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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
F.A. Hayek
The Road To Serfdom
Preface
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WHEN a professional student of social affairs writes a
political book, his first duty is plainly to say so. This
is a political book. I do not wish to disguise this by
describing it, as I might perhaps have done, by the more
elegant and ambitious name of an essay in social philosophy.
But, whatever the name, the essential point remains that all
I shall have to say is derived from certain ultimate values. I
hope I have adequately discharged in the book itself a second
and no less important duty: to make it clear beyond doubt
what these ultimate values are on which the whole argument
depends.
There is, however, one thing I want to add to this. Though
this is a political book, I am as certain as anyone can be that
the beliefs set out in it are not determined by my personal in-
terests. I can discover no reason why the kind of society which
seems to me desirable should offer greater advantages to me
than to the great majority of the people of my country. In
fact, I am always told by my socialist colleagues that as an
economist I should occupy a much more important position
in the kind of society to which I am opposed — provided, of
course, that I could bring myself to accept their views. I feel
equally certain that my opposition to these views is not due to
their being different from those with which I have grown up,
since they are the very views which I held as a young man and
which have led me to make the study of economics my profes-
sion.
For those who, in the current fashion, seek interested
motives in every profession of a political opinion, I may, per-
haps, be allowed to add that I have every possible reason for
not writing or publishing this book. It is certain to offend many
people with whom I wish to live on friendly terms; it has
forced me to put aside work for which I feel better qualified
and to which I attach greater importance in the long run; and,
above all, it is certain to prejudice the reception of the results
of the more strictly academic work to which all my inclina-
tions lead me.
If in spite of this I have come to regard the writing of this
book as a duty which I must not evade, this was mainly due to
a peculiar and serious feature of the discussions of problems of
future economic policy at the present time, of which the public
is scarcely sufficiently aware. This is the fact that the majority
of economists have now for some years been absorbed by the
war machine, and silenced by their official positions, and that
in consequence public opinion on these problems is to an
alarming extent guided by amateurs and cranks, by people
who have an ax to grind or a pet panacea to sell.
In these circumstances one who still has the leisure for literary work is
hardly entitled to keep to himself apprehensions which current
tendencies must create in the minds of many who cannot
publicly express them — though in different circumstances I
should have gladly left the discussion of questions of national
policy to those who are both better authorized and better
qualified for the task.
The central argument of this book was first sketched in an
article entitled “Freedom and the Economic System,” which
appeared in the Contemporary Review for April, 1938, and was
later reprinted in an enlarged form as one of the “Public
Policy Pamphlets” edited by Professor H. D. Gideonse for the
University of Chicago Press (1939). I have to thank the editors
and publishers of both these publications for permission to re-
produce certain passages from them.
F. A. Hayek
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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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