I have been at work, in various ways, upon this project for so long that
proper acknowledgements would amount to an exercise in intellectual
autobiography. All that I can sensibly say here, is that I would like to thank
again all those whom I thanked in the acknowledgements to my University
of London Ph.D. dissertation, ‘The Political Thought of F.A.von Hayek’,
especially Kenneth Minogue, and in addition Norman Barry and John Gray,
with whose important work on Hayek I have been engaged over such a
period that it is difficult to identify specific influences upon what I have
written here. In addition, I would like to thank, in relation to the present
volume, Tyler Cowen, David Schmidtz and Leif Wenar for their extensive
comments on an earlier version, and also anonymous academic referees for
their reactions to successive versions of the manuscript. I would also like to
thank Knud Haakonssen and Chandran Kukathas for useful conversations;
Bruce Caldwell for his particularly useful comments on a very late version
of the manuscript; everyone at the Institute for Humane Studies, George
Mason University, for their assistance and encouragement, and finally my
wife, for her forbearance in not reminding me too often that the book was
not yet finished.