From the conclusion of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty trilogy (The Political Order of a Free People):

I believe men will look back on our age as an age of superstition, chiefly connected with the names of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. I believe people will discover that the most widely held ideas which dominated the twentieth century, those of a planned economy with a just distribution, a freeing ourselves from repression and conventional morals, of permissive education as a way to freedom, and the replacement of the market by a rational arrangement of a body with coercive powers, were all based on superstitions in the strict sense of the word. An age of superstition is a time when people imagine that they know more than they do. In this sense, the twentieth century was certainly an outstanding century of superstition, and the cause of this is an overestimation of what science has achieved… (University of Chicago Press, 1979; pp. 175–176)

Of course, Charles Darwin’s name should have appeared here as well. We may therefore supplement this quote with one from Hayek’s contemporary, Malcolm Muggeridge (from The End of Christendom):

I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.

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