The Road to Serfdom

At the end of the last century, the publishers at Random House constructed a list of the 100 best novels and 100 best non-fiction works of the twentieth century. The non-fiction list was particularly instructive. Actually, there were two lists. One list represented the consensus of a blue ribbon panel with many notables including Daniel J. Boorstin, Shelby Foote, Stephen Jay Gould, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, and. Gore Vidal. The other list was the result of a poll of 194,829 readers. Admittedly any such public poll is self-selected and likely to reflect strength of opinion rather than breath of consensus. Nonetheless, it is instructive that Ayn Rand, the laissez-faire economist and novelist, had three books of the top six books in the reader list and, yet, did not even make the top 100 selections of the blue-ribbon panel. A little further down the reader list at number 16 was Friedrich A. Hayek's, The Road to Serfdom. The Austrian economist also did not make it in the top 100 of the blue-ribbon list. This is quite a shame since Hayek's book ought to be required reading for any educated person.

The modern Conservative reader may miss Hayek's originality and innovation because much of what he presented in the relatively short The Road to Serfdom is now part of the conventional wisdom of Conservatives, especially free-market Conservatives. The fact that the ideas do not seem surprising or remarkable is a measure of how thoroughly the ideas in his book have been felt. Indeed, much of his warnings against the effects of central planning were borne out by the Communist experience in the last half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, when the book was written in 1943, memories of the Great Depression, what was then considered a massive failure of free markets, still dominated economic thought and an unplanned economy seemed dangerous. Centrally directed economies appeared to be an inevitable next step in the evolution of industrial societies.

Hayek's argument focused less on the economic efficiency of markets, and more on the nature of freedom. Hayek is the champion of individualism over collectivism. Central planning must necessarily limit the scope of freedom. A key Hayek observation is that central planning reverses the centuries old trend toward the rule of law against arbitrary authority. Moreover, in collectivist societies the worst elements inevitably rise to the top. As political power rather than market competition decides success and failure, political power rather than economic superiority becomes the goal.

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