Never underestimate influence of intellectuals, because theories they promote today are the basis of tomorrow’s political programs. This was the warning Friedrich Hayek, great architect of twentieth-century revival of classical liberal ideas, issued in 1949 with this essay. Hayek describes intellectuals as ‘professional second-hand dealers in ideas,’ people in position to become familiar with new ideas and promote them through writings and speeches. He believed the importance of this class had been ignored by supporters of the free market, with serious consequences. For example, socialism had never, and nowhere, been at first a working-class movement. Its adoption by policy makers had been preceded by a long period in which it was of interest only to intellectuals who promoted it relentlessly.

This is a reprint of an 1949 essay of Hayek wherein he pursued the dictum of Keynes’ contained with the ‘General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’ about the influence of ideas.

In the essay Hayek questions the view that intellectuals are original thinkers. For him, original thinkers are few and far between but their ideas and views are percolated through society by the intellectuals. Those ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’ as Hayek referred to them are not necessarily the greatest scholars or the most brilliant minds but are adept at taking ideas and regurgitating them as teachers or journalists or through some other profession such that they pass through to the general public. Hayek contends that intelligent people consider intelligence to be more important than it is and in the world of men and thus tends to be more socialist orientated as those people view the market with disdain. He recognises that the market is a fundamental part of establishing value through individuals participating in a trial and error system of exchange which the intelligensia overlook but which directly affects them anyway. For Hayek, the battle of ideas was to be won, not by the original thinkers, but by the spread of classical liberal ideas by the class of intellectuals who could be convinced of the power of new, or perhaps not so new, ideas.

As Edwin Feulner, one of the editors, remarks, this article was a clarion call to those who espoused a classical liberal standpoint. Following on from this was the establishment of the free market think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs and other such institutions around the world. The story goes on to celebrate to some degree at least the success in bringing classical liberal ideas to the fore in many countries around the world and the success of some of those ideas.