Tuesday's Culture Briefs include an excerpt of a column by Johns Hopkins University economics professor Steve H. Hanke:

A true intellectual conveys to the public new ideas on a wide range of subjects, unearthing these notions long before most people do. That is the essence of Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek's definition of an intellectual. In his 1949 University of Chicago Law Review essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism," Hayek also underlined that for better or worse, intellectuals are more important than most people think. After all, they shape public opinion.

Austrian economist Hayek was one of Ronald Reagan's favorite thinkers. And Reagan, by Hayek's definition, was an intellectual. Reagan the intellectual? The book "Reagan, In His Own Hand" (2001) answers that question. This volume ... contains 259 essays Reagan wrote in his own hand, mainly scripts for his five-minute, five-day-a-week syndicated radio broadcasts in the late 1970s. They are awe-inspiring in their breadth of subject matter. And they laid out the philosophical framework for his presidency. ...

No wonder Reagan always appeared to be relaxed and in control. He had thought things through.

Mr. Hanke's column in Globe Asia makes an excellent point. Reagan, it should be remembered, was originally a Democrat -- he proudly cast his first vote in 1932 for Franklin Roosevelt -- and a very liberal Democrat, at that. In his memoir "Where's the Rest of Me?" Reagan jokingly described himself as "a near-hopeless hemophiliac liberal," saying "I bled for 'causes.' " In fact, although he later became famous as an anti-communist, Reagan in the 1940s had unwittingly joined two communist "front" groups in Hollywood.

To have shifted not merely from Democrat to Republican, but from fellow-traveler to anti-communist, Reagan had to think very deeply about what he believed and why he believed it. And, as Mr. Hanke points out, Friedrich Hayek had a profound influence on Reagan's understanding of the relationship between the free market and the free society. Anyone familiar with Reagan's philosophy can see certain seeds of it in Hayek's essay "Socialism and the Intellectuals" (online in PDF form, thanks to the Mises Institute):

Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. ... It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar. ...
In every country that has moved toward socialism, the phase of the development in which socialism becomes a determining influence on politics has been preceded for many years by a period during which socialist ideals governed the thinking of the more active intellectuals. ....

Critics of Reagan have at times suggested that his conservative views were "anti-intellectual." But what Reagan was actual "anti-" was the elitist views of those intellectuals who, as Hayek pointed out, favored abstract theories that had little support among the working class. Hayek's insight was echoed in Reagan's first inaugural address:

From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? ...

We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we're sick -- professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, "we the people," this breed called Americans.

Reagan had more faith in ordinary Americans than in those elitist intellectuals whom Hayek derided as "secondhand dealers in ideas." Hayek called on the friends of freedom to "make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage." Reagan answered that call, and inspired others to join the adventure.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times