The Road to Serfdom

by Friedrich A. Hayek

Of these, one of the most important is that the desire of the individual to identify himself with a group is very frequently the result of a feeling of inferiority and that therefore his want will be satisfied only if membership of the group confers some superiority over outsiders.

It is not only, as Russell has so well described, that the desire to organize social life according to a unitary plan itself springs largely from a desire for power.

What all those who argue in this manner overlook is that, by concentrating power so that it can be used in the service of a single plan, it is not merely transferred but infinitely heightened; that, by uniting in the hands of some single body power formerly exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before, so much more far-reaching as almost to be different in kind.

What is called economic power, while it can be an instrument of coercion, is, in the hands of private individuals, never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.

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; there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves “the good of the whole,” because the “good of the whole” is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done.

raison d’état

Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity.

There is always in the eyes of the collectivist a greater goal which these acts serve and which to him justifies them because the pursuit of the common end of society can know no limits in any rights or values of any individual.

They must, above all, be unreservedly committed to the person of the leader; but next to this the most important thing is that they should be completely unprincipled and literally capable of everything. They must have no ideals of their own which they want to realize; no ideas about right or wrong which might interfere with the intentions of the leader.

To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.

This is, of course, brought about by the various forms of propaganda.

propaganda are coordinated to influence the individuals in the same direction and to produce the characteristic Gleichschal-tung of all minds.2

They are destructive of all morals because they undermine one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and the respect for truth.

And while the planning authority will constantly have to decide issues on merits about which there exist no definite moral rules, it will have to justify its decisions to the people—or, at least, have somehow to make the people believe that they are the right decisions.

This process of creating a “myth” to justify his action need not be conscious.

So he will readily embrace theories which seem to provide a rational justification for the prejudices which he shares with many of his fellows. Thus a pseudoscientific theory becomes part of the official creed which to a greater or lesser degree directs everybody’s action.

And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning.

Like their freedom, the “collective freedom” he offers us is not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases.

Gradually, as this process continues, the whole language becomes despoiled, and words become empty shells deprived of any definite meaning, as capable of denoting one thing as its opposite and used solely for the emotional associations which still adhere to them.

But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. We have already seen why coercion cannot be confined to the acceptance of the ethical code underlying the plan according to which all social activity is directed. Since many parts of this code will never be explicitly stated, since many parts of the guiding scale of values will exist only implicitly in the plan, the plan itself in every detail, in fact every act of the government, must become sacrosanct and exempt from criticism. If the people are to support the common effort without hesitation, they must be convinced that not only the end aimed at but also the means chosen are the right ones.

Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken public support.

“Whilst the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt, or even fear that the plan will not be successful, is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effects on the will and on the efforts of the rest of the staff.”8 When the doubt or fear expressed concerns not the success of a particular enterprise but of the whole social plan, it must be treated even more as sabotage.

Facts and theories must thus become no less the object of an official doctrine than views about values. And the whole apparatus for spreading knowledge— the schools and the press, radio and motion picture—will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld. The probable effect on the people’s loyalty to the system becomes the only criterion for deciding whether a particular piece of information is to be published or suppressed. The situation in a totalitarian state is permanently and in all fields t...

This applies even to fields apparently most remote from any political interests and particularly to all the sciences, even the most abstract.

Nor does it make much difference whether certain theorems of mathematical statistics are attacked because they “form part of the class struggle on the ideological frontier and are a product of the historical role of mathematics as the servant of the bourgeoisie,” or whether the whole subject is condemned because “it provides no guaranty that it will serve the interest of the people.”

They are a direct result of that same desire to see everything directed by a “unitary conception of the whole,” of the need to uphold at all costs the views in the service of which people are asked to make constant sacrifices, and of the general idea that the knowledge and beliefs of the people are an instrument to be used for a single purpose. Once science has to serve, not truth, but the interests of a class, a community, or a state, the sole task of argument and discussion is to vindicate and to spread still further the beliefs by which the whole life of the community is directed.

From this it is concluded that if the ideals and tastes of the great majority are always fashioned by circumstances which we can control, we ought to use this power deliberately to turn the thoughts of the people in what we think is a desirable direction.

To deprecate the value of intellectual freedom because it will never mean for everybody the same possibility of independent thought is completely to miss the reasons which give intellectual freedom its value.

To “plan” or “organize” the growth of mind, or, for that matter, progress in general, is a contradiction in terms.

By attempting to control it, we are merely setting bounds to its development and must sooner or later produce a stagnation of thought and a decline of reason.

What, then, caused these views held by a reactionary minority finally to gain the support of the great majority of Germans and practically the whole of her youth? It was not merely the defeat, the suffering, and the wave of nationalism which led to their success. Still less was the cause, as so many people wish to believe, a capitalist reaction against the advance of socialism. On the contrary, the support which brought these ideas to power came precisely from the socialist camp. It was certainly not through the bourgeoisie, but rather through the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, that they were helped to power.

The “German idea of the state,” as formulated by Fichte, Lassalle, and Rodbertus, is that the state is neither founded nor formed by individuals, nor an aggregate of individuals, nor is its purpose to serve any interest of individuals. It is a Volksgemeinschaft in which the individual has no rights but only duties.

“It is high time to recognize the fact that socialism must be power policy, because it is to be organization. Socialism has to win power: it must never blindly destroy power. And the most important and critical question for socialism in the time of war of peoples is necessarily this: what people is pre-eminently summoned to power, because it is the exemplary leader in the organization of peoples?”

“The result of Bismarck’s decision of the year 1879 was that Germany took on the role of the revolutionary; that is to say, of a state whose position in relation to the rest of the world is that of a representative of a higher and more advanced economic system.

Or, to put it more plainly, our conceptions of Liberalism, Democracy, and so forth, are derived from the ideas of English Individualism, according to which a state with a weak government is a liberal state, and every restriction upon the freedom of the individual is conceived as the product of autocracy and militarism.”

Socialism is coming, and in fact has to some extent already arrived, since we can no longer live without it.”24

“This class of people, who unconsciously reason from English standards, comprises the whole educated German bourgeoisie. Their political notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘civic right,’ of constitutionalism and parliamentarianism, are derived from that individualistic conception of the world, of which English Liberalism is a classical embodiment, and which was adopted

by the spokesmen of the German bourgeoisie in the fifties, sixties, and seventies of the nineteenth century. But these standards are old-fashioned and shattered, just as old-fashioned English Liberalism has been shattered by this war.

The state has undergone a process of socialization, and Social Democracy has undergone a process of nationalization.”26

The German, more correctly, Prussian, instinct is: the power belongs to the whole. . . . Everyone is given his place. One commands or obeys. This is, since the eighteenth century, authoritarian socialism, essentially illiberal and anti-democratic, in so far as English Liberalism and French Democracy are meant.

The “Prussian idea” requires that everybody should become a state official—that all wages and salaries be fixed by the state.

German youth today recognizes the liberal as the archenemy.”

In America today, this is now shown as contempt for the conservatives (the modern day liberal under Hayak’s terms) where the young hate those who believe in the constitution and the ideals of capitalism.

“The fight against the capitalistic order, according to this view, is a continuation of the war against the Entente with the weapons of the spirit and of economic organization, the way which leads to practical socialism, a return of the German people to their best and noblest traditions.”

When authority presents itself in the guise of organization, it develops charms fascinating enough to convert communities of free people into totalitarian States. —The Times (London)1

But let us not forget that fifteen years ago the possibility of such a thing’s happening in Germany would have appeared just as fantastic, not only to nine-tenths of the Germans themselves, but also to the most hostile foreign observers (however wise they may now pretend to have been).

And the same is true of America just 20 years ago.

This is what he means by speaking of the ‘militarisation of our industrial life’ [the title of the work reviewed]. Individualism must come to an end absolutely. A system of regulations must be set up, the object of which is not the greater happiness of the individual

but the strengthening of the organised unity of the state for the object of attaining the maximum degree of efficiency

Although few people, if anybody, in England would probably be ready to swallow totalitarianism whole, there are few single features which have not yet been advised by somebody or other.

Another similarity in America where the left chooses things on a socialism narrative but clearly state they do not believe in socialism as a whole.

As was also true in Germany, most of the works which are preparing the way for a totalitarian course in the democracies are the product of sincere idealists and often of men of considerable intellectual distinction.

Professor E. H. Carr’s