The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A....

The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek) | F. A. Hayek | As revelant today as in 1944

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The Road to Serfdo...

	The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek) F. A. Hayek University Of Chicago Press, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, The textlinks">Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in 1944?when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program?The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945, Reader?s Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best seller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century.

With this new edition, The Road to Serfdom takes its place in the series The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. The volume includes a foreword by series editor and leading Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought. Caldwell has also standardized and corrected Hayek's references and added helpful new explanatory notes. Supplemented with an appendix of related materials ranging from prepublication reports on the initial manuscript to forewords to earlier editions by John Chamberlain, Milton Friedman, and Hayek himself, this new edition of The Road to Serfdom will be the definitive version of Friedrich Hayek's enduring masterwork.

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Ahead of his time

Over 30 years ago, when I was in graduate school, this book was nowhere to be found on any Political Science or Political Theory reading list. I suppose part of the reason was that once the Nazis and Fascists had been defeated, their ideas were no longer seen as important. The question then was whether or not Communism would succeed. Furthermore, then and now, many people in academia had no complaint about government power as long as their side holds the power.

Hayek skillfully deflates that delusion by showing how the very economic powers of government created by the Social Democrats were the powers the Nazis used to consolidate their power.

This book was published 64 years ago but is as timely today as it was then.

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As revelant today as in 1944

Without question one of the finest books every written in the realm of economics and politics. This is required reading for all whom love liberty and freedom.

Why Good Intentions Do Not Mean Good Outcomes

I read this book while in high school, many people thought that I was radical and was being taken in by ideas that sounded great but never worked in principle. Essentially I was surrounded by people who approved of government expansion, as long as it was in their interest, this included fellow students and teachers, who in lectures about US history and government espoused the greatness of the government and those presidents who contributed the most to its expansion. This book readily refutes many of the claims that government expansion is not bad so long as the people helming the expansion are benevolent.

It has become to be interesting to watch the news after reading this book, you will instantly see claims to more regulation of the lives of others and appointing people from academia to run these operations. If ever someone questions this arrangement, such as with the Fed, people will either claim that they do not know enough about the area being regulated or that the examples they point to of regulation gone wrong was an anomaly, enlightened and well-written legislation will solve the problems that may arise from regulation. But through reading this book you realize that the very nature and incentive structure of the bureaucratic system leads even the most well-meaning individuals to stray and even those that do not face the inevitable negative consequences that develop when the government tries to defy economic laws and limit the freedom of its constituents.

This book should be required reading for those in high school (maybe even middle school, but many would not have the historical or vocabulary necessary to understand much of the book) and above. It was relevant in its time, yet it is even more relevant now, because then the fight was obvious, the enemies clear, and the motives and goals of all involved clearly defined. Now the enemies are those who wish us well, those who believe they are doing good when they are actually doing the most harm. The enemies of freedom today, more than ever, use gradual erosion, much like boiling frog, of liberty until waking up one day, we realize much of our freedom is gone. Hayek discusses concepts like these and more, it is a testament to his understanding of the workings of government and the incentives that go along with in addition to understanding basic economic principles that make this work so timeless.

This edition is indeed the definitive, it corrects some of the citation errors in the original and provides many footnotes that help with some of the references Hayek makes to lesser known historical figures, works and events. The index is well done and helps greatly in finding those concepts you want to look over. The Preface to the Original Editions, Foreword to the 1956 and the Preface to the 1976 editions are welcome, they provide added insight, such as what the author wished to change and why he left certain elements the same across the editions. The introduction is something else, a great summary of what Hayek went through to publish this book and what lead him down the path to publishing the book while also putting the book into a historical context and explaining its continued relevance. It is a wonderful look at the history behind the book itself and Hayek as well. Lastly, the Appendix provides several reads that are insightful, the introduction to the 1994 edition by Milton Friedman is welcome. Bruce Caldwell has done a brilliant job with this edition, I find it hard to see anyone making a better edition, this is indeed the definitive.

People, scenarios, governments - these all change with time, but the basic laws underlying economics and the workings of government do not. Just because people want to end poverty, hunger, unequal distribution of wealth and other malaises of modern life, does not mean using force and the government will cure them. As Hayek noted, "Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour 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."

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"All that is gold does not glitter"

This definitive edition has been edited and provided with a Foreword and Introduction by Bruce Caldwell who retained the prefaces and forewords of earlier editions. The text has been enhanced by explanatory notes and new appendices that are listed at the end of this review.

Even after six decades, The Road To Serfdom remains essential for understanding economics, politics and history. Hayek's main point, that whatever the problem, human nature demands that government provide the solution and that this is the road to hell, remains more valid than ever. He demonstrated the similarities between Soviet communism and fascism in Germany and Italy.

The consensus in post-war Europe was for the welfare state which seemed humane and sensible for a long time. Now it is clear that this has led to declining birth-rates amongst native Europeans, mass immigration from North Africa and the Middle East, and a tendency to exchange their ancient cultural values for multiculturalism and moral relativism which is just another form of nihilism as the French philosopher Chantal Delsol observes.

In this timeless classic, Hayek examines issues like planning and power, the fallacy of the utopian idea, state planning versus the rule of law, economic control, totalitarianism, security and economic freedom. He brilliantly explains how we are faced with two irreconcilable forms of social organization. Choice and risk either reside with the individual or s/he is relieved of both. Societies that opt for security instead of economic freedom will in the long run have neither.

Complete economic security is inseparable from restrictions on liberty - it becomes the security of the barracks. When the striving for security becomes stronger than the love of freedom, a society gets into deep, deep trouble. The way to prosperity for all is to remove the obstacles of bureaucracy in order to release the creative energy of individuals.

The government's job is not to plan for progress but to create the conditions favorable to progress. This has been proved by the impressive economic expansion under Reagan and Thatcher and by the amazing growth of the Asian Tiger economies, and most recently India since it started implementing sensible economic policies. Everywhere entrepreneurial energy is unshackled, massive improvements follow.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the contrast between phenomenal growth in formerly communist countries like Estonia or Poland or even the economic health of the UK as measured against the stagnant economies of Germany and France during the first years of the millennium. Old Europe would have benefited by a Thatcher and the French would have welcomed Polish plumbers instead of being resentful.

Hayek warns against utopian yearnings that are exploited by politicians, the stealthy way in which welfarism diminishes individual freedom, the totalitarian impulse and different types of propaganda. As pointed out by Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallen, lack of personal responsibility leads to perpetual adolescence where citizens conflate desires with rights. Defining this process as the "sacralization" of rights, she shows that freedoms are then transformed into entitlements.

What a pity people don't learn; what a blessing we have in The Road to Serfdom as a reminder and a warning. The new Appendix of Related Documents include: Nazi-Socialism (1933), Reader's Report by Frank Knight (1943), Reader's Report by Jacob Marschak (1943), Foreword to the 1944 American Edition by John Chamberlain, Letter from John Scoon to C. Hartley Grattan (1945) and Introduction to the 1994 Edition by Milton Friedman. The book concludes with an index.

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The road to serfdom

This new edition includes a foreword by Bruce Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought. Caldwell has also standardized and corrected Hayek's references and added useful explanatory notes.

Hayek's central thesis of "The textlinks">road to serfdom" is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which had gone down "the road to serfdom" and reached tyranny.

The book has many worthy observations. For example, all people are different by their mental development (which is also influenced by family environment and education, not counting the physical differences of the brain and endocrine system) and thus the classes of the society are needed at least to give more developed people to fully put into action their potential. Liquidation of social classes will also liquidate the abilities of more developed individuals. The same is on the international level. Consider international planning. Whichever honest and democratically open panning system will be adopted, it will be opposed by less developed and poorer nations, because they will see it as ignorance or oppression of their interests. This is obvious - the needs and goals of poor or underdeveloped countries cannot match the goals of rich or developed countries; as the interests of more educated people cannot match the interests of less educated ones.

Many people came to a conclusion that the wealth, in some extent, depends on a level of education. The problem is that not all the people in equal extend incline to the education, to their self-improvement. This is because of the differences of their needs, habits, abilities, capabilities, and so on. Leo Tolstoy in his novel "Resurrection" arose a question of how to improve the level of education: from inside of each individual or from outside? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Should first the level of education in the society be risen which yields a revolution (dialectic transition of quantity into quality) or the revolution should make the environment to foster the education. Hayek doesn't explicitly raise this issue, but brings parallel between delegation of decision making in managing an enterprise and managing the state. Hayek thought that if a company boss makes all decision making solely by himself and doesn't give the work (of decision making) back to the people (see Ronald Heifetz's publications), it is similar to the states with totalitarian government. Such a dictatorship, enterprise-wide or country-wide, can be used in particular circumstances, but should not be used in all cases as the absolutely correct way of management, according to Hayek.

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