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.

Chapters 4 through 6 deconstruct false beliefs about collectivism. It’s not inevitable, says Hayek, that the modern world must move toward collectivism, or that socialism is better than markets at allocating resources. Planning cannot realize a unified purpose because humans don’t share one single goal; further, planning will cause the breakdown of the Rule of Law, without which governments quickly descend into despotism.

In Chapters 7 through 9, Hayek examines the pitfalls of planning. Rather than achieving greater autonomy and respect, workers would be treated as cogs in the government machine, their freedoms curtailed. Fair wages would be reserved for groups favored by the planners. A guaranteed income would be possible only at the cost of freedom to choose one’s vocation.

Chapters 10 and 11 look at how central planning distorts political incentives. Instead of the best people achieving office, planning attracts the worst among us: those who crave arbitrary power. They, in turn, would encourage the populace to believe propaganda that furthers their plans, which would damage discourse and the search for truth.

In Chapter 12, Hayek presents evidence that Nazism is a form of socialism and not capitalism, as presumed by the West. Chapter 13 shows that many of the same principles espoused by the Nazis are being promoted by respected thinkers in democratic nations.

Modern socialists, as described in Chapter 14, persist in advocating for an idealized moral standard that would instead wipe out ethics altogether. Chapter 15 cautions that the campaign to create an international planning body would simply impose a magnified form of collectivism on the entire world. In Chapter 16, Hayek augments that idea with the warning that collectivism amounts to imitating Hitler.

The 2007 edition contains an appendix with several short essays and letters that provide further background, including the 1994 introduction by economist Milton Friedman, himself a bestselling American author.