On Tuesday last week, customers at Deb’s Books in Cullman, Ala. started coming in and calling with an odd request: They wanted copies of “The Road to Serfdom,” a book economist Friedrich Hayek wrote over 65 years ago.

Customers at Schuler Books and Music, in Grand Rapids, Mich. were also looking Hayek’s book. Same with the Book Shop in Green Valley, Ariz. On Amazon, it shot to number one where it remained for a week. The reason: Fox News television host Glenn Beck, whose recommendations have lately had an Oprah Winfrey-like effect on book sales, had just devoted a section of his show to the Road to Serfdom.

But Mr. Hayek’s book is no beach read. Rather, it’s dense polemic against socialism that argues that centralized planning by the government will inevitably lead to an oppressive state. Mr. Hayek wrote it while living in England in the early 1940s out of concern that a shift toward collectivism there would give rise to something akin to Nazism.

Even before Mr. Beck’s show, there was a surge in interest in Mr. Hayek, a Nobel-prize winner who died in 1992.

A member of the so-called Austrian school of economics, Mr. Hayek believed that the economy was simply too complex for the government to attempt to manage its ups and downs. He argued that economist John Maynard Keynes’s recommendation that government spend money to allay an economic downturn could actually make the downturn worse, as well as lead to an inflation problem later.

With many people angry over the financial crisis, the recession and the government’s large-scale response to both of those things, Mr. Hayek’s ideas are striking a chord. Late last year George Mason University economist Russell Roberts helped put together a rap video that pitted Mr. Keynes against Mr. Hayek that so far has garnered over a million hits on YouTube.