Here is Hayek addressing Mont Pelerin Society on the issues that caused him to pull together liberal thinkers into the Mont Pelerin Society. At that time he felt the liberal views MPS sponsored had provided little practical political impact but were “absolutely fundamental in the movement of ideas”.

In 1984 Thatcher had been in office for four years, the collapse of Communism was coming, and the capitalist transformation of China was germinating. I suppose the general pessimism about political effect would now be greater.

But on another plain he recognised the potency of liberalism founded on property rights, honesty and the family (not sure what he’d make of gay marriage) in generating efficiency He was pondering the book which he called “The Fatal Conceit” in which he demonstrated that the march of socialism had nothing to do with the proletariat but was totally due to the intellectuals, an observation that would also be true of socialism’s modern offspring, the green ideology.