The essays assembled in this volume were written as part of a greater work that, if it ever should be finished, pursues the history of the abuse and decline of reason in modern times. I wrote the first two essays in London in relative leisure, which the early years of the last war afforded me. I wrote them on a remote subject matter in a state of intensive concentration with which I reacted to my impotence against the continuous disruptions of falling bombs. The first two appeared in the journal Economica in 1941 to 1944. The third was written later from notes on a lecture given at the same time and was published in Measure in June 1951. I am indebted to the publishers of these journals as well as to the London School of Economics and the Henry Regnery Company in Chicago for their permission to reproduce these works in essentially unaltered form.
Other investigations that do not follow directly, but belong to the same area of interest, disrupted my labors on the original plan. A sense of urgency then led me to prepare a summary of my analyses that were to constitute the main argument of the second part of that greater work on the decline of reason. But I became more and more aware that a satisfactory execution of the original plan presupposes extensive philosophical studies, which occupied me during the greater part of the intervening years. I readily accepted the friendly offer of the American publisher to reprint the essays because of the public interest they generated and because the time I had hoped to publish the complete work has not drawn any closer.
The train of thought of such a fragmentary discourse is determined, of course, by the wider setting in which it belongs. Therefore, the reader may welcome a brief explanation of the objectives of. the greater task. The essays were to be preceded by a study on the individualistic theories of the eighteenth century. Some preliminary results of this undertaking were published in the meantime in the first chapter of my book Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). The first part of the present volume pursues the intellectual sources of the hostility against this individualism. The historical development of these views, that to me seem to reflect an abuse of reason, was to follow in four more sections. The second part of the present volume dealing with the earlier French phase of this development would have been the first of these sections. And the third part was to be the beginning of the second section, which deals with the German continuation of this movement that originated in France. There was to follow a similar section of the retreat of liberalism that took place in England toward the end of the nineteenth century, due primarily to intellectual influences that came from France and Germany. And finally there was to be a section on a similar development in the United States.
This overview of the progressive abuse of reason, or socialism, was to be followed by a discussion of the decay of reason under totalitarianism, be it fascism or communism. The basic thought of this second major part was initially presented in popular form in my book The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).
Perhaps I should not have retained the original order in this reprint of an excerpt. A detailed theoretical introduction into ``Scientism and the Study of Society'' probably presents a better systematic analysis than this small volume, in which it may create an unnecessary obstacle to the easier terrain that follows. The reader who has little taste for abstract discussion, therefore, would do well to read first the second part on ``The Counter- Revolution of Science.'' He will find it easier then to perceive the significance of the abstract discussion of the same problems in the first part.
I should like to add that the work of which this is a part will not be continued in the form originally conceived. I now hope to present the body of thought in another volume that is less historical but more systematic.