The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents: Text and Documents - the Definitive Edition (Collected Works of F.A. Hayek) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Hayek's masterpiece has appreciated in value since its first publication some 60 to 70 years ago. In fact, it is scary how much further down the path to serfdom we have gone over the past decades.

So, what is it all about?
In an intellectual but easily readable way Hayek explains that any sort of "planning" or "government intervention" is necessarily arbitrary by nature and a clear threat to democracy, liberty and individualism. The world we have been heading to is a collectivist authocracy, which always will be ruled by the worst characters amongst us.

Having written the book in the 30s of this century, Hayek does provide sufficient evidence that the emergence of collectivist tyrannies in Russia and Germany does not have their roots in the "bad genes of their peoples", but was a necessary by-product of their collectivist economic policies. Being an Austrian he nevertheless also traces back the roots of German National Socialism to both Germany's militarist history and the fathers of socialism, i.e. Marx, Engels, Bebel, Sombart, etal.

I highly recommend this book to everyone. No matter what your current perspective on the issues discussed, the book will give you new insight and foster a flow of new debates.

For a small book it is a masterpiece of objective economic-political analysis. It is also a tour de force, written with passion, conviction and justified concern. Published in '44 while Hayek taught economics at the London School of Economics, he shrewdly observed that the British government and economic planners were falsely conceptualizing post-war policies to retain war-time centralized control. After all, so it seemed, war-time production was boosted tremendously under central governmental control of the economy. So why not retain and expand it after the war is over to boost the living standard.

This was either spelled out or implied in various White Papers or reports which drew inspirations from the theory of Hayek's chief opponent, John Maynard Keynes. Hayek warned that such dangerous policies, which he thought emulated too much German National Socialist economic policies, would fail and jeopardize liberty.

Unfortunately, his warnings were disregarded by the British post-war governments and the subsequent evolution of the British economy relative to the German one tells the story. The British centralized, nationalized industries as well as the Bank of England, passed the Town and Country Planning Act, created a national health system, etc. while the Germans decentralized, freed the central bank from political control, denationalized industries and restored private initiatives, relatively speaking. The British developed the British economic disease while the Germans pulled off one of the world's most stunning economic miracle. It was all in compliance with Hayek's profound analysis and prediction. One could almost cynically says that the British in enacting National Socialist economic policies fought the Nazis to have the right to adopt Nazi economic policies. Compare for example, the British nationalizing the Bank of England much like Hitler taking over the German central bank in '38 or, for more shocking comparison, read the British labor party platform of '45 and compare it with the socio-economic policies advocated in the l921 Twenty-Five Point Nazi party program.

Beyond this, Hayek's book is also a wonderful analysis of how knowledge pulsates throughout the economy, how economic progress is achieved, how, above all, liberty can be preserved and how the "worst wind up on top" (the title of chapter ten) of a political hierarchy. This chapter can be used to explain in part the rise of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Saddam Hussain, Castro, and so on down to even LBJ, Nixon, Clinton, Sharon and Bush, etc.

This book has had a long life and deservedly so. All undergraduates and anyone interested in profound philosophical-economic analysis should read it, especially those interested in preserving liberty and preventing serfdom. One of the primary elements for this, according to Hayek, is to deny centralized planning. Ironically, Hayek's chief opponent, John Maynard Keynes who influenced post-war centralized economic planning tremendously, reviewed the book favorably before his death and and said something to the effect that morally and philosophically he found himself in agreement with nearly all of it and not just in agreement but in heartfelt agreement. Too bad the politicians did not heed the change of mind Keynes had just before he died. Had they followed Hayek, the corrosive consequences of politicized Keynesianism in terms of the inflation, centralized planning and other results could have been prevented. By l969, Nixon publicly stated "we're all Keynesians now."

George Orwell, a socialist, was also favorably impressed by this book and most likely was inspired by it when he wrote in 1948 his famous "1984."

But by l974, Hayek received, belatedly, the Nobel Economics Prize (though he shared it with Gunnar Myrdal) and wise scholars and graduate students in communist nations in Eastern Europe started to disseminate and read this book with vigorous enthusiasm. Though it is not well known, this book, along with others Hayek wrote, helped considerably in counteracting Communism. By the early l990s, several editorials in the Wall Street Journal paid tribute to Hayek and the favorable impact his publications had on eroding communism.

Writing in the middle of WWII, F.A. Hayek was concerned with what he was seeing: far from learning lessons from the destructive forces of fascism and communism, many politicians and intellectuals in the west were getting ready to wholeheartedly embrace some of the policies and practices that led to the rise of some of the most vile and destructive regimes in history. The title of the book evokes the old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and Hayek readily acknowledges that most proponents of state control of economy would be vehemently opposed to the methods that are necessary to implement those policies. Unlike many in his time and unfortunately many more today, Hayek did not see fascism and communism as polar opposites of each other, but rather two aspects of the same socialist ideology. Sometimes those that are most alike are most opposed to each other, and the communist portrayal of fascists and Nazis as right wing movement was a label that stuck to this day. Hayek perceived this to be very dangerous, not least because it would create an environment in which self-proclaimed leftist ideologues would face far less scrutiny than those on the self-proclaimed right. This is the reason why Hayek dedicated this book to "socialists of all parties."

The most remarkable thing about this book is that it has aged so well. The style of writing, the ideas presented, and the importance of what it had to say are as fresh and relevant today as they were when the book was first written. This, to me at least, is quite unsettling. It is rather sad that after all these years we still have to debate the same premises that were spelled out so clearly during one of history's worst moments.