The Road To Serfdom

As World War II raged around him, F.A. Hayek wrote and published The Road to Serfdom, which became a touchstone of the campaign to preserve personal and economic freedoms. The book argues that Western democracies’ attraction to socialism will take them down a path to authoritarian dictatorships like those in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Government planning of economies, Hayek declares, must result in arbitrary and unfair edicts, as well as a loss of individual liberty.

The Road to Serfdom was successful from the start and remains controversial to this day. It has been re-issued several times; the 2007 Definitive Edition contains six introductory essays that include useful background information about the book’s history.

The first three chapters discuss the revolt against freedom in Europe and the move toward centralized management of society. Democracies that were economically free had become so successful that people began to take their prosperity for granted, and chafed at the uneven distribution of wealth. Germany, Russia, and Italy adopted central planning and became dictatorships, but the West assumed that planning and tyranny were unrelated, and, heedless, moved toward implementing parts of socialism.