The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is an excellent example of academia informing how Capitalism has lifted others out of poverty and how Socialism reduces the individual into the collective. Hayek explains that, despite being warned for centuries that Socialism leads to slavery, the world has become more Socialist. Further, Hayek argues that economic freedoms encouraged individual freedoms and posits that liberties increase inversely when barriers are removed. Finally, Hayek explains that the means used to advance one’s ends allow for the change to be implemented quickly. A “planned economy” is the macro-economic term for collectivism. As Hayek puts it:
This liberal plan, according to them, is no plan – and it is, indeed, not a plan designed to satisfy particular views about who should have what. What our planners demand is a central direction of all economic activity according to a single pan, laying down how the resources of society should be “consciously directed” to serve particular ends in a definite way.[1]
As such, the concept of a “planned economy” subverts every concept of individualism for collectivism. Just a year after The Road to Serfdom was published, Eric Roll wrote in The American Economic Review that Hayek’s thesis that “the system of free enterprise for profit has not failed but on the contrary has not yet even been tried”[2] is proven by the actions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the increasingly nationalistic ideals occurring within Europe.[3] Thus, World War II was less of a battle between Freedom and Fascism but more of a war between Socialism and Classical Liberalism. Hayek makes this point clear by stating that:
The connection between Socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism – Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lassalle – are at the same time acknowledged fathers of Socialism.[4]
To further back his accusation, Hayek concludes that Marx and Hegel’s notion of organizing a civilization is misguided, stating that:
Organization is to him, as to all socialists who derive their Socialism from a crude application of scientific ideals to the problems of society, the essence of Socialism. It was, as he rightly emphasizes, the root of the socialist movement at its inception in early nineteenth-century France. Marx and Marxism have betrayed this basic idea of Socialism by their fanatic but utopian adherence to the abstract idea of freedom.[5]
As recently as 2013, academics have argued that society has reached the end of such talk of an organized society and placed restrictions only to benefit the public good. Martin Loughlin’s “The End of the Road to Serfdom?” suggests, in the last four pages of the book, that the
dilemma has been resolved and we are in danger of finding ourselves living in a society of chiefs and slaves.[6] In agreement with Hayek, Loughlin argues that planned economies attempt to resolve inequalities, yet they tend to make people feel worse off than they are. Thus, limitations keep people poor.
Other Books to Consider:
· The Roots of National Socialism – R.D. Butler
· New Liberties for Old – Carl L. Becker
· The Twenty-Year Crisis – E.H. Carr
[1] F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Routledge: The University of Chicago Press, 1944), 85.
[2] Eric Roll. 1945. “The Road to Serfdom Friedrich A. Hayek.” The American Economic Review 35 (1): 176–80. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.1810127&site=eds-live&scope=site.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 182.
[5] Ibid, 184.
[6] Review of Martin Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010).