The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

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This classic by one of the 20th century's leading economic thinkers has established itself beside the works of Orwell and others as a timeless meditation on the relationship between human freedom and government authority. Hayek argues that empowering government with increasing economic control... read more

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Having lived and traveled in the German-speaking countries before, during and after World War I, the economist Friedrich Hayek saw collectivism and central planning contribute to war and undermine democracy. Living in England and traveling in America in the 1930s, he hears the same ideas being expressed that attended Germany's descent into despotism. Fearful that the political and intellectual climate of his adopted home is becoming similar to that of his native Central Europe of 25 years earlier, he writes this book as a warning "to the socialists of all parties" and argues the following three things. 1) The value that the West puts on independent thought and initiative, individual conviction and integrity, respect and tolerance for others, consideration for the weak, and distrust of power are all made possible by the traditions of free market capitalism and individual liberty. 2) Collectivism and central planning are not only inefficient but necessarily lead to an ends-justify-the-means mentality that runs counter to those humanistic values. 3) Once collectivist central planning takes hold of a society, government will not long “remain in the hands of benevolent despots when it would be so much more easy for any group of ruffians to keep itself indefinitely in power.” This, Hayek is aware, contradicts Alexis de Tocqueville, who thought that “servitude of the regular, quiet and gentle kind … might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people,” perhaps maintaining a benevolent despotism for a very long time. Hayek warns that this might not be the case and that, eventually if not sooner, central planning will coarsen us by putting collective goals above individual goals to the extent that society will be persuaded of the need to suppress the individual by any means necessary including brutality.

Characters/People edit see section history

John Acton: (1834–1902) British lord and politician whose vast learning aimed toward a history of liberty that he never wrote. He coined the phrase, "All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Julien Benda: (1867-1956) French author of “La Trahison des Clercs” (“The Betrayal of the Intellectuals,” 1927) who contended that many nineteenth and twentieth century scientists disguised their political prejudices as science in advocating public policy.
Otto von Bismarck: (1815-1898) Chancellor of Germany (1871-1890) (having previously been Minister President of Prussia from 1862). After unifying Germany in the 1860s and defeating France in 1871, Bismarck instituted a thorough reorganization of Germany along the lines of expanded central planning. Until his dismissal by Kaiser Wilhelm II, he was the de facto dictator of Germany and stymied all efforts to establish an effective representative democracy.
E. H. Carr: (1892-1982) One of many economic writers who illustrate a recurring point in Hayek’s book: socialists often borrow their ideas from fascists and vice versa; that, at both the intellectual and practical levels, communism and fascism are often interchangeable. Carr was a British socialist whose book “Conditions of Peace” (1942) was influenced by the American fascist Lawrence Dennis. Referring to Carr's “The Twenty Years Crisis” (1939) Hayek points out that it contains echoes of Carl Schmitt (qv) as well as Karl Marx (qv).
Benjamin Disraeli: (1804–1881) British Prime Minister (1868, 1874-1880). In Hayek’s view Disraeli seemed to anticipate totalitarianism when he foresaw a society in which “no avenue to wealth and honor would exist save through the government.”
Ferdinand Fried: (1898-1967) Pseudonym of Ferdinand Zimmermann (1898-1967), an influential literary figure between the world wars in Germany who led the “Edelnazis” or proto-Nazis to fuse socialism with nationalism. Author of “The End of Capitalism” (1931). Wrote for the Nazi-leaning newspaper “Die Tat” from 1931. Joined the Nazi S.S. in 1934.
Élie Halévy: (1870-1937) Author of “The Era of Tyrannies” (1938). French observer of the English who noted the slide toward acceptance of economic dictatorship. He was acquainted with Sidney and Beatrice Webb (qv) and noted their anti-liberalism and preference for large, domineering government.
Friedrich Hayek: (1899-1992) Author of “The Road to Serfdom” (1944). Born in Austria, he flirted with socialism in his youth. After serving in World War I he studied law, political science, and economics at the University of Vienna, subsequently becoming a key disciple of Ludwig von Mises, who along with Carl Menger had developed the Austrian school of free-market economics. (Hayek also studied at the Institute for Brain Anatomy in Zurich, which led to a book, “The Sensory Order,” in 1952.) He moved to England in 1931, becoming a British subject in 1938, and taught economics in the United Kingdom, United States, and, toward the end of his life, in Germany. His interest in philosophical, political, judicial, and social theory made him an influential political and social critic as well as an important contributor to academic economics. He adhered to liberalism as defined in the nineteenth century and never accepted the use of this label to mean “socialism light” (my term, not his). He also rejected the label “conservative,” although he was often labeled as such, especially later in life. Today his work is most admired by conservatives and libertarians (another label he rejected). He was widely praised for his politeness—even to those with whom he disagreed strongly—which is probably why he was able to influence the English socialist George Orwell, whose novel “1984” (1949) shows signs of having been influenced by “The Road to Serfdom.” (See especially chapter eleven, “The End of Truth,” in Hayek’s book, where bases for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, Newspeak, and even the “memory hole” are suggested.)
Adolf Hitler: (1889-1945) Fuhrer and Reichskanzler (1934-1945) of Germany, head of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. Austrian-born, he served in the German army during World War I and afterward identified himself as German. Referred to throughout “The Road to Serfdom” by Hayek, Hitler embodies the attitudes that spread in Germany between the world wars and made Hitler’s totalitarian system palatable. Hayek repeatedly compares these formative attitudes to those that are more and more embraced by the democracies that, paradoxically, opposed Hitler. Perhaps Hayek’s most personal attack on Hitler is concealed in his description of an unnamed dictator: “The totalitarian leader may be guided merely by an instinctive dislike of the state of things he has found and a desire to create a new hierarchical order which conforms better to his conception of merit; he may merely know that he dislikes the Jews who seemed to be so successful in an order which did not provide a satisfactory place for him, and that he loves and admires the tall blond man, the ‘aristocratic’ figure of the novels of his youth. So he will readily embrace theories which seem to provide a rational justification for the prejudices which he shares with many of his fellows.” Hayek points out that before Hitler came to power, the Germans had been used to looking for leadership from a strong authority figure. “Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy….”
Harold J. Laski: (1893–1950) Hayek says, "In a book, 'Democracy in Crisis' (1933), ...Professor Laski later elaborated these ideas, his determination that parliamentary democracy must not be allowed to form an obstacle to the realization of socialism...."
Philipp Lenard: 1862-1947) Nobel Prize-winning physicist and author of “German Physics in Four Volumes” the title of which seems to suggest that physics can have a nationality. Hayek suggests that under National Socialism (Nazism), the title also implies that physics has a political agenda.
Paul Lensch: (1873-1926) Author of "Three Years of World Revolution" (1918). As a Marxist, he believed that Germany was on the side of the socialist future in World War I. England represented the old capitalist system.
Hugh Macmillan: (1873-1952) Chairman of the British Committee on Finance and Industry which issued a 1931 report on the 1929 stock market crash. Hayek quotes passages showing that, even before the 1930s, Parliamentary legislation increasingly had “for its conscious aim the regulation of the day-to-day affairs of the community and now intervenes in matters formerly thought to be entirely outside its scope.”
Karl Mannheim: (1893-1947) Author of “Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction.” Hayek says his use of the word freedom “offers us not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases.”
Karl Marx: (1818-1883) Major socialist theoretician who, with Friedrich Engels, wrote the “The Communist Manifesto” (1848). Hayek points out that except for its internationalist ideals—often honored only in the breech by such communist countries as Soviet Russia—Marxist ideas often fit comfortably with fascist nationalism. Several Marxist intellectuals cited by Hayek more or less easily became Nazis or crypto-fascists. (See Werner Sombart (qv) or Edward H. Carr (qv), for examples.)
John Stuart Mill: (1806-1873) Author of "On Liberty," a seminal statement of the principles of classical liberalism. Pointing out the over-simplification of attributing certain views to one nationality or another, such as assigning classical liberalism strictly to England, Hayek points out that Mill was influenced by two Germans, J.W. von Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
John Milton: (1608–1674) English poet who observed that “If every action which is good or evil… were under… compulsion, what were virtue but a name…?” In other words, compelling people to do good, or not allowing them to do evil, denies them any choice and therefore any opportunity for virtue. Hayek suspects that more and more English and American intellectuals were (as of 1943) critical of Milton’s view that England had something to teach the world.
Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: (1876–1925) Though he had misgivings about Hitler, Moeller van den Bruck expressed an idea of German socialism that was embraced by the Nazis who even took their regime's name from the title of Moeller van den Bruck's book "The Third Reich" (1923).
Wilhelm Ostwald: (1853-1932) German chemist quoted by Hayek as saying, "…we, or perhaps the German race, have discovered the significance of organization. While the other nations still live under the regime of individualism, we have already achieved that of organization."
Johann Plenge: (1874-1963) German sociologist and author of "Marx and Hegel." Influenced by H.G. Well's (qv) "Future in America." Quoted by Hayek as saying, "Because in the sphere of ideas Germany was the most convinced exponent of all socialist dreams, and in the sphere of reality she was the most powerful architect of the most highly organized economic system - in us is the twentieth century." He did not become a Nazi, and yet his socialism embraced a nationalistic variety. He approvingly saw Germany as forced by World War I to embrace socialism.
Lionel Robbins: (1898-1984) Hayek cites Robbins’ book “Economic Planning and International Order” (1937) and his essay “The inevitability of Monopoly” in “The Economic Basis of Class Conflict” (1939) in footnotes.
Carl Schmitt: (1888-1985) German professor whom Hayek calls “the leading Nazi theoretician of totalitarianism.” He joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Hayek shows parallels between Schmitt and socialists who were not Nazis. (See Spengler and Carr, for examples.)
George Bernard Shaw: (1856-1950) Best known as one of the great playwrights in the English language, Shaw was also a Fabian socialist and great friend of Beatrice and Sidney Webb (qv). During the Boer War, Shaw told Élie Halévy (qv) that in the future small countries were going to have to be dominated by larger ones.
Adam Smith: (1723–1790) Author of "The Wealth of Nations" (1776). Seminal writer on the function of the free market. Coined terms such as "the invisible hand" to describe the agglomeration of separate individual economic acts into the action of a whole economy.
Werner Sombart: (1863-1941) Especially in his chapter “The Socialist Roots of Nazism,” Hayek characterizes Sombart as one of the German teachers and writers who “from 1914 onward arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism” to lead “not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hard-working laborer and idealist youth into the National Socialist fold.” Though never a member of the Nazi party himself, Sombart embraced his own version of “national socialism,” helping to make the idea of “German Socialism” palatable.
Oswald Spengler: (1880–1936) German nationalist who wrote a tract called "Prussianism and Socialism" in which he called the two "one and the same." Hayek alleges that Spengler's ideas can clearly be traced to the German socialists such as Plenge (qv) and Lensch (qv). Spengler tars Germany's nineteenth century liberals as "English" and "the invisible English army" undermining the German (that is, Prussian) spirit.
Conrad Hal Waddington: (1905-1975) British scientist who in his book “The Scientific Attitude” (1941) expressed belief in central planning as a scientific approach and claimed that “science can pass ethical judgment on human behavior.”
Beatrice Webb: (1858-1943) With her husband Sidney, a partnership of upper-class British socialists of the early twentieth century. They were unabashed apologists for the Soviet Union. Hayek cites their own words from their book “Soviet Communism” to show that a totalitarian system does not allow even mild doubt to be expressed about its goals.
Sidney Webb: (1859-1947) See Beatrice Webb.
H. G. Wells: (1866–1946) Author of works in science and history, but best remembered as a science fiction author, Wells was also a social critic from a distinctly socialist perspective. His book "The Future in America" is mentioned by Hayek as influencing Johann Plenge (qv). Also, Wells wrote a declaration of human rights which was published in a British newspaper and later in book form. Writes Hayek, "It is pathetic but characteristic of the muddle into which many of our intellectuals have been led by the conflicting ideals in which they believe that a leading advocate of the most comprehensive central planning like H.G. Wells should at the same time write an ardent defense of the rights of man. The individual rights which Mr. Wells hopes to preserve would inevitably obstruct the planning which he desires."

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Quotes edit see section history

“Nothing is more fatal than the present fashion among intellectual leaders of extolling security at the expense of freedom.”
“It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate 'capitalism'. If 'capitalism' means here a competitive system based on free disposal of property, it is far more important to realize that only within this system is democracy possible. When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.”

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We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.
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“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom,” he said in 1848; “socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”3
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In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of “planned economy” in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.
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Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.
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The question is whether for this purpose it is better that the holder of coercive power should confine himself in general to creating conditions under which the knowledge and initiative of individuals are given the best scope so that they can plan most successfully; or whether a rational utilization of our resources requires central direction and organization of all our activities according to some consciously constructed “blueprint.”
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Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.
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planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition but not by planning against competition.
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To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. The only question here is whether in the particular instance the advantages gained are greater than the social costs which they impose. Nor is the preservation of competition incompatible with an extensive system of social services—so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.
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Individualism has a bad name today, and the term has come to be connected with egotism and selfishness.7 But the individualism of which we speak in contrast to socialism and all other forms of collectivism has no necessary connection with these.
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It seems almost as if we did not want to understand the development which has produced totalitarianism because such an understanding might destroy some of the dearest illusions to which we are determined to cling.
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First Sentence edit see section history

Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produe. Looking back, we can assess the significance of past occurrances and trace the consequences they have brought in their train. But while history runs its course, it is not history to us. It leads us into an unknown land, and but rarely can we get a glimpse of what lies ahead. It would be different if it were given to us to live a second time through the same events with all the knowledge of what we have seen before. How different wuld things appear t us; how important, and often alarming would changes seem that we now scarcely notice! It is probably fortunate that man can never have this experience and knows of no laws which history must obey.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Introduction

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

Bibliographical Note

Errata edit see section history

Page vii "merts" should be "merits"
Page 29 "German" should be "Germany"
Page 41 "...it is must be possible..." should be "it must be possbile..."
Page 50 "tumbled" should be "stumbled"
Page 55 "units" should be "unites"
Pages 100 and 102 "freedon" should be "freedom"
Page 150 "woman" should probably be "women"
194 "to ward" should be "to-ward" (hyphenated at line break)
198 "The problem of monopoly would not be difficult as it is..." should probably be "...as difficult as..."
204 "connceted" should be "connected"
208 "the economic system has to adopt itself to continuous changes..." should be "...has to adapt itself..."

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 4 of 102 in National Review - 100 Best Non-fiction Books of the Century. (authoritative list)

This is book 90 of 96 in Wikipedia's 100 most influential books ever written. (authoritative list)

This book is in Wall Street's Summer Book List. (standard series)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

F. A. Hayek (Author)

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Bruce Caldwell (Editor)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: G. Routledge & sons
Country: England
Publication Date: 1944
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 184

Classification edit see section history

Library of Congress: HD0082.H38 1944
Dewey: 338.91

Subjects edit see section history

Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Political Science › Political Doctrines › Socialism
Books › Business & Investing › Popular Economics › Policy & Current Events
Books › Nonfiction › Politics › History & Theory
Books › Nonfiction › Philosophy › Political
Books › Business & Investing › Economics › Economic History
Books › Business & Investing › Economics › Development & Growth
Books › Business & Investing › Economics › Economic Policy & Development
Books › Business & Investing › Economics › Theory

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