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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
F.A. Hayek
The Road To Serfdom
Introduction
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Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose
the pedigree of ideas . — Lord Acton.
CONTEMPORARY events differ from history in that we do
not know the results they will produce. Looking back,
we can assess the significance of past occurrences and
trace the consequences they have brought in their train. But
while history runs its course, it is not history to us. It leads us
into an unknown land, and but rarely can we get a glimpse of
what lies ahead. It would be different if it were given to us to
live a second time through the same events with all the knowl-
edge of what we have seen before. How different would things
apj>ear to us; how important and often alarming would
changes seem that we now scarcely notice! It is probably
fortunate that man can never have this experience and knows
of no laws which history must obey.
Yet, although history never quite repeats itself, and just be-
cause no development is inevitable, we can in a measure learn
from the past to avoid a repetition of the same process. One
need not be a prophet to be aware of impending dangers. An
accidental combination of experience and interest will often
reveal events to one man under aspects which few yet see.
The following pages are the product of an experience as near
as possible to twice living through the same period — or at least
twice watching a very similar evolution of ideas. While this is
an experience one is not likely to gain in one country, it may
in certain circumstance be acquired by living in turn for long
periods in different countries. Though the influences to which
the trend of thought is subject in most civilized nations are to a
large extent similar, they do not necessarily operate at the
same time or at the same speed.
Thus, by moving from one
country to another, one may sometimes twice watch similar
phases of intellectual development. The senses have then be-
come peculiarly acute. When one hears for a second time
opinions expressed or measures advocated which one has first
met twenty or twenty-five years ago, they Eissume a new mean-
ing as symptoms of a definite trend. They suggest, if not the
necessity, at least the probability, that developments will take
a similar course.
It is necessary now to state the unpalatable truth that it is
Germany whose fate we are in some danger of repeating. The
danger is not immediate, it is true, and conditions in England
and the United States are still so remote from those witnessed
in recent years in Germany as to make it difficult to believe
that we are moving in the same direction. Yet, though the
road be long, it is one on which it becomes more difficult to
turn back as one advances. If in the long run we are the makers
of our own fate, in the short run we are the captives of the
ideas we have created. Only if we recognize the danger in
time can we hope to avert it.
It is not to the Germany of Hitler, the Germany of the pres-
ent war, that England and the United States bear yet any re-
semblance. But students of the currents of ideas can hardly fail
to see that there is more than a superficial similarity between
the trend of thought in Germany during and after the last war
and the present current of ideas in the democracies. There
exists now in these countries certainly the same determination
that the organization of the nation which has been achieved
for purposes of defense shall be retained for the purposes of cre-
ation. There is the same contempt for nineteenth-century
liberalism, the same spurious “realism” and even cynicism,
the same fatalistic acceptance of “inevitable trends.”
And at least nine out of every ten of the lessons which our most
vociferous reformers are so anxious we should learn from this
war are precisely the lessons which the Germans did learn from
the last war and which have done much to produce the Nazi
system. We shall have opportunity in the course of this book to
show that there are a large number of other points where at an
interval of fifteen to twenty-five years we seem to follow the ex-
ample of Germany. Although one does not like to be reminded,
it is not so many years since the socialist policy of that country
was generally held up by progressives as an example to be
imitated, just as in more recent years Sweden has been the
model country to which progressive eyes were directed. All
those whose memory goes further back know how deeply for at
least a generation before the last war German thought and
German practice influenced ideals and policy in England and,
to some extent, in the United States.
The author has spent about half of his adult life in his native
Austria, in close touch with German intellectual life, and the
other half in the United States and England. In the latter pe-
riod he has become increasingly convinced that at least some
of the forces which have destroyed freedom in Germany are
also at work here and that the character and the source of this
danger are, if possible, even less understood than they were in
Germany. The supreme tragedy is still not seen that in Ger-
many it was largely people of good will, men who were
admired and held up as models in the democratic countries,
who prepared the way for, if they did not actually create, the
forces which now stand for everything they detest.
Yet our chance of averting a similar fate depends on our facing the
danger and on our being prepared to revise even our most
cherished hopes and ambitions if they should prove to be the
source of the danger. There are few signs yet that we have the
intellectual courage to admit to ourselves that we may have
been wrong. Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism
and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of
the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tenden-
cies. This is a truth which most people were unwilling to see
even when the similarities of many of the repellent features of
the internal regimes in communist Russia and National Social-
ist Germany were widely recognized. As a result, many who
think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of
naziism, and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the
same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to
the abhorred tyranny.
All parallels between developments in different countries
are, of course, deceptive; but I am not basing my argument
mainly on such parallels. Nor am I arguing that these develop-
ments are inevitable. If they were, there would be no point in
writing this. They can be prevented if people realize in time
where their efforts may lead. But until recently there was little
hope that any attempt to make them see the danger would be
successful. It seems, however, as if the time were now ripe for a
fuller discussion of the whole issue. Not only is the problem
now more widely recognized; there are also special reasons
which at this juncture make it imperative that we should face
the issues squarely. *
It will, perhaps, be said that this is not the time to raise an
issue on which opinions clash sharply. But the socialism of
which we speak is not a party matter, and the questions which
we are discussing have little to do with the questions at dispute
between political parties. It does not affect our problem that
some groups may want less socialism than others; that some
want socialism mainly in the interest of one group and others
in that of another. The important point is that, if we take the
people whose views influence developments, they are now in
the democracies in some measure all socialists. If it is no longer
fashionable to emphasize that “we are all socialists now,” this
is so merely because the fact is too obvious. Scarcely anybody
doubts that we must continue to move toward socialism, and
most people are merely trying to deflect this movement in the
interest of a particular class or group.
It is because nearly everybody wants it that we are moving
in this direction. There are no objective facts which make it
inevitable. We shall have to say something about the alleged
inevitability of “planning” later. The main question is where
this movement will lead us. Is it not possible that if the people
whose convictions now give it an irresistible momentum began
to see what only a few yet apprehend, they would recoil in
horror and abandon the quest which for half a century has
engaged so many people of good will? Where these common
beliefs of our generation will lead us is a problem not for one
party but for every one of us — a problem of the most momen-
tous significance. Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than
that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in ac-
cordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly pro-
duce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?
There is an even more pressing reason why at this time we
should seriously endeavor to understand the forces which have
created National Socialism: that this will enable us to under-
stand our enemy and the issue at stake between us. It cannot
be denied that there is yet little recognition of the positive
ideals for which we are fighting. We know that we are fighting
for freedom to shape our life according to our own ideas. That
is a great deal, but not enough. It is not enough to give us the
firm beliefs which we need to resist an enemy who uses propa-
ganda as one of his main weapons not only in the most blatant
but also in the most subtle forms. It is still more insufficient
when we have to counter this propaganda among the people in
the countries under his control and elsewhere, where the effect
of this propaganda will not disappear with the defeat of the
Axis powers. It is not enough if we are to show to others that
what w'e are fighting for is worth their support, and it is not
enough to guide us in the building of a new world safe against
the dangers to which the old one has succumbed.
It is a lamentable fact that the democracies in their dealings
with the dictators before the war, not less than in their at-
tempts at propaganda and in the discussion of their war aims,
have shown an inner insecurity and uncertainty of aim which
can be explained only by confusion about their own ideals and
the nature of the differences which separated them from the
enemy. We have been misled as much because we have refused
to believe that the enemy was sincere in the profession of some
beliefs which we shared as because we believed in the sincerity
of some of his other claims. Have not the parties of the Left as
well as those of the Right been deceived by believing that the
National Socialist party was in the service of the capitalists
and opposed to all forms of socialism? How many features of
Hitler’s system have not been recommended to us for imitation
from the most unexpected quarters, unaware that they are an
integral part of that system and incompatible with the free
society we hope to preserve? The number of dangerous mis-
takes we have made before amd since the outbreak of war be-
cause we do not understand the opponent with whom we are
faced is appalling. It seems almost as if we did not want to un-
derstand the development which has produced totalitarianism
because such an understanding might destroy some of the
dearest illusions to which we are determined to cling.
We shall never be successful in our dealings with the Ger-
mans until we understand the character and the growth of the
ideas which now govern them. The theory which is once again
put forth, that the Germans as such are inherently vicious, is
hardly tenable and not very creditable to those who hold it. It
dishonors the long series of Anglo-Saxon thinkers who during
the last hundred years have gladly taken over what was best,
and not only what was best, in German thought. It overlooks
the fact that, when eighty years ago John Stuart Mill was
writing his great essay On Liberty, he drew his inspiration, more
than from any other men, from two Germans — Goethe and
Wilhelm von Humboldt^ — and forgets the fact that two of the
most influential intellectual forebears of National Socialism —
Thomas Carlyle and Houston Stewart Chamberlain — were a
Scot and an Englishman. In its cruder forms this view is a dis-
grace to those who by maintaining it adopt the worst features
of German racial theories.
The problem is not why the Germans as such are vicious,
which congenitally they are probably no more than other
peoples, but to determine the circumstances which during the
last seventy years have made possible the progressive growth
and the ultimate victory of a particular set of ideas, and why
in the end this victory has brought the most vicious elements
among them to the top. Mere hatred of everything German
instead of the particular ideas which now dominate the Ger-
mans is, moreover, very dangerous, because it blinds those
who indulge in it against a real threat. It is to be feared that
this attitude is frequently merely a kind of escapism, caused by
an unwillingness to recognize tendencies which are not con-
fined to Germany and by a reluctance to re-examine, and if
necessary to discard, beliefs which we have taken over from
the Germans and by which we are still as much deluded as the
Germans were. It is doubly dangerous because the contention
that only the peculiar wickedness of the Germans has pro-
duced the Nazi system is likely to become the excuse for forc-
ing on us the very institutions which have produced that
wickedness.
The interpretation of the developments in Germany and
Italy about to be proffered in this book is very different from
* As some people may think thb statement exaggerated, the testimony of Lord Morley may be worth quoting, who in his Recollections speaks of the "acknowledged point” that the main argument of the essay On Liberty "was not original but came from Germany.”
that given by most foreign observers and by the majority of
exiles from those countries. But if this interpretation is correct,
it will also explain why it is almost impossible for a person
who, like most of the exiles and the foreign correspondents of
English and American newspapers, holds the now prevalent
socialist views to see those events in the proper perspective.
The superficial and misleading view which sees in National
Socialism merely a reaction fomented by those whose privi-
leges or interests were threatened by the advance of socialism
was naturally supported by all those who, although they were
at one time active in the movement of ideas that has led to
National Socialism, have stopped at some point of that de-
velopment and, by the conflict into which this brought them
with the Nazis, were forced to leave their country. But the
fact that they were numerically the only significant opposition
to the Nazis means no more than that in the wider sense prac-
tically all Germans had become socialists and that liberalism
in the old sense had been driven out by socialism. As we hope
to show, the conflict in existence between the National Social-
ist “Right” and the “Left” in Germany is the kind of conflict
that will always arise between rival socialist factions. If this
interpretation is correct, it means, however, that many of
those socialist refugees, in clinging to their beliefs, arc now,
though with the best will in the world, helping to lead their
adopted country the way which Germany has gone.
I know that many of my Anglo-Saxon friends have some-
times been shocked by the semi-Fascist views they would oc-
casionally hear expressed by German refugees, whose genuine-
ly socialist convictions could not be doubted. But while these
observers put this down to the others’ being Germans, the
true explanation is that they were socialists whose experience
had carried them several stages beyond that yet reached by so-
cialists in England and America. It is true, of course, that Ger-
man socialists have found much support in their country from
certain features of the Prussian tradition; and this kinship be-
tween Prussianism and socialism, in which in Germany both
sides gloried, gives additional support to our main contention.*
* That there did exist a certain kinship between socialism and the organization of the Prussian state, consciously organized from the top as in no other country, is undeniable and was freely recognized already by the early French socialists. Long before the ideal of running the whole state on the same principles as a single factory was to inspire nineteenth-century socialism, the Prussian poet
Novalis had already deplored that “no other state has ever been administered so much like a factory as Prussia since the death of Frederick William” (cf. Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], Glauben und Liebcy oder der Kbnig und die Kdnigin [1798 ]).
But it would be a mistake to believe that the specific German
rather than the socialist element produced totalitarianism. It
was the prevalence of socialist views and not Prussianism that
Germany had in common with Italy and Russia — and it was
from the masses and not from the classes steeped in the Prus-
sian tradition, and favored by it, that National Socialism
arose.
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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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