The Road to Serfdom

"As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself. If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve."

"We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes."

"We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in."

"The first need is to free ourselves of that worst form of contemporary obscurantism which tries to persuade us that what we have done in the recent past was all either wise or unavoidable. We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish."

"Though we neither can wish nor possess the power to go back to the reality of the nineteenth century, we have the opportunity to realize its ideals — and they were not mean. We have little right to feel in this respect superior to our grandfathers; and we should never forget that it is we, the twentieth century, and not they, who have made a mess of things. If they had not yet fully learned what was necessary to create the world they wanted, the experience we have since gained ought to have equipped us better for the task. If in the first attempt to create a world of free men we have failed, we must try again. The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century."

"The empirical and historical data presented above provide a clear challenge to the slippery slope argument that forms the foundation of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The evidence shows that laissez-faire is inherently unstable – small governments tend to grow larger; that totalitarianism is similarly unstable – totalitarian regimes have not survived in the long run; whereas the mixed economy is relatively stable – the mixed economies of Western Europe and North America whose futures most troubled Hayek have in fact endured since the end of the Second World War and there is no evidence of an imminent threat of regime change."

"What ultimately matters is not reading Hayek accurately, but instead providing a productive reading of Hayek that can improve our understanding of the principles of political economy that is relevant for us today. Hayek’s emphasis on how alternative institutional arrangements, through their properties to align incentives and utilize dispersed information, impact the choices people make, and the consequences of those choice that will be realized in social interaction provides the basis for a reinvigorated classical liberal political economy research program."

"The publication of two books … helped to galvanize the concerns that were beginning to emerge among intellectuals (and many others) about the implications of totalitarianism. One was James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution … [A second] Friedrich A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom … was far more controversial — and influential. Even more than Burnham, Hayek forced into public discourse the question of the compatibility of democracy and statism. And unlike Burnham, he made no pretense of neutrality about the phenomena he described. … In responding to Burnham and Hayek … liberals were in fact responding to a powerful strain of Jeffersonian anti-statism in American political culture … The result was a subtle but important shift in liberal thinking."

"George Nash rightly sees the publication of Friedrich A. von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in 1944 as the first shot in the intellectual battle that was to turn the tide in favor of conservatism. Geoffrey Perret saw the book as "the intellectual success story of the war.""

"I think the Adam Smith role was played in this cycle by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom."

"Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, a surprise bestseller in Britain and in the United States in 1944, was probably the first real inroad in the dominant intellectual view. Yet the impact of the free-market counter-current on the dominant tide of intellectual opinion, though perceptible to those directly involved, was at first minute. Even for those of us who were actively promoting free markets in the 1950s and 1960s it is difficult to recall how strong and pervasive was the intellectual climate of the times."

"My interest in public policy and political philosophy was rather casual before I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. Informal discussions with colleagues and friends stimulated a greater interest, which was reinforced by Friedrich Hayek's powerful book The Road to Serfdom, by my attendance at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, and by discussions with Hayek after he joined the university faculty in 1950. In addition, Hayek attracted an exceptionally able group of students who were dedicated to a libertarian ideology. They started a student publication, The New Individualist Review, which was the outstanding libertarian journal of opinion for some years. I served as an adviser to the journal and published a number of articles in it."

"With all due respect – Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" never took place. The interventionism he deplored in the 1940s did not lead to the spectre of a totalitarian system that he evoked. During the war, there was central planning – and afterwards there came, on the one hand, new regulations and, on the other hand, deregulations, a step forward and a step back. Hayek's idea that any intervention required new interventions, so that in the end there can only be the planned economy, was refuted by the empirical observation."

"I have noted above that Hayek is incredibly skimpy about the nature and character of this "road to serfdom" which all modern democracies are on, … Thus we may infer that Alexander Hamilton, who introduced our protective tariff system, was our first socialist starting us down the road to serfdom. Hayek, I hasten to add, does not cite Hamilton, but he does cite Bismarck's adoption of protectionism in 1879 as an early milepost down the road to Nazism. … This kind of writing is not scholarship. It is seeing hobgoblins under every bed."

"You know, The Road to Serfdom had a great influence on George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984. In fact, he had reviewed The Road to Serfdom before he wrote these two books. On the whole, I still believe in what I said in that book, although it made me frightfully unpopular among my colleagues, particularly in this country. I was more disliked here in this country than in England! In England, and in Europe generally, people had started to reflect on the dangerous aspects of socialism. Here the New Deal had created a new enthusiasm for planning, and I seemed to be tearing down the finist ideas of the period. I was hated — intensely disliked — for writing The Road to Serfdom. But I gradually regained my reputation."

"You see, the English had been aware of these problems, you could accuse me of having exaggerated an argument, but it was not a wholly new conception. Some of the more reflective people-well the fact that Orwell, of course, was arguing at the same time, and I no longer believe this, but I did believe at one time that he was directly inspired by my Road to Serfdom, he had written a review of that book, and I thought it had started him, but it's now clear that by that time he already had the draft of Animal Farm ready. So he must have arrived at this general view independently of anything he learned from it. He was not the only one. This was not a completely new idea. It was an idea to which the English public was somewhat prepared."

"If planning was wrong for Hayek, this was because it was obliged to base itself on calculations and predictions which were essentially meaningless and thus irrational. Planning was not a moral misstep, much less undesirable on some general principle. It was simply unworkable—and, had he been consistent, Hayek would have acknowledged that much the same applied to ‘scientific’ theories of the market mechanism. The difference, of course, was that planning required enforcement if it was to work as intended, and thus led directly to dictatorship—Hayek’s real target. The efficient market might be a myth, but at least it did not entail coercion from above. All the same, Hayek’s dogmatic rejection of all central control invited the charge of ... dogmatism."

"Hayek is quite explicit on this count: if you begin with welfare policies of any sort—directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships—you will end up with Hitler. […] Thus, rather than run such a risk, democracies should avoid all forms of intervention which distort the properly apolitical mechanisms of a market economy. […] This is the political autism of Hayek, manifest in that inability to distinguish the different politics that he didn’t like from one another."

"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."

"I come finally to what is really my only serious criticism of the book. You admit here and there that it is a question of knowing where to draw the line. You agree that the line has to be drawn somewhere [between free-enterprise and planning], and that the logical extreme is not possible. But you give us no guidance whatever as to where to draw it. In a sense this is shirking the practical issue. It is true that you and I would probably draw it in different places. I should guess that according to my ideas you greatly underestimate the practicability of the middle course. But as soon as you admit that the extreme is not possible, and that a line has to be drawn, you are, on your own argument, done for since you are trying to persuade us that as soon as one moves an inch in the planned direction you are necessarily launched on the slippery path which will lead you in due course over the precipice."

"I should therefore conclude your theme rather differently. I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers wholly share your own moral position. Moderate planning will be safe enough if those carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue. This is in fact already true of some of them. But the curse is that there is also an important section who could almost be said to want planning not in order to enjoy its fruits but because morally they hold ideas exactly the opposite of yours, and wish to serve not God but the devil. … What we need therefore, in my opinion, is not a change in our economic programmes, which would only lead in practice to disillusion with the results of your philosophy; but perhaps even the contrary, namely, an enlargement of them. Your greatest danger ahead is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the US in a fairly extreme form. No, what we need is the restoration of right moral thinking - a return to proper moral values in our social philosophy. If only you could turn your crusade in that direction you would not look of feel quite so much like Don Quixote. I accuse you of perhaps confusing a little bit the moral and the material issues. Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were execute by those who think and feel wrongly."

"It also seems to follow from the preceding observations that there is some question about the notion, frequently encountered among conservative politicians and social scientists, (see, for example, Friedrich Hayek's famous The Road to Serfdom), that nationalization of capital will necessarily lead to dictatorship. Historically, the order in which nationalization and dictatorship have occurred seems rather to have been the reverse of that suggested by Hayek. In all communist dictatorships today, dictatorship came first and nationalization afterward, rather than the other way around (except for the Soviet Union, where nationalization and the present form of dictatorship came simultaneously)."

"This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom—not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine. A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics. And only in a society already deeply infected with Rationalism will the conversion of the traditional resources of resistance to the tyranny of Rationalism into a self-conscious ideology be considered a strengthening of those resources. It seems that now, in order to participate in politics and expect a hearing, it is necessary to have, in the strict sense, a doctrine; not to have a doctrine appears frivolous, even disreputable. And the sanctity, which in some societies was the property of a politics piously attached to traditional ways, has now come to belong exclusively to rationalist politics."

"Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter."

"Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness."

"Libertarians are not just bad emotional cripples. They are also bad advice givers. I refer of course to the views of both Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. The “serfdom” they warn against is not that of Genghis Khan or Lenin-Stalin-Mao or Hitler-Mussolini. Rather, they warn against the centrist states of the modern world. Think only of Switzerland, Britain, the US, the Scandinavian countries, and the Pacific Rim. Why do citizenries there report high indexes of “happiness” and enjoy broad freedoms of speech and belief?"

"What exactly was the road to serfdom that Hayek and Friedman warned us against? They were arguing against social security, a minimum wage, national parks, progressive taxation, and government rules to clean up the environment or slow global warming. People who live in high-income societies support these programs with great majorities. Such mixed economies involve both the rule of law and the limited liberty to compete."

"In The Road to Serfdom, he gave powerful reason to indicate why explicit provision has to be made by the state and the society for the deprived and the dispossessed. While Hayek is often taken to be uncompromisingly hostile to any economic role of the state (other than what is needed to support the market mechanism), and certainly late in his life he gave grounds for thinking that this could indeed be his view, nevertheless in The Road to Serfdom Hayek's position is much broader and inclusive than that. Now that the welfare state is often under such attack, it is worth recollecting that the pioneering manifesto that championed the market mechanism on grounds of freedom did not reject the need for a welfare state and provided a reasoned defence of it as an institutional necessity."

"Hayek’s warning was dead wrong. Most rich countries tried some form of Keynes’s policies in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, and while they didn’t always work as advertised, they most definitely did not lead to totalitarianism. Yet somehow Hayek’s meme entered our collective consciousness. On blogs and in the financial media, where politics and economics mix freely, self-described "Austrians" kept using the word "Keynesian" as a political epithet, the way National Review writers or Fox News anchors use the word "liberal.""

"The 20th Century looked for many decades as if it were going to be the century of collectivism … Anyone who would have predicted the reversal of this trend … would have been considered mad just a dozen years ago. Innumerable factors led to [the reversal of the rise of collectivism], not the least of which was the bitter experience of seeing 'rational planning' degenerate into economic chaos and Utopian dreams turn into police-state nightmares. Still, it takes a vision to beat a vision … An alternative vision had to become viable before the reversal of the collectivist tide could begin with Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. That vision came from many sources, but if one point in time could mark the beginning of the intellectual turning of the tide which made later political changes possible, it was the publication of The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek."

"It is a fair reading of The Road to Serfdom to say that forty years more of the march toward socialism would lead to major losses of the political and economic freedom of individuals. Yet in those forty years we have seen that continuous expansion of the state in Sweden and England, even in Canada and the United States, without consequences for personal freedom so dire as those he predicted."

"I find the historical origins of Hayek terribly puzzling. He was in Austria, where a conservative, authoritarian Catholic state declared itself in favor of something called corporatism. This was a kind of pose which announced itself as political economy, but it had no political economy. Corporatism was the name of the state ideology, but corporatism in Austria was a partnership between the government and various parts of society. There was very little in the way of interventionist fiscal or monetary policy."

"The most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state which I read at this time [the late 1940's], and to which I have returned so often since [is] F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom."

"The answer to this puzzle, I think, is that Hayek was inconsistent."