Last month, a funny thing happened on the way to the best-seller list. A 66-year-old treatise by a long-dead Austrian-born economist began flying off the shelves, following an hourlong endorsement from a right-wing television host better known for pumping political thrillers than for rocking political theory.

The economist was Friedrich von Hayek, the book was “The Road to Serfdom” and the host was Glenn Beck, who compared Hayek’s book to “a Mike Tyson (in his prime) right hook to socialism in Western Europe and in the United States.” As it happens, “The Road to Serfdom” — a classic attack on government planning as an inevitable step toward totalitarianism, published in 1944 and kept in print since then by the University of Chicago Press — had already begun a comeback of sorts. It sold 27,000 copies in 2009, up from about 7,000 a year before the inauguration of Barack Obama. But Beck’s endorsement catapulted the book to No. 1 at Amazon.com, bringing a temporary end to at least one tyranny, that of Stieg Larsson. Since the program was broadcast on June 8, 100,000 copies have been sold.

That’s an impressive number for an academic-press book, if a bit anemic compared with the 1.2 million views for “Fear the Boom and Bust,” a Hayek versus John Maynard Keynes rap video that went up on YouTube in January. (Kickoff line: “Party at the Fed!”) But in fact “The Road to Serfdom” has a long history of timely assists from the popular media.

When Hayek began formulating his ideas in the early 1930s, he was an émigré professor at the London School of Economics, watching events in both Europe and Britain with alarm. Like many others, Hayek was frightened by the rise of Nazism. He interpreted it, however, in an unorthodox way, not as the defeat of democratic socialism but as its logical culmination. Hayek started writing the book after World War II began, as a contribution to the war effort. Looking ahead, “Hayek was also worried about what would transpire if the Allies won,” as Bruce Caldwell puts it in his introduction to “THE ROAD TO SERFDOM”: Text and Documents — The Definitive Edition (University of Chicago, $17). In ominously titled chapters like “The Totalitarians in Our Midst” and “Why the Worst Get on Top,” Hayek laid out his case against “socialists of all parties” who he believed were leading the Western democracies into tyranny that mirrored the centrally planned societies of Germany and the Soviet Union.