Reflecting on fascism and Nazism in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, a number of intellectuals began to challenge the rationale of any social state. In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Friedrich von Hayek argued that those who advocated planning by politicians and experts in the interests of society were unwittingly embarking upon a road that could only lead to totalitarianism in socialist or national socialist form. When the state takes on itself the role of planning society, planning production, housing, transport, welfare, it becomes an instrument for imposing a morality. It inescapably violates the requirements for formality and generality required by the rule of law, in favour of substantive decisions about worthy activities and worthy persons. These then have to be rendered acceptable to ‘the people’ through all sorts of propagandist means. Intellectuals may claim to be able to take judgements about right and wrong ways of acting and behaving, and so to direct society, but such intellectual hubris is specious and self-serving: it subordinates the necessary pluralism of reason to the totalitarian claim to eternal truth. The only principles upon which true freedom can be based are those of classical liberalism, ‘freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience’.