Caroline P. Intoduction

I'm using Dinh's account for the night, sorry if it's confusing.

Q: What is the relevance of Lord Acton’s quote, “Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ides,” to the main idea of the Hayek Introduction?

A: Hayek establishes a thesis that states that there are distinct similarities between WWII German thinking and the current post WWII ideas closely represent those of Germany (5). Correct me if I’m wrong, but what it sounds like to me is that Hayek is saying that America’s anti-Germany attitude has lead to new socialistic tendencies which mimic the beginning of the move toward fascism, and then Nazism, in German (6). Americans then either refuse to recognize or are ignorant to this progression because of their displaced anger towards the German people and culture instead of the separate entity of Nazism (9-10). Thusly, Hayek is calling to Americans to recognize their fault in doing so, because it is causing them to become the thing that they hate. Lord Acton’s quote is used to describe the desire of the American people to ignore the direction in which they are traveling because they are speeding towards the fate of Germany. “If in the long run we are the makers of our own fate, in the short run we are the captives of the ideas we have created” (4).