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Introduction
The Road to Serfdom is a book written by Friedrich A. Hayek (recipient of a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics) and originally published by Routledge Press in March 1944 in the UK and then by the University of Chicago in September 1944. In April, 1945, Reader's Digest published a slightly shortened version of the book, which eventually reached more than 600,000 readers. Around 1950 a picture-book version was published in Look Magazine, later made into a pamphlet and distributed by General Motors. There exist translations of the book in about 20 languages. The book 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).
Main theses and arguments
Hayek’s central thesis is that all collectivist societies, from Hitler’s National Socialism to Stalin’s communism, lead logically and inevitably to tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal. Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners’ resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved. Hayek further argued that the failure of central planning would be perceived by the public as an absence of sufficient power by the state to implement an otherwise good idea. Such a perception would lead the public to vote more power to the state, and would assist the rise to power of a “strong man” perceived to be capable of “getting the job done”. After these developments Hayek argued that a country would be ineluctably driven into outright totalitarianism. For Hayek “the road to serfdom” inadvertently set upon by central planning, with its dismantiling of the free market system, ends in the destruction of all individual economic and personal freedom.
Hayek argued that countries such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had already gone down the "road to serfdom", and that various democratic nations are being led down the same road. In The Road to Serfdom he wrote: "The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule."
However, as Hayek says "It is important not to confuse opposition against this kind of planning with a dogmatic laissez-faire attitude".The Road to Serfdom, 50th anniversary edition, chapter 3, p. 41.The Road to Serfdom mentions the provision or regulation of sign posts, roads, pollution and noise from factory, and the harmful side-effects of deforestation, for example, as issues that cannot be left purely to the unregulated market price mechanism.The Road to Serfdom, 50th anniversary edition, chapter 3, p. 42
Reaction
John Maynard Keynes read The Road to Serfdom and 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". *
Sir Winston Churchill was, according to Harold Macmillan, "fortified in his apprehensions a Labour government by reading Professor Hayek's The Road to Serfdom"Harold Macmillan, Tides of Fortune, 1945-1955 (Harper & Row, 1969), p. 32. 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.David Willetts and Richard Forsdyke, After the Landslide: Learning the Lessons of 1906 and 1945 (Centre for Policy Studies, 1999), p. 59.
Criticism
"The Road To Serfdom" has been criticized by some scholars, including Karl Polanyi, who considered Hayek's libertarian ideals to be unrealistically utopian.
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."Barbara Wootton, Freedom under Planning, p. 5. 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."
Notes
References
- The Road to Serfdom, 50th anniversary edition, ISBN 0226320618
- The Road to Serfdom, 2001 edition in Routledge Classics, ISBN 0415253896
See also
External links
- A condensed and abridged version, online
- Reader's Digest version from the IEA
- Mises.org The Road to Serfdom in cartoons - The cartoon-booklet version.
- The Road to Serfdom in Five Minutes The above booklet... as a 5-minute movie!
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"The Road to Serfdom"