Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and a leading proponent of classical liberalism  in the twentieth century. He taught at the University of London, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg.

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The Road to Serfdom

University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

The book was written for a British audience, so the director of the Press, Joseph Brandt, did not expect it to be a big seller in the States. Brandt hoped to get the well-known New York Herald Tribune journalist and author Walter Lippmann to write the foreword, noting in an internal memo that if he did, it might sell between two and three thousand copies. Otherwise, he estimated, it might sell nine hundred. Unfortunately, Lippmann was busy with his own work and so turned him down, as did the 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie, whose 1943 book One World had been a best-seller. John Chamberlain, the book review editor for the New York Times, was ultimately recruited for the job.

One hopes for his sake that Brandt was not the sort who bet money on his hunches. Since its first publication in 1944, the University of Chicago Press estimates that more than 350,000 copies of The Road to Serfdom have been sold. Routledge added many thousands more, but we do not know how many exactly: that press was unable to come up with any reliable numbers. There is also no good count on the number of copies that appeared in translation, not least because a portion were samizdat copies produced and distributed behind the Iron Curtain during the cold war.

Not everyone, of course, liked (or likes) the book. The intelligentsia, particularly in the United States, greeted its publication with condescension and, occasionally, vitriol. Then a diplomat in the British Embassy in Washington, Isaiah Berlin wrote to a friend in April 1945 that he was "still reading the awful Dr. Hayek." The economist Gardiner Means did not have Berlin's fortitude; after reading 50 pages he reported to William Benton of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he "couldn't stomach any more." The philosopher Rudolf Carnap, writing to Hayek's friend Karl Popper, apparently could not muster even the stamina of Means: "I was somewhat surprised to see your acknowledgement of von Hayek. I have not read his book myself; it is much read and discussed in this country, but praised mostly by the protagonists of free enterprise and unrestricted capitalism, while all leftists regard him as a reactionary."

Those who, like Carnap, have not read Hayek but think that they already know what he is all about should be prepared for some surprises. Those on the left might preview their reading with a peek at chapter 3, where Hayek expounds on some of the government intervention that he was prepared to accept, at least in 1944. Those on the right might want to have a look at his distinction between a liberal and a conservative in his 1956 foreword to the American paperback edition. Both will be surprised by what they find.

In this introduction I trace the origins of Hayek's little book, summoning up the context in which it was produced and showing how it gradually came to its final form. The reactions, both positive and negative, that ultimately turned it into a cultural icon will then be documented. Because it is a controversial work, I will comment upon some of the most persistent criticisms that have been levied against it. Not all of these, I argue, are warranted: Hayek's book may have been widely, but it was not always carefully, read. In my conclusion I will reflect briefly on its lasting messages.

Prelude: The British, Naziism, and Socialism

Friedrich A. Hayek, a young economist from Vienna, came to the London School of Economics (LSE) in early 1931 to deliver four lectures on monetary theory, later published as the book Prices and Production. The topic was timely-Britain's economy, stagnant through the 1920s, had only gotten worse with the onset of the depression-and the presentation was erudite, if at times hard to follow, owing to Hayek's accent. On the basis of the lectures Hayek was offered a visiting professorship that began in the Michaelmas (fall) 1931 term, and a year later he was appointed to the Tooke Chair of Economic Science and Statistics. He would remain at the LSE until after the war.

The summer before Hayek arrived to teach was a traumatic one in Britain and across Europe. In addition to the deepening economic depression, financial crises on the continent led to a gold drain in Britain, and ultimately to the collapse of the Labour government, the abandoning of the gold standard, and, in autumn, the imposition of protectionist tariffs. Hayek's entrance onto the London stage was itself accompanied by no little controversy. In August 1931 he caused a stir with the publication of the first half of a review of John Maynard Keynes's new book, A Treatise on Money, which drew a heated reply from Keynes a few months later. His battle with Keynes and, later, with Keynes's compatriot Piero Sraffa, would occupy no small amount of Hayek's attention during the 1931-32 academic year.

By the following year, however, Hayek had secured his chair, and for his inaugural lecture, delivered on March 1, 1933, he turned to a new subject. He began with the following question: Why were economists, whose advice was often so useful, increasingly regarded by the general public as out of step with the times during the perilous years that had followed the last war? To answer it Hayek drew upon intellectual history. He claimed that public opinion was unduly influenced by an earlier generation of economists who, by criticizing a theoretical approach to the social sciences, had undermined the credibility of economic reasoning in general. Once that had been accomplished, people felt free to propose all manner of utopian solutions to the problem of the depression, solutions that any serious study of economics would show were infeasible. Toward the end of his talk Hayek cited the new enthusiasm for socialist planning in Britain as an example of such misguided ideas. The economists who had paved the way for these errors were members of the German Historical School, advisors to Bismarck in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Hayek's choice of the German Historical School economists was significant on a number of levels. First, the German Historical School had before the war been the chief rival of the Austrian School of Economics, of which Hayek was a member. Next, though the German Historical School economists were conservative imperialists, cheerleaders for a strong German Reich and opponents of German social democracy, they also were the architects of numerous social welfare reforms. Bismarck embraced these reforms while at the same time repressing the socialists; indeed, the reforms were designed at least in part to undermine the socialist position and thereby strengthen the Empire. Hayek...