The Road To Serfdom

In the modern age, people have become more resistant to conditions they used to accept. Hayek writes that “[m]an has come to hate, and to revolt against, the impersonal forces to which in the past he submitted” (211), but modernity is so complex that often we simply don’t understand conditions that frustrate our desires. This can lead to an unreasoning rebellion that may cause much more damage than it fixes: “a refusal to submit to anything we cannot understand must lead to the destruction of our civilization” (211).

We may rebel against our economic conditions, but “the only alternative to submission to the impersonal and seemingly irrational forces of the market is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men” (212), which could be much worse.

Could we perhaps learn to master the forces of society the way we have mastered the forces of nature? Hayek answers that controlling a nation for a single such purpose would ruin what we’ve already accomplished and destroy personal freedom, and that doing so “at any price” is “likely to do the greatest harm” (213).

Laborers at the end of World War II might want to keep their high-paying jobs, even if they were no longer needed: “a socialist society would certainly use coercion in this position,” while a Western liberal democracy, straining to find a way to appease the workers, would have to distort the economic system, “which [would] seriously interfere with the most productive use of our resources” (214).