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Friedrich A. Hayek: Roads
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To mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Road to Serfdom, reason interviewed Hayek's most recent explicator, Bruce Caldwell, author of Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek, published in 2003 by the University of Chicago Press. Caldwell is a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and the general editor of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. In early October, he spoke with reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie about the origins of The Road to Serfdom, its continuing relevance, and Hayek's legacy in the 20th century--and in the 21st.
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Hayek worked at LSE until 1950 when he moved to Chicago, joining the Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago. There Hayek moved beyond economic to largely social and philosophic-historical analysis. His major works in these areas include his most famous defense of private property and decentralized markets, The Road to Serfdom (1944), New Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1978), and the compilation The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988). These works, more than his economic studies, provided much of the intellectual inspiration and substance behind the anti-Communist and economic liberal movements in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1962 Hayek left Chicago for the University of Freiburg in Germany, and subsequently for Salzburg, where he spent the rest of his life. The Nobel Prize in 1974 significantly raised interest in his work and in Austrian economics.
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Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944 because he wanted the English to avoid the disastrous path that Germans and Austrians earlier had taken. By the time he republished the book in America in 1956, Hayek could look back and observe that "hot socialism" in Europe had peaked by 1948 (though he claimed small credit for this development [viii]). But the post-war Welfare State had risen to replace outright socialism; and, to his mind, it posed no less a long-term threat to individual freedom, both in Europe and in the United States. (ix) It was that concern that motivated him to republish The Road to Serfdom in the US. He had moved from England to the US in 1950 for a professorial position at the University of Chicago, where he stayed until 1962. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
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Hayek was ... lucky because he lived to see the collapse of communism. While many people today in China and in Eastern Europe may have nice things to say about Hayek and his book, The Road to Serfdom, few people in the US and Western European countries know his name. Hayek’s warning is as relevant today as it was in 1944. China still has a long way to go before Chinese people reach the level of economic and personal freedom envisioned by Hayek. May freedom triumph in those lands that read and remember Hayek and the Road to Serfdom.
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In “Road to Serfdom“, Hayek shows that a system of free markets helps the survival of a free people. People within that system might use that independence for good or bad things, but the system itself leaves all people free. Under Socialism, the dictatorial ends are contained within the means. The whole system itself demands that people should not be free and independent. Hayek was not just making this whole material up in the abstract; he knew exactly what he was writing about totally based on the terrible and awful reality of planned economies.
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It was in this period that Hayek applied his thinking about central planning to current politics. In 1944 he published what became his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, in which he warned of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning. His message was clear: Nazism and fascism were not the only threats to liberty. The little book was condensed in Reader’s Digest and read by millions.
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