Tracing the “true liberalism”: F. A. Hayek as a reader of Tocqueville

Abstract In reaction to diagnoses of a “crisis of liberalism,” scholars are actively engaged in revising our understanding of the tradition's history. This article explores an alternative account of the liberal past that appeared at a parallel moment of “crisis”: the Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek's interwar typology of two liberalisms, true and false. It argues that Hayek mobilized Alexis de Tocqueville as one representative of the “true liberal tradition,” revived to challenge varieties of collectivism and illiberalism in the twentieth century. Hayek's Tocqueville was an evolving exemplar of that true liberalism in reaction to its opponents, left and right, assuming distinct roles for Hayek as he tried to foreclose the road to serfdom. Hayek's idiosyncratic renderings of Tocqueville, this article maintains, offer both normative and methodological lessons for us today about defining the liberal tradition and identifying the sources of its decline.