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The Road to Serfdom
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The Road to Serfdom is a book written by Friedrich Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974) which has significantly shaped the political ideologies of Margaret Thatcher and of Ronald Reagan and the concepts of ‘Thatcherism’ and of ‘Reagonomics’. The Road to Serfdom is among the most influential and popular expositions of classical liberalism and libertarianism.
The book was originally published by Routledge Press in March 1944 in the UK and then by the University of Chicago Press in September 1944.
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Encyclopedia
The Road to Serfdom is a book written by Friedrich Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974) which has significantly shaped the political ideologies of Margaret Thatcher and of Ronald Reagan and the concepts of ‘Thatcherism’ and of ‘Reagonomics’. The Road to Serfdom is among the most influential and popular expositions of classical liberalism and libertarianism.
The book was originally published by Routledge Press in March 1944 in the UK and then by the University of Chicago Press 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. In February 1945 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".
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 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."
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". Having said that, Keynes did not think Hayek's philosophy was of practical use; this was explained later in the same letter, through the following comment and prophecy: "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 is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the United States."
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 responded to the book with cautious praise, stating, "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". Yet he also warned, "[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 Road to Serfdom was placed fourth on the compiled by National Review magazine. It also made #16 in reader selections of the hundred best non-fiction book of the twentieth century administered by Modern Library.
The Road to Serfdom appears on Martin Seymour-Smith's list of the 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, whilst it made #1 on in 2006.
Criticism
The Road To Serfdom has been criticized on both theoretical and empirical grounds. The main empirical criticism of Hayek is that, although the Labour Party program he opposed was implemented after World War II and the central elements remained in place for decades thereafter, Britain did not in fact move towards dictatorship.
Karl Polanyi made a case diametrically opposed to Hayek, arguing that unfettered markets had undermined the social order and that economic breakdown had paved the way for the emergence of dictatorship .
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".
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.
A criticism of the book's ideas by Jeffrey Sachs was published in the Scientific American in October 2006, with a rebuttal by William Easterly and a re-rebuttal by Sachs.
Libertarian critics
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a fellow Austrian economist, also criticized the book, arguing that central planning fails not primarily because the central planners lack the sufficient amount of knowledge needed regarding the needs and wants of the people (as argued by Hayek), but because there is no private ownership of the means of production. This, according to Hoppe, makes it impossible for the central planners to conduct any proper economic calculations, even if they were to possess full and constant knowledge of each individual's economic demands and preferences.
The libertarian economist Walter Block has observed critically that while the The Road to Serfdom makes a strong case against centrally-planned economies, it appears only lukewarm in its support of pure laissez-faire capitalism, with Hayek even going so far as to say that "probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire capitalism". In the book, Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system (a view that he later withdrew), work-hours regulation, social welfare, and institutions for the flow of proper information.
Gordon Tullock has argued Hayek's analysis predicted totalitarian governments in much of Europe in the late 20th century. He uses Sweden, in which the government at that time controlled 63 percent of GNP, as an example to support his argument that the basic problem with The Road to Serfdom is "that it offered predictions which turned out to be false. The steady advance of government in places such as Sweden has not led to any loss of non-economic freedoms." While criticizing Hayek, Tullock still praises the classical liberal notion of economic freedom, saying, "Arguments for political freedom are strong, as are the arguments for economic freedom. We needn’t make one set of arguments depend on the other." However, according to Robert Skidelsky, Hayek "safeguarded himself from such retrospective refutation." Skidelsky argues that Hayek's argument was contingent, and that, "By the 1970s there was some evidence of the slippery slope…and then there was Thatcher. Hayek's warning played a critical part in her determination to 'roll back the state.'"
List of chapters
- The Abandoned Road
- The Great Utopia
- Individualism and Collectivism
- The "Inevitability" of Planning
- Planning and Democracy
- Planning and the Rule of Law
- Economic Control and Totalitarianism
- Who, Whom?
- Security and Freedom
- Why the Worst Get on Top
- The End of Truth
- The Socialist Roots of Nazism
- The Totalitarians in Our Midst
- Material Conditions and Ideal Ends
- The Prospects of International Order
- Conclusion
See also
External links
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- - The cartoon-booklet version.
- - The above booklet, as a 5-minute animated movie.
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