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The Road to Serfdom is a book written by Friedrich Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974) 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 (still in print from the Institute of Economic Affairs), 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. 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 put out a "Definitive Edition". The Road to Serfdom is among the most influential and popular expositions of classical liberalism and libertarianism.

This single book has significantly shaped the political ideologies of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the concepts of 'Reagonomics' and 'Thatcherism'. It also lead to the revival of Neoclassical economics in the West and lessening the Keynesian influence.

Main thesis and arguments

Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which, in his view, had gone down “the road to serfdom” and reached 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 dismantling 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."

Contents

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

Positive 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 [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.

George Orwell, a democratic socialist, responded to the book with cautious praise. "[A] return to 'free' competition," he argued, "means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the state." He added, however, that "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".

The Road to Serfdom was placed fourth on the list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the twentieth century compiled by the conservative journal National Review.

In Martin Seymour-Smith's list of the 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, The Road to Serfdom appears at number 90.

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".[1]

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." 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) 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.

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

See also

• Criticisms of communism
• Economic calculation problem
• Omnipotent Government

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.