53 pages • 1 hour read
Friedrich HayekThe Road To Serfdom
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1944A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Abandoned Road”
What caused the sudden rise of totalitarian regimes—Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia—during the early twentieth century? Hayek suggests that citizens of Western liberal democracies, stunned by these sudden upwellings in the midst of their progressive world, and galvanized into battle against the threat during World War II, were blind to the possibility that they may have contributed unwittingly to the buildup of those very dictatorships.
Instead, people in England, the United States, and other democratic countries simply assumed that the authoritarian world was disconnected from the liberal one. It was “easier and more comforting to think that they are entirely different from us and that what happened there cannot happen here” (66).
Yet the ideals of liberalism—personal autonomy, freedom from oppression, freedom of expression—had suffered steady erosion during the decades leading up to World War II. The growth of commerce and science had liberated people from “a rigidly organized hierarchic system” (69) to pursue prosperity under the new banner of personal liberty. This approach was so successful that citizens began to take their newfound wellbeing for granted, and progress began to seem too slow. The old ideal of freedom was challenged by a new concept, socialism, which proposed that governments take greater control of economies to speed up progress. The problem with this, warns Hayek, is that “[w]e have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past” (67).
England’s ardor for, and leadership in, the principles of liberty began to cool, and Western democracies looked eastward to Germany for new ideas. Germany became a hotbed of revolt against personal freedom, favoring instead greater controls on society. Hayek notes that “whether it was socialism in its more radical form or merely ‘organization’ or ‘planning’ of a less radical kind, German ideas were everywhere readily imported and German institutions imitated” (73). Soon, people believed that “the political ideals of England and America were hopelessly outmoded and a thing to be ashamed of” (75). It was only a matter of time, then, before disaster would strike.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Great Utopia”
The revolt against liberalism began early, not long after the French Revolution, among the French themselves. Reformers envisioned a socialism that would “‘terminate the revolution’ by a deliberate reorganization of society on hierarchical lines”; they also counseled against “freedom of thought” (76). Early socialists preached equality gained by “freedom from necessity,” but “[f]reedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth” (77). This shifts the concept of freedom away from anti-coercion and toward the notion of the “freedom” to force others to hand over their wealth.
Hayek notes that socialists have nonetheless usurped the title “liberal” from the freedom movement, so that “the idea of socialism’s leading to the opposite of liberty should appear inconceivable” (78).
The loss of freedom under socialism is demonstrated by the two main totalitarian regimes of the 20th century: Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Hayek quotes several public figures, including former socialists, who remarked on the similarities between the two tyrannies, especially in the nationalization and collectivization of their respective societies. Hayek argues that Nazism is simply the end result of Marxist socialism, and that many pundits had “been struck by the number of leading men, from Mussolini downward […] who began as socialists and ended as Fascists or Nazis” (80). Nazis and Marxists often could convert one another, owing to their similarities, but neither could compromise with their true enemy, “the liberal of the old type” (81).
Despite all this evidence, Western liberals persist in believing that socialism and freedom can coexist. Hayek declares that democratic socialism produces something “utterly different” (82).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Individualism and Collectivism”
Hayek sets forth a definition of socialism: “the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of ‘planned economy’ in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body” (83). Socialism is a method meant to achieve the goal of equalized distribution of resources. This requires central planning, which can as easily be used to divert resources to a favored group in society.
Socialists often disagree about the methods but rarely about the end: redistribution of wealth. To clear up the confusion about methods, Hayek suggests that socialism is simply the most significant example of collectivism, “that sort of planning which is necessary to realize any given distributive ideals” (84). Hayek’s critique centers on the collectivist nature of socialism, and thus “all the consequences with which we shall be concerned in this book follow from the methods of collectivism irrespective of the ends for which they are used” (84).
The idea of central planning gains traction because it is vague yet sounds sensible and logical. Nearly everyone agrees that political and social problems should be addressed with plans; debaters thus argue over what type of plan should be implemented, but few question whether there should be a central plan at all. Even old-school economic liberals agree that “in order that competition should work beneficially, a carefully thought-out legal framework is required” (85). In this respect, collectivists begin the debate with a head start.
By contrast, economic liberals insist that marketplace competition and free price setting is “the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority” (86). An underlying legal framework should prevent the restriction of trade between buyers and sellers that “deprives competition of its power of bringing about an effective coordination of individual efforts” (86). Exceptions can and should be made to protect public safety, provide limited social services, and improve infrastructure. Beyond that, laws should be adjusted until they encourage trade to flow as freely as possible.
The power of the state has, however, shifted away from refereeing the free market and toward replacing it entirely: “What in effect unites the socialists of the Left and the Right is hostility to competition and a common desire to replace it by a directed economy” (88).
The battle between Left and Right over economics can result in a mishmash between the two views, “a sort of syndicalist or ‘corporative’ organization of industry, in which competition is more or less suppressed but planning is left in the hands of the independent monopolies of the separate industries” (88). This condition cannot persist but evolves into complete government control of industries.
Many people suppose that some other mixture of free markets and central planning can yet be managed. Hayek argues this would amount to a worst-of-both-worlds situation that also would collapse quickly into total central planning.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The love of liberty—freedom from government tyranny, respect for individuals—suffered a long decline in Europe, until Western democracies began to see freedom as a source of unfairness. Thus, they turned their attention toward collectivism. To the east, two centrally-planned societies, Russia and Germany, demonstrated the perils of socialism, but western intellectuals ignored them as aberrant dictatorships. Hayek sounds the alarm, warning that these two countries behave exactly as socialist societies must, and to flirt with such a system is to dance with the devil.
Hayek predicted correctly that Western democracies would at least try socialism. Postwar England’s economy, for example, suffered under decades of semi-socialist planning, until the public rejected it. The allure of the collectivist ideal waxes and wanes over time but seems always to recur; anger at accumulated wealth is ever in the news. Hayek notes that conservatives tend ultimately to side with progressives about the need for larger government, a sign that collectivist thinking has seeped into our institutions. In these respects, The Road to Serfdom is evergreen, its arguments highly relevant in today’s political arena.
