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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

F.A. Hayek

The Road To Serfdom

 Conclusion

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THE purpose of this book has not been to sketch a detailed program of a desirable future order of society. If with regard to international affairs we have gone a little beyond its essentially critical task, it was because in this field we may soon be called upon to create a framework within which future growth may have to proceed for a long time to come.

A great deal will depend on how we use the opportunity we shall then have. But, whatever we do, it can only be the beginning of a new, long, and arduous process in which we all hope we shall gradually create a world very different from that which we knew during the last quarter of a century.

It is at least doubtful whether at this stage a detailed blueprint of a desirable internal order of society would be of much use--or whether anyone is competent to furnish it. The important thing now is that we shall come to agree on certain principles and free ourselves from some of the errors which have governed us in the recent past.

However distasteful such an admission may be, we must recognize that we had before this war once again reached a stage where it is more important to clear away the obstacles with which human folly has encumbered our path and to release the creative energy of individuals than to devise further machinery for "guiding" and "directing" them--to create conditions favorable to progress rather than to "plan progress."

The first need is to free ourselves of that worst form of contemporary obscurantism which tries to persuade us that what we have done in the recent past was all either wise or inevitable. We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done way very foolish.

If we are to build a better world, we must have the courage to make a new start-even if that means some reculer pour mieux sauter. It is not those who believe in inevitable tendencies who show this courage, not those who preach a "New Order" which is no more than a projection of the tendencies of the last forty years, and who can think of nothing better than to imitate Hitler.

It is, indeed, those who cry loudest for the New Order who are most completely under the sway of the ideas which have created this war and most of the evils from which we suffer. The young are right if they have little confidence in the ideas which rule most of their elders. But they are mistaken or misled when they believe that these are still the liberal ideas of the nineteenth century, which, in fact, the younger generation hardly knows.

Though we neither can wish nor possess the power to go back to the reality of the nineteenth century, we have the opportunity to realize its ideals--and they were not mean. We have little right to feel in this respect superior to our grandfathers; and we should never forget that it is we, the twentieth century, and not they, who have made a mess of things.

If they had not yet fully learned what was necessary to create the world they wanted, the experience we have since gained ought to have equipped us better for the task. If in the first attempt to create a world of free men we have failed, we must try again.

The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century.

 

• "When he wrote The Road to Serfdom, [Hayek's] was a voice in the wilderness. Now the fight [has] been taken up by people all over the world, by institutions and movements, and the ideas that seemed so strange to many in 1944 can be found from scholarly journals to television programs." Thomas Sowell, Forbes, January 1994.

   

• "One of the most important books of our generation ... It restates for our time the issue between liberty and authority with the power and rigor of reasoning with which John Stuart Mill stated the issue for his own generation in his great essay On Liberty." Henry Hazlitt, New York Times Book Review, September 1944.

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"How sharp a break not only with the recent past but with the whole evolution of Western civilization the modern trend toward socialism means becomes clear if we consider it not merely against the background of the nineteenth century but in a longer historical perspective. We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans... The Nazi leader who described the National Socialist revolution as a counter-Renaissance spoke more truly than he probably knew."  F. A. Hayek