What caused the sudden rise of totalitarian regimes—Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia—during the early twentieth century? Hayek suggests that citizens of Western liberal democracies, stunned by these sudden upwellings in the midst of their progressive world, and galvanized into battle against the threat during World War II, were blind to the possibility that they may have contributed unwittingly to the buildup of those very dictatorships.

Instead, people in England, the United States, and other democratic countries simply assumed that the authoritarian world was disconnected from the liberal one. It was “easier and more comforting to think that they are entirely different from us and that what happened there cannot happen here” (66).

Yet the ideals of liberalism—personal autonomy, freedom from oppression, freedom of expression—had suffered steady erosion during the decades leading up to World War II. The growth of commerce and science had liberated people from “a rigidly organized hierarchic system” (69) to pursue prosperity under the new banner of personal liberty. This approach was so successful that citizens began to take their newfound wellbeing for granted, and progress began to seem too slow. The old ideal of freedom was challenged by a new concept,

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