The Great Idea

The Great Idea (1951), later reissued as Time Will Run Back, is set in the year 282 A.M. (After Marx), roughly equivalent to 2100, in a world communist state called Wonworld ruled from Moscow by the dictator Stalenin. Peter Uldanov, Stalenin’s son, has been raised in deliberate isolation and near-total ignorance, and when his father summons him to Moscow as a possible successor, he begins encountering the contradictions of the system from within. The novel’s central premise is that Peter, knowing nothing of pre-Marxist economics, must independently rediscover the functions of private property, free exchange, and market pricing through experience and deduction alone. Hazlitt, best known for Economics in One Lesson, uses the novel to argue that market economics are not merely ideological preferences but structural necessities that any functioning society will eventually rediscover. Dedicated to Ludwig von Mises, the novel stands firmly in the anti-communist libertarian tradition. In the preface Hazlitt acknowledged the similarities to Nineteen Eighty-Four, while emphasizing that his novel was intended as a more optimistic answer to Orwell’s pessimism.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, blue cloth. New York: Appleton, 1951. #11273.
A few slight rubs to cloth, else fine in nearly fine dust jacket with minimal wear to extremities.