Something Went Wrong: Three Views of the Heritage of the Early Nineteenth Century

These three very different books' have in common a concern in the history of ideas. Different though the three authors are in their approaches and emphases, they are all concerned at bottom with what has happened in our times to the heritage of early nineteenth-century liberalism, and more particularly with that most characteristic strain of liberalism which stems directly from the naturalistic-historical individualism of the Enlightenment. For two of these writers, Mr. Baumgardt and Mr. Viereck, the works under review need to be supplemented by some knowledge of their other works. For Mr. Hayek, though the reader who knows his Road to Serfdom and his Individualism and Economic Order will find the present work more fully intelligible, such cross reference is hardly necessary; The Counter-Revolution of Science is a direct attack on what its author regards as a collectivist perversion of the ideas and ideals of nineteenth-century liberalism, and by something more than implication, a defense of these ideas and ideals. All three writers clearly feel that something has gone wrong in the transmission of ideas that ought to have preserved us from some at least of our present difficulties.