Popper, Mises, and Hayek: 1) working within and responding to Nazi totalitarianism. Popper, Mises, and Hayek "were largely responding to European, and even particularly German, trends that had led mankind, as they saw it, to the terrors of National Socialist totalitarianism and world war" (35); 2) anticommunists, saw communism as threat as great as Nazism and fascism.
Ludwig von Mises's Bureacracy: attacked bureaucratic mentality he saw as corrosive of human initiative as it is expressed through individual freedom and the profit motive. As a free market libertarian, he saw market competition and private enterprise as the ultimate source of improvement for a bureaucracy that is inefficient and answers to no one. The market to him was democratic, liberating individuals to experiment and improve.
Frederick Hayek's The Road to Serfdom: attacked Western policy drift towards collectivism. His pessimism on governmental intervention stemmed from a limited view of human capacities, which was informed by Judeo-Christian traditions. He believed inequality to be acceptable because everyone has equal access to free market. No liberty is possible without economic freedom.
Karl Popper's The Open Society: provided a historical account of collectivist political ideas that were the reasons why the true essence of Western civilization, individual liberty, was lost. He believed that individualism with altruism formed the foundation of Western civilization. Unlike Mises and Hayek, Popper did not espouse free market prioritization at all costs. He sought to rally against the erosion of critical faculties, proposing the idea of piecemeal engineering, where social change is most effective if made in incremental steps.