There Is No Meaner Attitude toward Human Nature Than Is to be Found in the Moralists of the 18th Century: Men Needed a Superior Authority to Maintain Internal Balances; Today We Call That Authority “Social Planning”

If the lives of the great majority--before the nineteenth century--were brutish, nasty, and short (under the manorial system, under the cottage system, under American plantation slavery), it is exactly because, despite the alleged securities of status and custom, there was no interest in betterment. There is no meaner attitude toward human nature than is to be found in the moralists of the eighteenth century (I cite Defoe and Mandeville) who regarded men as incapable of achieving their own salvation. Men needed a superior authority--of custom, law, and punishment--in order to maintain that prescription which assured internal balances; today we call that authority “social planning.” Both attitudes essentially distrust the capacities of men, exercising their intelligence, to order their lives harmoniously.

--Louis M. Hacker, “The Anticapitalist Bias of American Historians,” in Capitalism and the Historians, ed. F.A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 64.