The Road to Serfdom

by Friedrich A. Hayek

Thus in a Chicago newspaper under a banner that read in part “Friedrich Hayek Comments on Uses to Which His Book Has Been Put” he stated, “I was at first a bit puzzled and even alarmed when I found that a book written in no party spirit and not meant to support any popular philosophy should have been so exclusively welcomed by one party and so thoroughly excoriated by the other.”68 He repeatedly emphasized in his talks before business groups that he was not against government intervention per se: “I think what is needed is a clear set of principles which enables us to distinguish between the legitimate fields of government activities and the illegitimate fields of government activity. You must cease to argue for and against government activity as such.”69 He also feared that certain parts of his message would be ignored. For example, businessmen who might be quite eager to get “government off of our backs” might be equally eager to demand that the government protect their industries from foreign competition. Responding to a question about tariffs in a discussion following his speech in Washington, DC, Hayek bluntly asserted: “If you have any comprehension of

my philosophy at all, you must know that one thing I stand for above all else is free trade throughout the world.”

Keynes went on to say, though, that “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, and that the logical extreme is not possible. But you give us no guidance whatever as to where to draw it.”87 Hayek evidently took these criticisms to heart, for in the coming years he would make two further important contributions to political philosophy that would refine and extend the arguments made in The Road to Serfdom. In The Constitution of Liberty he laid out the philosophical foundations of liberal constitutionalism, wherein a private

sphere of individual activity is defined, the state is granted a monopoly on coercion, and then is constitutionally limited by the rule of law in its use of those coercive powers. In the last third of the book Hayek outlined the specific sorts of government policies that were consistent with such a political setup.88 In Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek lamented how western democracies were increasingly circumventing the spirit of liberal constitutionalism by passing coercive legislation, typically under the guise of achieving social justice, but in reality serving well-organized coalitions of special interests. The book also included a unique proposal for legislative reform aimed at reestablishing the ideal of a constitutionally constrained liberal democratic commonwealth.89

Hayek was decidedly not making the historical claim that, no matter what future moves were made in Britain and America, there was no turning back, that a socialist future that would end in totalitarianism was inevitably coming. This kind of inevitability thesis was, after all, exactly what Hayek was criticizing in his essay “Scientism and the Study of Society,” when he attacked historicism, the belief that there were historical laws knowledge of which allowed one to predict a necessary future. A more plausible way to read Hayek’s words is to see him as warning that, unless we change our ways, we are headed down the road to serfdom.

Those who see Hayek as issuing a prediction of an inevitable trend would view this history as refuting his claim. Those who see him as providing a warning might consider thanking him for saving them from disaster. If one confronts Hayek’s logical argument, however, the subsequent paths of the western European democracies are not really tests of Hayek’s thesis. To be sure, many of them did develop substantial welfare states, and Hayek spoke about the separate dangers of these in his later writings. But the existence of such states, and whatever successes they may or may not have had, does not undermine Hayek’s logical argument from The Road to Serfdom: a welfare state is not socialism. The proper way to evaluate Hayek’s logical thesis is to ask, How many actually existing, real-world political systems have fully nationalized their means of production and preserved both some measure of economic efficiency and freedom of choice over goods and occupations? Count them up. Then compare the number with those that nationalized their means of production and turned to extensive planning and control, and with it the curtailment of individual liberties. If one agrees that this is the right test, Hayek’s position is fully vindicated: full socialism can only be put into practice by using methods of which most socialists would disapprove.

Another theme, evident perhaps more explicitly in this introduction than in specific passages in Hayek’s own text, but nonetheless very much a part of his underlying motivation in writing the book, is Hayek’s warning concerning the dangers that times of war pose for established civil societies—for it is during such times when hard-won civil liberties are most likely to be all-too-easily given up. Even more troubling, politicians instinctively recognize the seductive power of war. Times of national emergency permit the invocation of a common cause and a common purpose. War enables leaders to ask for sacrifices. It presents an enemy against which all segments of society may unite. This is true of real war, but because of its ability to unify disparate groups, savvy politicians from all parties find it effective to invoke war metaphors in a host of contexts. The war on drugs, the war on poverty, and the war on terror are but three examples from recent times.107 What makes these examples even more worrisome than true wars is that none has a

logical endpoint; each may be invoked forever. Hayek’s message was to be wary of such martial invocations. His specific fear was that, for a war to be fought effectively, the power and size of the state must grow. No matter what rhetoric they employ, politicians and the bureaucracies over which they preside love power, and power is never easily surrendered once the danger, if there ever was one, has passed. Though eternal vigilance is sage advice, surely “wartime” (or when politicians would try to convince us that it is such a time) is when those who value the preservation of individual liberty must be most on guard.108

Finally, what one finds in this book, and in all of Hayek’s work, is a clear recognition of the power of ideas. It was perhaps John Maynard Keynes who said it best, in the closing chapter of The General Theory: the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.109

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. —David Hume I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it. —A. de Tocqueville

Thus this book gradually took shape as a warning to the socialist intelligentsia of England; with the inevitable delays of wartime production, it finally appeared there early in the spring of 1944. This date will, incidentally, also explain why I felt that in order to get a hearing I had somewhat to restrain myself in my comments on the regime of our wartime ally3 and to choose my illustrations mainly from developments in Germany.

The whole intellectual climate in the United States at the time The Road to Serfdom appeared was thus one in which it was bound either profoundly to shock or greatly to delight the members of sharply divided groups. In consequence, in spite of its apparent success, the book has not had here the kind of effect I should have wished or which it has had elsewhere. It is true that its main conclusions are today widely accepted. If twelve years ago it seemed to many almost sacrilege to suggest that fascism and communism are merely variants of the same totalitarianism which central control of all economic activity tends to produce, this has become almost a commonplace. It is now even widely recognized that democratic socialism is a very precarious and unstable affair, riven with internal contradictions and everywhere producing results most distasteful to many of its advocates.

Whatever merits this book possesses consist not in the reiteration of this thesis but in the patient and detailed examination of the reasons why economic planning will produce such unlooked-for results and of the process by which they come about.

Yet though hot socialism is probably a thing of the past, some of its conceptions have penetrated far too deeply into the whole structure of current thought to justify complacency. If few people in the Western world now want to remake society from the bottom according to some ideal blueprint, a great many still believe in measures which, though not designed completely to remodel the economy, in their aggregate effect may well unintentionally produce this result.

That hodgepodge of ill-assembled and often inconsistent ideals which under the name of the Welfare State has largely replaced socialism as the goal of the reformers needs very careful sorting out if its results are not to be very similar to those of full-fledged socialism.

The increasing tendency to rely on administrative coercion and discrimination where a modification of the general rules of law might,

perhaps more slowly, achieve the same object, and to resort to direct state controls or to the creation of monopolistic institutions where judicious use of financial inducements might evoke spontaneous efforts, is still a powerful legacy of the socialist period which is likely to influence policy for a long time to come.

But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.

This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.

Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.

Of course, six years of socialist government in England have not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state. But those who argue that this has disproved the thesis of The Road to Serfdom have really missed one of its main points: that the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.

What I have argued in this book, and what the British experience convinces me even more to be true, is that the unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand.

The most important qualification I must add is that during the interval of time terminology has changed and for this reason what I say in the book may be misunderstood. At the time I wrote, socialism meant unambiguously the nationalization of the means of production and the central economic planning which this made possible and necessary. In this sense Sweden, for instance, is today very much less socialistically organized than Great Britain or Austria, though Sweden is commonly regarded as much more socialistic. This is due to the fact that socialism has come to mean chiefly the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state. In the latter kind of socialism the effects I discuss in this book are brought about more slowly, indirectly, and imperfectly. I believe that the ultimate outcome tends to be very much the same, although the process by which it is brought about is not quite the same as that described in this book.

Where I now feel I was wrong in this book is chiefly in that I rather under-stressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russia—a fault which is perhaps pardonable when it is remembered that when I wrote, Russia was our wartime ally—and that I had not wholly freed myself from all the current interventionist superstitions, and in consequence still made various concessions which I now think unwarranted.

The following pages are the product of an experience as near as possible to twice living through the same period—or at least twice watching a very similar evolution of ideas. While this is an experience one is not likely to gain in one country, it may in certain circumstance be acquired by living in turn for long periods in different countries.

It is necessary now to state the unpalatable truth that it is Germany whose fate we are in some danger of repeating. The danger is not immediate, it is true, and conditions in England and the United States are still so remote from those witnessed in recent years in Germany as to make it difficult to believe that we are moving in the same direction.

It is not to the Germany of Hitler, the Germany of the present war, that England and the United States bear yet any resemblance. But students of the currents of ideas can hardly fail to see that there is more than a superficial similarity between the trend of thought in Germany during and after the last war and the present current of ideas in the democracies. There exists now in these countries certainly the same determination that the organization of the nation which has been achieved for purposes of defense shall be retained for the purposes of creation.

The author has spent about half of his adult life in his native Austria, in close touch with German intellectual life, and the other half in the United States and England. In the latter period he has become increasingly convinced that at least some of the forces which have destroyed freedom in Germany are also at work here and that the character and the source of this danger are, if possible, even less understood than they were in Germany.

Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.

The number of dangerous mistakes we have made before and since the outbreak of war because we do not understand the opponent with whom we are faced is appalling. It seems almost as if we did not want to understand the development which has produced totalitarianism because such an understanding might destroy some of the dearest illusions to which we are determined to cling.

The interpretation of the developments in Germany and Italy about to be proffered in this book is very different from that given by most foreign observers and by the majority of exiles from those countries. But if this interpretation is correct, it will also explain why it is almost impossible for a person who, like most of the exiles and the foreign correspondents of English and American newspapers, holds the now prevalent socialist views to see those events in the proper perspective.

If the outcome is so different from our aims— if, instead of freedom and prosperity, bondage and misery stare us in the face—is it not clear that sinister forces must have foiled our intentions, that we are the victims of some evil power which must be conquered before we can resume the road to better things?

We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.

For at least twenty-five years before the specter of totalitarianism became a real threat, we had progressively been moving away from the basic ideas on which Western civilization has been built. That this movement on which we have entered with such high hopes and ambitions should have brought us face to face with the totalitarian horror has come as a profound shock to this generation, which still refuses to connect the two facts. Yet this development merely confirms the warnings of the fathers of the liberal philosophy which we still profess. We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.

Individualism has a bad name today, and the term has come to be connected with egotism and selfishness.7 But the individualism of which we speak in contrast to socialism and all other forms of collectivism has no necessary connection with these.