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"An unbeholden case for Friedrich Hayek, twenty-first-century political influencer. The publication of The Road to Serfdom in 1944 was both an intellectual watershed and, forever after, a source of blistering political division. The book's championing of individualism and classical liberalism-and its derision of government interference in the free-market economy-made it, and its author Friedrich Hayek, lightning rods for evergreen political feuds around the nature of capitalism and the role of the welfare state. Lost in the ongoing bluster-readings of The Road to Serfdom was Hayek's political message: liberalism is a thing to be protected, and its alternatives are perilous. In Liberalism's Last Man, political scientist Vikash Yadav exhumes the political core of Hayek's most famous work to map today's core political anxiety: the tenuous state of liberal-capitalist societies-the United States and other Western powers-in the face of planned political-capitalist powers like China. As free-market capitalist powers struggle to match the economic productivity of planned economies, the promises of meritocracy in countries like the US continue to fade; Yadav channels Hayek to articulate how the moral backbone of liberalism is its greatest defense against insurgent, and repressive, social structures. Erudite and deeply critical, Liberalism's Last Man subverts traditional political partisanship, embodying the principles of liberalism while defending it. Its clear-eyed mining of one of our most brilliant political philosophers is not to be missed"--
About the author
Vikash Yadav is associate professor of international relations and Asian studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
