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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 12-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Socialist Roots of Nazism”
Hayek denies that Nazism is mindlessly irrational. Instead, it is the distillation of an important trend of political thought, “simply collectivism freed from all traces of an individualist tradition which might hamper its realization” (181). Hayek cites a number of intellectuals outside Germany, including Thomas Carlyle, who helped lay the foundations of what grew into the Third Reich. But the main influence came from socialists inside Germany.
These believers finally saw that their collectivist dream could not be realized as long as socialism contained precepts of individual liberty: “It was the union of the anticapitalist forces of the Right and of the Left, the fusion of radical and conservative socialism, which drove out from Germany everything that was liberal” (182).
Hayek mentions several important 19th- and early 20th-century socialist thinkers who believed that, under a collectivist system, “the individual has no rights but only duties” (183). During World War I, socialist authors argued that the Germans ought to regain their warlike spirit in a battle against decadent British commercialism. One socialist believed the ideal of freedom and the ideal of organization were in conflict, that organization ought to win out, and that Germany would lead the way as the ideal industrial seedbed for socialism.
German socialists further argued that World War I was actually a war between socialism and the backward-looking British bourgeoisie and its allies, who believed in individualism and freedom. Hayek gives example after example of prominent German theorists who declared that the destiny of Germany was to replace Western liberal freedoms with a planned economy that subjugates the people to the needs of the nation.
In short, the foundations of Nazism were socialism and nationalism combined into an authoritarian state.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Totalitarians in Our Midst”
People assume that something as bad as Nazi Germany could never happen in the West. Hayek points out that “it is not the present Germany [1944] but the Germany of twenty or thirty years ago to which conditions in the democracies show an ever increasing resemblance” (193). The German political system that most resembles Western societies is the one just preceding Nazism.
Hayek points to the “increasing veneration for the state, the admiration of power, and of bigness for bigness’[s] sake” in English political thought (193). Leaders of English liberalism who were much admired in the past are now considered “largely obsolete Victorians” (194). Troubling, he says, is the fact that “most of the works which are preparing the way for a totalitarian course in the democracies are the product of sincere idealists and often of men of considerable intellectual distinction” (196).
These Western intellectuals propose many of the same theories as the German collectivists. The concepts include the belief that individual rights should be set aside in favor of the group, that past beliefs are flawed and a socialist future is inevitable, that morality must come from the state, that industrial life must imitate military culture, that warfare is good because it unifies a people, that modern industry must be monopolized, and that all human activity must be organized under the state for maximum efficiency. Hayek singles out for lengthy criticism the writings of British professor E.H. Carr, who sympathized with much of the Nazi program.
Hayek also condemns the German researchers, especially in the physical sciences, who offered their great prestige to the notion that the Nazi plan was rational, moral, and logically foreordained. Hayek laments the fact that English scientists followed suit, offering themselves as arbiters of scientific ethics and planning in a collectivist society. Eminent publishers (including the science magazine Nature) promoted their writings.
Hayek shifts his attention toward what he regards as even more important influencers in the movement toward collectivism, “organized capital and organized labor” (204). Big business and labor want to see their industries monopolized so they can better control, and share in, the profits. Hayek warns that “they are as shortsighted as were their German colleagues in believing that they will be allowed not only to create but also for any length of time to run such a system” because a state “which allows such enormous aggregations of power to grow up cannot afford to let this power rest entirely in private control” (205).
Even if markets are monopolized, as with railroads or electric companies, Hayek holds that it’s better for consumers if industries face the possibility of new competition. State-run monopolies, on the other hand, will be “protected against both potential competition and effective criticism” (206). Hayek would rather concede to the state the power to set price controls on a private monopoly’s profits than have the state run the industry itself.
The British Labor party, having aligned itself with both socialist beliefs and totalitarian leanings, becomes “the source of the mortal danger to everything a [classical] liberal must value” (209).
Chapters 12-13 Analysis
The West refuses to see the collectivist foundations on which Nazi Germany stands; Western intellectuals whitewash German despotism as romantic nationalism and not the inevitable outcomes of socialist planning that Hayek recognizes. Hayek uses Nazi Germany as his best available example of a socialist nightmare because the other strong case, Soviet Russia, fights alongside Britain against Germany, and he doesn’t want to cause dissent among allies during wartime. Another reason is that Hayek, an Austrian native, was witness to many of the authoritarian traditions and socialist leanings that had already appeared in Germany prior to Hitler’s rise.
Hayek portrays a German people ill-accustomed to the liberal traditions of the West yet steeped in the unifying traditions of Teutonic nationalism. These traits made Germans into good candidates for authoritarian central planning and control. The Germans were the first to embrace collectivist theorists. World-War-I Germany sent Lenin to Russia to foment a socialist revolution. Hayek makes clear that the socialist movement burgeoned in Germany. The German march toward socialism was blocked for a time by defeat in World War I, but it picked up steam and finally transformed into the nationalist and socialist practices of Nazism.
Hitler did encourage private industrial combines but mainly as an adjunct to his war effort. Small corporations were wiped out and large ones organized into cartels obedient to Nazi dictates, effectively a form of corporate collectivism rather than a free marketplace. Most stock exchanges were closed. All enterprise was directed by the government toward the glory of Germany, mainly in the form of preparation for war.
Hayek’s purpose is to warn Western democracies that Germany has become an exemplar of everything wrong with socialism itself. He hopes his adopted Britain will see the danger and come to its senses before it succumbs to the temptation to resolve postwar economic disruptions through central planning. He hopes, also, that after the war, the West will avoid the even greater pitfalls of worldwide economic planning.
Since The Road to Serfdom was first published, many new examples of the failure of collectivism have come to light. The Chinese experiment with Marxist socialism failed miserably and was replaced with market reforms. Communist rulers in Cambodia murdered millions in a vain attempt to force utopia on its people. Soviet Russia, falling rapidly behind the advancing West, abandoned its collectivist system and adopted a more open market. North Koreans famously suffer frequent bouts of starvation under socialism. Venezuela, a well-off nation that nonetheless rebelled against free markets, recently has also faced hunger while millions of it citizens flee to neighboring countries.
