The dangers about which Hayek warned are ever present.Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom is firmly established as one of those books you’re supposed to read.īut on the spectrum of works about economics, it probably falls more on the Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital side than on the Economics in One Lessonor even Freakonomics side. The Foundation for Economic Education is happy to present this work to a new generation.

It tells the dramatic story of a society dealing with economic decline in wartime turning to unworkable political fixes, authoritarianism, and eventual control of the whole of economic life.

In addition, a magazine called Look, distributed by General Motors, released a much-reduced version of Hayek’s argument in the form of cartoons. The Foundation for Economic Education has made this reduction available online in HTML and in PDF. In 1945, the Readers Digest released a masterful reduction of the book for a popular audience. Hayek sought to show that fascist forms of economic organization were not peculiar to the 'German mind' or limited to rarified times and places but rather represent a grave danger to the whole world. Popular wisdom regards this book as a warning against socialism, which is true enough, but a closer look reveals something striking: its primary warning concerns not Soviet-style socialism but rather the fascist form that was then sweeping Europe. Hayek regarded this path as deeply dangerous, one that threatened to convert free nations into the very thing they were supposedly fighting. Even countries with relatively free economies turned to economic planning and political centralization for the duration. This argument shocked a generation of intellectuals who - very much like now - refuse to consider the integral relationship between liberty generally and freedom in the economic realm. The difference between the Reds and Browns, Hayek argued, matters in theory but not in practice: both paths lead to serfdom. With central control comes corruption, servitude, and relative impoverishment. Every step away from economic liberty takes us closer to authoritarian control over the whole of society. The book argued that there can be no political or civil liberty without economic liberty as a first principle.

Hayek’s Road to Serfdom rocked the English-speaking world.

The road to serfdom 1944