Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Wealth
& Economics:
- F. A. Hayek's
- The Road
to Serfdom
Preface:
1956
PREFACE to the 1956 Paperback Edition
ALTHOUGH THIS BOOK might in some respects have been different if I had written it in the
first instance with American readers primarily in mind, it has by now made for itself too
definite if unexpected a place in this country to make any rewriting advisable. Its
republication in a new form, however, more than ten years after its first appearance, is
perhaps an appropriate occasion for explaining its original aim and for a few comments on
the altogether unforeseen and in many ways curious success it has had in this country.
The book was written in England during the war years and was designed almost exclusively
for English readers. Indeed, it was addressed mainly to a very special class of readers in
England. It was in no spirit of mockery that I dedicated it "To the Socialists of All
Parties." It had its origin in many discussions which, during the preceding ten
years, I had with friends and colleagues whose sympathies had been inclined toward the
left, and it was in continuation of those arguments that I wrote The Road to Serfdom.
When Hitler came into power in Germany, I had already been teaching at the University of
London for several years, but I kept in close touch with affairs on the Continent and was
able to do so until the outbreak of war. What I had thus seen of the origins and evolution
of the various totalitarian movements made me feel that English public opinion,
particularly among my friends who held "advanced" views on social matters,
completely misconceived the nature of those movements. Even before the war I was led by
this to state in a brief essay what became the central argument of this book. But after
war broke out I felt that this widespread misunderstanding of the political systems of our
enemies, and soon also of our new ally, Russia, constituted a serious danger which had to
be met by a more systematic effort. Also, it was already fairly obvious that England
herself was likely to experiment after the war with the same kind of policies which I was
convinced had contributed so much to destroy liberty elsewhere.
Thus this book gradually took shape as a warning to the socialist intelligentsia of
England; with the inevitable delays of wartime production, it finally appeared there early
in the spring of 1944. This date will, incidentally, also explain why I felt that in order
to get a hearing I had somewhat to restrain myself in my comments on the regime of our
wartime ally and to choose my illustrations mainly from developments in Germany.
It seems that the book appeared at a propitious moment, and I can feel only gratification
at the success it had in England, which, though very different in kind, was quantitatively
no smaller than it was to be in the United States. On the whole, the book was taken in the
spirit in which it was written, and its argument was seriously examined by those to whom
it was mainly addressed. Excepting only certain of the leading politicians of the Labour
party--who, as if to provide an illustration for my remarks on the nationalist tendencies
of socialism, attacked the book on the ground that it was written by a foreigner--the
thoughtful and receptive manner in which it was generally examined by persons who must
have found its conclusions running counter to their strongest convictions was deeply
impressive. The same applies also to the other European countries where the book
eventually appeared; and its particularly cordial reception by the post-Nazi generation of
Germany, when copies of a translation published in Switzerland at last reached that
country, was one of the unforeseen pleasures I derived from the publication.
Rather different was the reception the book had in the United States when it was published
here a few months after its appearance in England. I had given little thought to its
possible appeal to American readers when writing it. It was then twenty years since I had
last been in America as a research student, and during that time I had somewhat lost touch
with the development of American ideas. I could not be sure how far my argument had direct
relevance to the American scene, and I was not in the least surprised when the book was in
fact rejected by the first three publishing houses approached. It was certainly most
unexpected when, after the book was brought out by its present publishers, it soon began
to sell at a rate almost unprecedented for a book of this kind, not intended for popular
consumption.
- And I was even more surprised by the violence of the
reaction from both political wings, by the lavish praise the book received from some
quarters no less than by the passionate hatred it appeared to arouse in others.
Contrary to my experience in England,
- in America the kind of people to whom this book was
mainly addressed seem to have rejected it out of hand as a malicious and disingenuous
attack on their finest ideals; they appear never to have paused to examine its argument.
The language used and the emotion shown in some of the more adverse
criticism the book received were indeed rather extraordinary. But scarcely less surprising
to me was the enthusiastic welcome accorded to the book by many whom I never expected to
read a volume of this type--and from many more of whom I still doubt whether in fact they
ever read it.
And I must add that occasionally the manner in which it was used vividly
brought home to me the truth of Lord Acton's observation that "at all times sincere
friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have
prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from
their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been
disastrous."
It seems hardly likely that this extraordinary difference in the
reception of the book on the two sides of the Atlantic is due entirely to a difference in
national temperament. I have since become increasingly convinced that the explanation must
lie in a difference of intellectual situation at the time when it arrived. In England, and
in Europe generally, the problems with which I dealt had long ceased to be abstract
questions. The ideals which I examined had long before come down to earth, and even their
most enthusiastic adherents had already seen concretely some of the difficulties and
unlooked-for results which their application produced. I was thus writing about phenomena
of which almost all my European readers had some more or less close experience, and I was
merely arguing systematically and consistently what many had already intuitively felt.
There was already a disillusionment about these ideals under way, which their critical
examination merely made more vocal or explicit.
In the United States, on the other hand, these ideals were still fresh and more virulent.
It was only ten or fifteen years earlier--not forty or fifty, as in England--that a large
part of the intelligentsia had caught the infection. And, in spite of the experimentation
of the New Deal, their enthusiasm for the new kind of rationally constructed society was
still largely unsoiled by practical experience. What to most Europeans had in some measure
become vieux jeux was to the American radicals still the glittering hope of a
better world which they had embraced and nourished during the recent years of the Great
Depression.
Opinion moves fast in the United States, and even now it is difficult to remember how
comparatively short a time it was before The Road to Serfdom appeared that the
most extreme kind of economic planning had been seriously advocated and the model of
Russia held up for imitation by men who were soon to play an important role in public
affairs. It would be easy enough to give chapter and verse for this, but it would be
invidious now to single out individuals. Be it enough to mention that in 1934 the newly
established National Planning Board devoted a good deal of attention to the example of
planning provided by these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan.
Ten years later we had of course learned to refer to these same
countries as "totalitarian," had fought a long war with three of them, and were
soon to start a "cold war" with the fourth. Yet the contention of this book that
the political development in those countries had something to do with their economic
policies was then still indignantly rejected by the advocates of planning in this country.
- It suddenly became the fashion to deny that the
inspiration of planning had come from Russia and to contend, as one of my eminent critics
put it, that it was "a plain fact that Italy, Russia, Japan, and Germany all reached
totalitarianism by very different roads."
The whole intellectual climate in the United States at the time The
Road to Serfdom appeared was thus one in which it was bound either profoundly to
shock or greatly to delight the members of sharply divided groups. In consequence, in
spite of its apparent success, the book has not had here the kind of effect I should have
wished or which it has had elsewhere. It is true that its main conclusions are today
widely accepted. If twelve years ago it seemed to many almost sacrilege to suggest that
fascism and communism are merely variants of the same totalitarianism which central
control of all economic activity tends to produce, this has become almost a commonplace.
It is now even widely recognized that democratic socialism is a very precarious and
unstable affair, ridden with internal contradictions and everywhere producing results most
distasteful to many of its advocates.
For this sobered mood the lessons of events and more popular discussions of the problem (The most effective of these was undoubtedly George Orwell's 1984. The
author had earlier kindly reviewed this book.) are certainly more
responsible than this book. Nor was my general thesis as such original when it was
published. Although similar but earlier warnings may have been largely forgotten, the
dangers inherent in the policies which I criticized had been pointed out again and again.
Whatever merits this book possesses consist not in the reiteration of this thesis but in
the patient and detailed examination of the reasons why economics planning will produce
such unlooked-for results and of the process by which they come about.
It is for this reason that I rather hope that the time may now be more favorable in
America for a serious consideration of the true argument of the book than it was when it
first appeared. I believe that what is important in it still has to render its service,
although I recognize that the hot socialism against which it was mainly directed-that
organized movement toward a deliberate organization of economic life by the state as the
chief owner of the means of production-is nearly dead in the Western world.
The century of socialism in this sense probably came to an end around
1948. Many of its illusions have been discarded even by its leaders, and elsewhere as well
as in the United States the very name has lost much of its attraction. Attempts will no
doubt be made to rescue the name for movements which are less dogmatic, less doctrinaire,
and less systematic. But an argument applicable solely against those clear-cut conceptions
of social reform which characterized the socialist movements of the past might today well
appear as tilting against windmills.
Yet though hot socialism is probably a thing of the past, some of its
conceptions have penetrated far too deeply into the whole structure of current thought to
justify complacency. If few people in the Western world now want to remake society from
the bottom according to some ideal blueprint, a great many still believe in measures
which, though not designed completely to remodel the economy, in their aggregate effect
may well unintentionally produce this result. And, even more than at the time when I wrote
this book, the advocacy of policies which in the long run cannot be reconciled with the
preservation of a free society is no longer a party matter.
That hodgepodge of ill-assembled and often inconsistent ideals which
under the name of the Welfare State has largely replaced socialism as the goal of the
reformers needs very careful sorting-out if its results are not to be very similar to
those of full-fledged socialism. This is not to say that some of its aims are not both
practicable and laudable. But there are many ways in which we can work toward the same
goal, and in the present state of opinion there is some danger that our impatience for
quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for
achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society.
The increasing tendency to rely on administrative coercion and
discrimination where a modification of the general rules of law might, perhaps more
slowly, achieve the same object, and to resort to direct state controls or to the creation
of monopolistic institutions where judicious use of financial inducements might evoke
spontaneous efforts is still a powerful legacy of the socialist period which is likely to
influence policy for a long time to come.
Just because in the years ahead of us political ideology is not likely to aim at a clearly
defined goal but toward piece-meal change, a full understanding of the process through
which certain kinds of measures can destroy the bases of an economy based on the market
and gradually smother the creative powers of a free civilization seems now of the greatest
importance.
- Only if we understand why and how certain kinds of
economic controls tend to paralyze the driving forces of a free society, and which kinds
of measures are particularly dangerous in this respect, can we hope that social
experimentation will not lead us into situations none of us want.
It is as a contribution to this task that this book is intended. I hope
that at least in the quieter atmosphere of the present it will be received as what it was
meant to be, not as an exhortation to resistance against any improvement or
experimentation, but as a warning that we should insist that any modification in our
arrangements should pass certain tests (described in the central chapter on the Rule of
Law) before we commit ourselves to courses from which withdrawal may be difficult.
The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does
not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader. But
there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any
misunderstanding.
- I use throughout the term "liberal" in the
original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current
American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this.
It has been part of the camouflage of leftist movements in this country,
helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that
"liberal" has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government
control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty
should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but
should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium.
- This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the
consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.
It is true, of course, that in the struggle against the believers in the
all-powerful state the true liberal must sometimes make common cause with the
conservative, and in some circumstances, as in contemporary Britain, he has hardly any
other way of actively working for his ideals.
- But true liberalism is still distinct from conservatism,
and there is danger in the two being confused.
Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a
social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is
often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic,
anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods
of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes
are desirable if this world is to become a better place.
- A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to
be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the
protection of privilege.
The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all
privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state
granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.
Perhaps a further word of apology is required for my allowing this book to reappear in
entirely unchanged form after the lapse of almost twelve years. I have many times tried to
revise it, and there are numerous points I should like to explain at greater length or to
state more cautiously or to fortify by more illustration and proof. But all attempts at
rewriting only proved that I could never again produce as short a book covering as much of
the field; and it seems to me that, whatever other merits it may have, its relative
brevity is its greatest. I have thus been forced to the conclusion that whatever I want to
add to the argument I must attempt in separate studies. I have begun to do so in various
essays, some of which provide a more searching discussion of certain philosophical and
economic issues on which the present book only touches.
On the special question of the roots of the ideas here criticized and of
their connection with some of the most powerful and impressive intellectual movements of
this age, I have commented in another volume. And before long I hope to supplement the
all-too brief central chapter of this book by a more extensive treatment of the relation
between equality and justice.
There is one particular topic, however, on which the reader will with justice expect me to
comment on this occasion, yet which I could even less treat adequately without writing a
new book. Little more than a year after The Road to Serfdom first appeared, Great
Britain had a socialist government which remained in power for six years. And the question
of how far this experience has confirmed or refuted my apprehensions is one which I must
try to answer at least briefly. If anything, this experience has strengthened my concern
and, I believe I may add, has taught the reality of the difficulties I pointed out to many
for whom an abstract argument would never have carried conviction. Indeed, it was not long
after the Labour government came into power that some of' the issues which my critics in
America dismissed as bogeys became in Great Britain main topics of political discussion.
Soon even official documents were gravely discussing the danger of totalitarianism raised
by the policy of economic planning.
There is no better illustration of the manner in which the inherent
logic of their policies drove an unwilling socialist government into the kind of coercion
it disliked than the following passage in the Economic Survey for 1947 (which the Prime
Minister presented to Parliament in February of that year) and its sequel:
"There is an essential difference between totalitarian and democratic planning. The
former subordinates all individual desires and preferences to the demand of the State. For
this purpose, it uses various methods of compulsion upon the individual which deprive him
of his freedom of choice. Such methods may be necessary even in a democratic country
during the extreme emergency of a great war. Thus the British people gave their war time
Government the power to direct labour. But in normal times the people of a democratic
country will not give up their freedom of choice to their Government. A democratic
Government must therefore conduct its economic planning in a manner which preserves the
maximum possible freedom of choice to the individual citizen."
The interesting point about this profession of laudable intentions is that six months
later the same government found itself in peacetime forced to put the conscription of
labor back on the statute book. It hardly diminishes the significance of this when it is
pointed out that the power was in fact never used because, if it is known that the
authorities have power to coerce, few will wait for actual coercion.
But it is rather difficult to see how the government could have
persisted in its illusions when in the same document it claims that it was now for
"the Government to say what is the best use for the resources in the national
interest" and to "lay down the economic task for the nation: it must say which
things are the most important and what the objectives of policy ought to be."
Of course, six years of socialist government in England have not produced anything
resembling a totalitarian state. But those who argue that this has disproved the thesis of
The Road to Serfdom have really missed one of its main points: that
- the most important change which extensive government
control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.
This is necessarily a slow affair, a process which extends not over a
few years but perhaps over one or two generations.
The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its
attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political
institutions under which it lives.
- This means, among other things, that even a strong
tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new
institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.
The consequences can of course be averted if that spirit reasserts
itself in time and the people not only throw out the party which has been leading them
further and further in the dangerous direction but also recognize the nature of the danger
and resolutely change their course. There is not yet much ground to believe that the
latter has happened in England.
Yet the change undergone by the character of the British people, not merely under its
Labour government but in the course of the much longer period during which it has been
enjoying the blessings of a paternalistic welfare state, can hardly be mistaken. These
changes are not easily demonstrated but are clearly felt if one lives in the country.
In Illustration, I will cite a few significant passages from a
sociological survey dealing with the impact of the surfeit of regulation on the mental
attitudes of the young. It is concerned with the situation before the Labour government
came into power, in fact, about the time this book was first published, and deals mainly
with the effects of those war regulations which the Labour government made permanent:
- "It is above all in the city that the province of the optional felt
as dwindling away to nothing. At school, in the place of irk, on the journey to and fro,
even in the very equipment A provisioning of the home, many of the activities normally
possible to human beings are either forbidden or enjoined. special agencies, called
Citizen's Advice Bureaus, are set up to steer the bewildered through the forest of rules,
and to indicate to the persistent the rare clearings where a private person may still make
a choice .... [The town lad] is conditioned not lift a finger without refering mentally to
the book of words first. A time-budget of an ordinary city youth for an ordinary working
day would show the he spends great stretches of his eking hour going through motions that
have been predetermined for him by directives in whose framing he has had no part, whose
precise intention he seldom understands, and of lose appropriateness he cannot judge . . .
. The inference at what the city lad needs is more discipline and tighter control is too
hasty. It would be nearer the mark to say that he is suffering from an overdose of control
already . . . . Surveying parents and his older brothers or sisters he finds them as
regulation-bound as himself. He sees them so acclimatised to that state that they seldom
plan and carry out under their own ,am any new social excursion or enterprise. He thus
looks forward to no future period at which a sinewy faculty of responsibility is likely to
be of service to himself or others .... he young people] are obliged to stomach so much
external d, as it seems to them meaningless control that they seek ;ape and recuperation
in an absence of discipline as complete as they can make it."
Is it too pessimistic to fear that a generation grown up under these
conditions is unlikely to throw off the fetters to which it has grown used? Or does this
description not rather fully bear out De Tocqueville's prediction of the "new kind of
servitude" when
- "after having thus successively taken each member of the community
in its powerful grasp, and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm
over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small
complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most
energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not
shattered but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are
constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents
existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and
stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid
and industrial animals, of which government is the shepherd. I have always thought that
servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be
combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom
and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the
people."
What De Tocqueville did not consider was
- how long such a government would remain in the hands of
benevolent despots when it would be so much more easy for any group of ruffians to keep
itself indefinitely in power by disregarding all the traditional decencies of political
life.
Perhaps I should also remind the reader that I have sever accused the
socialist parties of deliberately aiming at a totalitarian regime or even suspected that
the leaders of the old socialist movements might ever show such inclinations.
- What I have argued in this book, and what the
British experience convinces me even more to be true, is that the unforeseen but
inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the
policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand.
I explicitly stress that
- "socialism can be put into practice only by methods
of which most socialists disapprove" and even add that in this "the old
socialist parties were inhibited by their democratic ideals" and that "they did
not possess the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task."
I am afraid the impression one gained under the Labour government was
that these inhibitions were if anything weaker among the British socialists than they had
been among their German fellow-socialists twenty-five years earlier. Certainly German
Social Democrats, in the comparable period of the 1920's, under equally or more difficult
economic conditions, never approached as closely to totalitarian planning as the British
Labour government has done.
Since I cannot here examine the effect of these policies in detail, I will rather quote
the summary judgments of other servers who may be less suspect of preconceived opinions.
Some of the most damning, in fact, come from men who not long before had
themselves been members of the Labour Party.
- Thus Mr. Ivor Thomas, in a book apparently intended to
explain why he left that party, comes to the conclusion that "from the point of view
of fundamental human liberties there is little to choose between communism, socials, and
national socialism. They all are examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state . . .
in its essentials not only is completed socialism the same as communism but it hardly
differs from fascism."
- The most serious development is the growth of a
measure of arbitrary administrative coercion and the progressive destruction of the
cherished foundation of British liberty, the Rule of Law, for exactly the reasons here
discussed in chapter 6.
This process had of course started long before the last Labour
government came into power and had been accentuated by the war. But the attempts at
economic planning under the Labour government carried it to a point which makes it
doubtful whether it can be said that the Rule of Law still prevails in Britain.
- The "New Despotism" of which a Lord Chief
justice had warned Britain as long as twenty-five years ago is, as The Economist
recently observed, no longer a mere danger but an established fact.
It is a despotism exercised by a thoroughly conscientious and honest
bureaucracy for what they sincerely believe is the good of the country.
- But it is nevertheless an arbitrary government, in
practice free from effective parliamentary control; and its machinery would be as
effective for any other than the beneficent purposes for which it is now used.
I doubt whether it was much exaggerated when recently an eminent British
jurist, in a careful analysis of these trends, came to the conclusions that
- "in Britain to-day, we live on the edge of
dictatorship. Transition would be easy, swift, and it could be accomplished with complete
legality.
Already so many steps have been taken in this direction, due to the
completeness of power possessed by the Government of the day, and the absence of any real
check such as the terms of a written constitution or the existence of an effective second
chamber, that those still to be taken are small in comparison.
For a more detailed analysis of the economic policies of the British Labour government and
its consequences I cannot do better than refer the reader to Professor John Jewkes's Ordeal
by Planning (London: Macmillan & Co. , 1948). It is the best discussion known to
me of a concrete instance of the phenomena discussed in general terms in this book. It
supplements it better than anything I could add here and spells out a lesson which is of
significance far beyond Great Britain.
It seems now unlikely that, even when another Labour government should come into power in
Great Britain, it would resume the experiments in large-scale nationalization and
planning. But in Britain, as elsewhere in the world, the defeat of the onslaught of
systematic socialism has merely given those who are anxious to preserve freedom a
breathing space in which to re-examine our ambitions and to discard all those parts of the
socialist inheritance which are a danger to a free society.
- Without such a revised conception of our social aims, we
are likely to continue to drift in the same direction in which outright socialism would
merely have carried us a little faster.
F. A. HAYEK
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