The Road to Serfdom

[I]n his classic book, The Road to Serfdom, Hayek presents us with a multidimensional view of the corrosive nature of government control. He does not focus on the one-dimensional economic effects of state regulation. In fact, one might say that his primary concern is with the insidious, multidimensional effects of statism—how its consequences redound throughout a nexus of social relations: economic, political, and even social-psychological ... Hayek analyzes statism ... as a phenomenon whose effects can be measured on many different levels of generality and from many different vantage points.

[Hayek] was most famous ... for his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, a more popular treatment of many of the ideas expressed in Individualism and Economic Order that had a deep and profound effect on the English-speaking world. Its theme—that statism, socialism, and the erosion of economic liberty meant the erosion of political and civil liberty—was a brilliant exposition of classical liberal ideas ... It is through The Road to Serfdom—which was condensed by Reader's Digest and circulated ... by the Book of the Month Club—that Hayek likely had his biggest effect on public policy.

The problems of socialism that [Hayek] had observed ... led him to write The Road to Serfdom (1944). This book forced advocates of socialism to confront an additional problem, over and beyond the technical economic one ... In The Road to Serfdom Hayek also argued that there was good reason to suspect that those who would rise to the top in a socialistic regime would be those who had a comparative advantage in exercising discretionary power and were willing to make unpleasant decisions. And it was inevitable that these powerful men would run the system to their own personal advantage.

This analysis ... informs Hayek's best-known work, "The Road to Serfdom," which he wrote as a wartime warning to a popular audience. Published in 1944 and dedicated "to the socialists of all parties," the book argued that the logic of socialist central planning implied the erosion of personal freedoms. Britain's well-intended socialists were headed down the same path as the National Socialists whose rise Hayek had witnessed in Austria ... [I]n the United States, where Reader's Digest published a condensed version, "The Road to Serfdom" was a bestseller and a political lightning rod.

Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek organized the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. In 1944, Hayek wrote a seminal book, The Road to Serfdom, which argued that government central planning inevitably led to the rise of the totalitarian socialist state. Marxists maintained that fascism was a form of decaying capitalism, but Hayek's book also included a trenchant critique of Nazism as a form of socialism. After writing The Road to Serfdom, Hayek toured the United States. The trip contributed to his decision to issue a call to free-market advocates to meet at Mont Pelerin.

[F. A. Hayek's] seminal work The Road to Serfdom was first published in 1944 and has become a classic warning against the dangers to freedom inherent in the planned economy; it's as powerful today as the day it was written. Chapters like "Why the Worst Get on Top" and "The End of Truth" are both provocative and chilling. Don't pass this one up!

Hayek began amplifying Mises's criticisms of socialism, explaining that a developed system of division of labor is just too complex to be controlled and directed through any form of central planning. Only competitively formed market prices can successfully coordinate all the activities of the multitudes of market participants. This argument culminated in Hayek's most influential book, The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, in which he showed not only that planning could not work but inevitably ran the risk of degenerating into political tyranny.

I'm teaching a five-week online class on F.A. Hayek's classic book, The Road to Serfdom. After Glenn Beck invited our friends Tom Woods and Yuri Maltsev to appear on his television show to discuss the book, it went to #1 in sales on Amazon.com. It did so because so many people understand that the explosion of government that we are currently witnessing can lead to nothing but more tax slavery and economic depression. The Road to Serfdom is a classic warning of the dangers of Big Government. In reading it one learns ... a great deal about the entire Austrian tradition of scholarship.