that there were historical laws knowledge of which allowed one to predict a necessary future. A more plausible way to read Hayek’s words is to see him as warning that, unless we change our ways,
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