… is from page 19 of Hayek’s 1933 essay “The Trend of Economic Thinking,” reprinted in F.A. Hayek, The Trend of Economic Thinking: Essays on Political Economists and Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 17-34:
Indeed, it is probably no exaggeration to say that economics developed mainly as the outcome of the investigation and refutation of successive Utopian proposals – if by “Utopian” we mean proposals for the improvement of undesirable effects of the existing system, based upon a complete disregard of those forces which actually enabled it to work.
