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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
F.A. Hayek
The Road To Serfdom
Foreword
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Shibboleths of our times are expressed in a variety
of terms: “full employment,” “planning,” “social
security,” “freedom from want.” The facts of our
times suggest that none of these things can be had when they
are made conscious objects of government policy. They are
the fool’s-gold words. In Italy they debauched a people and
led to death under the burning African suns. In Russia there
was the first Five-Year Plan; there was also the liquidation of
the three million kulaks. In Germany there was full employ-
ment between 1935 and 1939; but six hundred thousand Jews
are now deprived of their property, scattered to the ends of
the earth, or lying in mass graves in the Polish forests. And in
America the pump never quite filled up after the successive
primings; war alone saved the politicians of “full employment.”
To date, only a handful of writers has dared to trace a con-
nection between our shibboleths and the terror that haunts
the modern world. Among these writers is F. A. Hayek, an
Austrian economist now living in England. Having watched
the congealing of the German, the Italian, and the Danubian
social and economic systems, Hayek is horrified to see the
English succumbing by degrees to the controlled-economy
ideas of the German Walter Rathenau, the Italian syndical-
ists — yes, and Adolf Hitler, who had the courage to draw con-
clusions from the less forthright statism of his predecessors.
This book of Hayek’s — The Road to Serfdom — is a warning, a
cry in a time of hesitation. It says to the British and by impli-
cation to Americans: Stop, look, and listen.
The Road to Serfdom is sober, logical, severe. It does not make
for ingratiating reading. But the logic is incontestable: “full
employment,” “social security,” and “freedom from want”
cannot be had unless they come as by-products of a system
that releases the free energies of individuals. When “society”
and the “good of the whole” and “the greatest good of the
greatest number” are made the overmastering touchstones of
state action, no individual can plan his own existence. For the
state “planners” must arrogate to themselves the right to move
in on any sector of the economic system if the good of “so-
ciety” or the “general welfare” is paramount. If the rights of
the individual get in the way, the rights of the individual must go.
The threat of state “dynamism” results in a vast, usually
unconscious fear among all producing interests that still retain
a conditional freedom of action. And the fear affects the
springs of action. Men must try to outguess the government as
yesterday they tried to outguess the market. But there is this
difference; the market factors obeyed at least relatively ob-
jective laws, while governments are subject to a good deal of
whim. One can stake one’s future on a judgment that reckons
with inventories, market saturation points, the interest rate,
the trend curves of buyers’ desires. But how can an individual
outguess a government whose aim is to suspend the objective
laws of the market whenever and wherever it wishes to do so
in the name of “planning”? Shrewdly, Peter Drucker once
remarked that the “planners” are all improvisers. They
create not certainty but uncertainty — for individuals. And, as
Hayek demonstrates, the end result of this uncertainty is civil
war or the dictatorship that averts civil war.
The alternative to “planning” is the “rule of law.” Hayek is
no devotee of laissez faire; he believes in a design for an enter-
prise system. Design is compatible with minimum-wage
standards, health standards, a minimum amount of compul-
sory social insurance. It is even compatible with certain types
of government investment. But the point is that the individual
must know, in advance, just how the rules are going to work.
He cannot plan his own business, his own future, even his own
family affairs, if the “dynamism” of a central planning au-
thority hangs over his head.
In some respects Hayek is more “English” than the modern
English. He belongs, with modifications, to the great Man-
chester line, not to the school of the Webbs. It may be that he
is also more “American” than the modern Americans. If so,
one can only wish for the widest possible United States audi-
ence for The Road to Serfdom,
John Chamberlain
New York, N.Y.
July 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
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