Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Wealth
& Economics:
- F. A. Hayek's
- The Road
to Serfdom
Introduction
- "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 knowledge of what we have seen
before. How different would things appear 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 because 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
circumstances 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 become 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 assume a new meaning 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 present war, that England and the
United States bear yet any resemblance. 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 creation.
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 example 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 period 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 Germany 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 tendencies. 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 Socialist 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
developments 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 momentous significance. Is
there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our
future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce 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
understand 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 propaganda 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 we 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 attempts 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 mistakes we have made before and since the outbreak of war because we do not
understand the opponent with whom we are faced is appalling.
It seems almost as if we did not want to understand 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 Germans 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 disgrace 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 Germans 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 confined to Germany and by a reluctance to reexamine, 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 produced the Nazi system is likely to become
the excuse for forcing 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 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 privileges 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 development 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 practically 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 Socialist "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, are 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 sometimes been shocked
by the semi-Fascist views they would occasionally hear expressed by German refugees, whose
genuinely 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 socialists in
England and America.
It is true, of course, that German socialists have found much support in
their country from certain features of the Prussian tradition; and this kinship between
Prussianism and socialism, in which in Germany both sides gloried, gives additional
support to our main contention. 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 Prussian tradition, and favored by it, that National Socialism
arose.
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