The Road to Serfdom

The Road to Serfdom

Author	Friedrich Hayek
Language	English
Subject	Politics
Publisher	Routledge Press (UK), University of Chicago Press (US)
Publication date	March 1944
Publication place	United Kingdom
Pages	266
ISBN	0-226-32061-8
OCLC	30733740
Dewey Decimal	338.9 20
LC Class	HD82 .H38 1994

The Road to Serfdom is a book written by the Austrian-born economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek between 1940–1943, in which he "warned of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning," and in which he argues that the abandonment of individualism, liberalism, and freedom inevitably leads to socialist or fascist oppression and tyranny and the serfdom of the individual. Significantly, Hayek challenged the general view among British academics that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism, instead arguing that fascism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and the power of the state over the individual.

The Road to Serfdom is among the most influential and popular expositions of classical liberalism and libertarianism and remains a popular and influential work in contemporary discourse, selling over two million copies, and remaining a best-seller.

The Road to Serfdom was to be the popular edition of the second volume of Hayek's treatise entitled "The Abuse and Decline of Reason," and the title was inspired by the writings of the 19th century French classical liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville on the "road to servitude." The Road to Serfdom was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944, during World War II, and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it "that unobtainable book," also due in part to wartime paper rationing. It was published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press in September 1944 and achieved great popularity. At the arrangement of editor Max Eastman, the American magazine Reader's Digest published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom to reach a wider popular audience beyond academics.

The Road to Serfdom dramatically altered the landscape of political thought in the middle of the 20th century, shifting the terms of debate for millions of people across the political spectrum.

Publication

"But when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery. It has been well said that, in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation."

The Road to Serfdom, "Planning and Power."

The book was originally published by Routledge Press in March 1944 in the UK and then by the University of Chicago Press in September 1944. A condensed version of the book written by Max Eastman was then published as the lead article in the April 1945 issue of Reader's Digest, with a press run of several million copies. This condensed version was then offered as a Book of the Month selection with a press run of over 600,000 copies. In February 1945 a picture-book version was published in Look magazine, later made into a pamphlet and distributed by General Motors. The book has been translated into approximately 20 languages and is dedicated to "The socialists of all parties." The introduction to the 50th anniversary edition is written by Milton Friedman (another recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics 1976).

In 2007, the University of Chicago Press issued a "Definitive Edition", Volume 2 in the "Collected Works of F. A. Hayek" series. In June 2010, the book achieved new popularity by rising to the top of the Amazon.com best seller list following extended coverage of the book on The Glenn Beck Program.

List of chapters

"The subtle change in meaning to which the word ‘freedom' was subjected in order that this argument sound plausible is important. To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached...The demand for the new freedom was [in contrast]...only a name for the old demand of an equal distribution of wealth."

The Road to Serfdom, "The Great Utopia." p. 77

1. The Abandoned Road
2. The Great Utopia
3. Individualism and Collectivism
4. The "Inevitability" of Planning
5. Planning and Democracy
6. Planning and the Rule of Law
7. Economic Control and Totalitarianism
8. Who, Whom?
9. Security and Freedom
10. Why the Worst Get on Top
11. The End of Truth
12. The Socialist Roots of Nazism
13. The Totalitarians in Our Midst
14. Material Conditions and Ideal Ends
15. The Prospects of International Order
16. Conclusion

Contemporary commentary

John Maynard Keynes said of it: "In my opinion it is a grand book...Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement." Having said that, Keynes did not think Hayek's philosophy was of practical use; this was explained later in the same letter, through the following comment: "What we need therefore, in my opinion, is not a change in our economic programmes, which would only lead in practice to disillusion with the results of your philosophy; but perhaps even the contrary, namely, an enlargement of them. Your greatest danger is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the United States." George Orwell responded with both praise and criticism, stating, "in the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of." Yet he also warned, "[A] return to 'free' competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the state."

Hayek's work was influential enough to warrant mention during the 1945 UK general election, when according to Harold Macmillan, Winston Churchill was "fortified in his apprehensions [of a Labour government] by reading Professor Hayek's The Road to Serfdom" when he warned in an election broadcast in 1945 that a socialist system would "have to fall back on some form of Gestapo." The Labour leader Clement Attlee responded in his election broadcast by claiming that what Churchill had said was the "second-hand version of the academic views of an Austrian professor, Friedrich August von Hayek." The Conservative Central Office sacrificed 1.5 tons of their precious paper ration allocated for the 1945 election so that more copies of The Road to Serfdom could be printed, although to no avail.

The Road to Serfdom was placed fourth on the list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the twentieth century compiled by National Review magazine. It also made #16 in reader selections of the hundred best non-fiction book of the twentieth century administered by Modern Library.

The Road to Serfdom appears on Martin Seymour-Smith's list of the 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, whilst it made #1 on Human Events: Top Ten Books Every Republican Congressman Should Read in 2006.

The book continues to sell in the tens of thousands of copies each year. Since the November 2008 election of Barack Obama, the University of Chicago Press has seen a massive increase in demand for this book. In June 2010, after being featured by Glenn Beck on his television show, the book became the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.com.

Milton Friedman's assessment:

” . . I think the Adam Smith role was played in this cycle [i.e. the late twentieth century collapse of socialism in which the idea of free-markets succeeded first, and then special events catalyzed a complete change of socio-political policy in countries around the world] by Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.”

Alan Brinkley's assessment:

“The publication of two books .. helped to galvanize the concerns that were beginning to emerge among intellectuals (and many others) about the implications of totalitarianism. One was James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution .. [A second] Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom .. was far more controversial — and influential. Even more than Burnham, Hayek forced into public discourse the question of the compatibility of democracy and statism .. In responding to Burnham and Hayek .. liberals [in the statist sense of this term as used by some in the United States] were in fact responding to a powerful strain of Jeffersonian anti-statism in American political culture .. The result was a subtle but important shift in liberal [i.e. American statist] thinking.”

Criticism

The Road To Serfdom has been criticized on theoretical grounds. Economic sociologist Karl Polanyi made a case diametrically opposed to Hayek, arguing that unfettered markets had undermined the social order and that economic breakdown had paved the way for the emergence of dictatorship.

Herman Finer, a Fabian socialist, published a rebuttal in his The Road to Reaction in 1946. Hayek called Finer's book "a specimen of abuse and invective which is probably unique in contemporary academic discussion."

Barbara Wootton wrote Freedom under Planning after reading an early copy of The Road to Serfdom and claimed "Much of what I have written is devoted to criticism of the views put forward by Professor Hayek in this and other books." However, Frank Knight, founder of the Chicago School of Economics, wrote in a scholarly review of the Wootton book: "Let me repeat that the Wootton book is in no logical sense an answer to The Road to Serfdom, whatever may be thought of the cogency of Hayek's argument, or the soundness of his position."

Hayek argues in The Road to Serfdom that central planning must of necessity be (or become) tightly coupled, but others dispute this premise. In his review (collected in The Present as History, 1953) Marxist economist Paul Sweezy joked that Hayek would have you believe that if there was an over-production of baby carriages, the central planners would then order the population to have more babies instead of simply warehousing the temporary excess of carriages and decreasing production for next year. The cybernetic arguments of Stafford Beer in his 1974 CBC Massey Lectures, Designing Freedom -- that intelligent adaptive planning can increase freedom—are of interest in this regard, as is the technical work of Herbert Simon and Albert Ando on the dynamics of hierarchical nearly decomposable systems in economics—namely, that everything in such a system is not tightly coupled to everything else.

A criticism of the book's ideas by Jeffrey Sachs was published in the Scientific American in October 2006, with a rebuttal by William Easterly and a re-rebuttal by Sachs.

More recently, Hayek's support of free market institutions has been challenged on a new front: the free market economy that he advocated is designed for an infinite planet, says Eric Zencey in "The Other Road to Serfdom," and when it runs into physical limits (as any growing system must), the result is a need for centralized planning to mediate the problematic interface of economy and nature. "Planning is planning, whether it's done to minimize poverty and injustice, as socialists were advocating then, or to preserve the minimum flow of ecosystem services that civilization requires, as we are finding increasingly necessary today."

Libertarian critics

Libertarian economist Walter Block has observed critically that while the The Road to Serfdom makes a strong case against centrally planned economies, it appears only lukewarm in its support of a free market system and laissez-faire capitalism, with Hayek even going so far as to say that "probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire capitalism." In the book, Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system (a view that he later withdrew), work-hours regulation, social welfare, and institutions for the flow of proper information. Through analysis of this and many other of Hayek's works, Block asserts that: "in making the case against socialism, Hayek was led into making all sort of compromises with what otherwise appeared to be his own philosophical perspective—so much so, that if a system was erected on the basis of them, it would not differ too sharply from what this author explicitly opposed."

Gordon Tullock has argued Hayek's analysis predicted totalitarian governments in much of Europe in the late 20th century. He uses Sweden, in which the government at that time controlled 63 percent of GNP, as an example to support his argument that the basic problem with The Road to Serfdom is "that it offered predictions which turned out to be false. The steady advance of government in places such as Sweden has not led to any loss of non-economic freedoms." While criticizing Hayek, Tullock still praises the classical liberal notion of economic freedom, saying, "Arguments for political freedom are strong, as are the arguments for economic freedom. We needn’t make one set of arguments depend on the other." However, according to Robert Skidelsky, Hayek "safeguarded himself from such retrospective refutation." Skidelsky argues that Hayek's argument was contingent, and that, "By the 1970s there was some evidence of the slippery slope…and then there was Thatcher. Hayek's warning played a critical part in her determination to 'roll back the state.'"

See also

• Criticisms of communism
• Economic calculation problem
• Omnipotent Government
• New class
• Nomenklatura

References

• The Road to Serfdom, 50th anniversary edition, University of Chicago Press, 1994 ISBN 0-226-32061-8
• The Road to Serfdom, 2001 edition in Routledge Classics, ISBN 0-415-25389-6
• The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents— The Definitive Edition, University of Chicago Press, 2007, ISBN 0-226-32054-5, ISBN 0-226-32055-3

External links

• The publication history of The Road to Serfdom
• Reader's Digest version from the IEA
• Mises.org The Road to Serfdom in cartoons - The cartoon-booklet version.
• The Road to Serfdom in cartoons - The cartoon-booklet version as a video.
• Review of The Road to Serfdom
• Informational website for The Road to Serfdom
• Booknotes interview with Milton Friedman on his writing of the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Road to Serfdom, November 20, 1994.