Writing in the era of the Great Depression, the rise of autocracies in Russia, Italy and Germany, and World War II, Hayek wrote a memo to the director of the London School of Economics, William Beveridge, in the early 1930s to dispute the then-popular claim that fascism represented the dying gasp of a failed capitalist system. The memo grew into a magazine article, and he intended to incorporate elements of the article into a book much larger than "The Road to Serfdom". However, he ultimately decided to write "The Road to Serfdom" as its own book.