In actuality, Ryan is like a lot of politicians who merely cherry-pick Hayek to promote neoclassical policies, says Peter Boettke, an economist at George Mason University and editor of The Review of Austrian Economics. “What Hayek has become, to a lot of people, is an iconic figure representing something that he didn’t believe at all,” Boettke says. For example, despite his complete lack of faith in the ability of politicians to affect the economy, Hayek, who is frequently cited in attacks on entitlement programs, believed that the state should provide a base income to all poor citizens.

To be truly Hayekian, Boettke says, Ryan would need to embrace one of his central ideas, known as the “generality norm.” This is Hayek’s belief that any government program that helps one group must be available to all. If applied, Boettke says, a Hayekian government would eliminate all corporate and agricultural subsidies and government housing programs, and it would get rid of Medicare and Medicaid or expand them to cover all citizens. (Hayek had no problem with a national health care program.) Hayek also believed that the government should not have a monopoly on any service it provides; instead, private companies should compete by offering an alternative Postal Service, road system, even, perhaps, a private fire department.

Because his ideas seem almost willfully designed to alienate every constituency, this is not going to be the year — no matter what kind of enthusiasm Paul Ryan whips up among the Tea Party faithful — that they will become central to the Republican platform. “I’m quite sure I’ve never heard any view of Mitt Romney’s about Hayek,” Greg Mankiw, one of Romney’s lead economic advisers, told me. But elements of Hayek’s ideas will be valuable to those trying to build their influence outside the mainstream right. Tea Party favorites, like Senator Mike Lee of Utah and the Senate candidate Ted Cruz of Texas, appear to have developed a deeper commitment to the Austrians. Wayne Brough, an economist for FreedomWorks, the Tea Party-friendly activist group, told me that the group’s goal is to eventually fill Congress with Hayekians. And Bruce Caldwell, the author of the intellectual biography “Hayek’s Challenge,” said he hoped that we were experiencing, partly through Ryan’s ascendancy, the first stage of a slow but steady embrace of Hayek’s philosophy.

It may sound crazy, but it would not be the first time that once-fringe ideas entered mainstream party politics. Most economists and politicians dismissed the ideas of the British economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, but by the 1950s they became the reigning orthodoxy for both parties. (Eisenhower and Nixon were Keynesians.) In the 1960s, a group of free-market-­oriented economists at the University of Chicago developed a critique of Keynes that was ignored for years. But in the 1980s, after Reagan’s election, the Chicago approach came to dominate economic discussion on the right and even held sway among many Democrats until the financial crisis of 2008. Since then, there has been a bit of a free-for-all. Keynesian ideas have come to dominate much of the academic and policy world, but the Occupy and Tea Party movements make clear that there is increasing interest in previously ignored radical ideas.