The Road To Serfdom

“We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.”

The West, focused on its efforts to improve the lives of its people through collective effort, persist in denying that the same practices have been put to sinister use in totalitarian countries. Those states achieve their despotic control because of, not despite, socialism.

“For at least twenty-five years before the specter of totalitarianism became a real threat, we had progressively been moving away from the basic ideas on which Western civilization has been built. That this movement on which we have entered with such high hopes and ambitions should have brought us face to face with the totalitarian horror has come as a profound shock to this generation, which still refuses to connect the two facts.”

Liberal ideals about freedom had suffered erosion well before the great dictatorships arose. The liberal West, moving away from those ideals and toward socialism, had through inattention laid the groundwork for the totalitarian threat.

“Wherever the barriers to the free exercise of human ingenuity were removed, man became rapidly able to satisfy ever widening ranges of desire.”

Law and custom could stifle progress, but as the advancing tide of scientific innovation swept the old rules aside, societies began rapidly to prosper.

“It might even be said that the very success of liberalism became the cause of its decline.”

The growth of individual freedom made possible a great flowering of prosperity, to the point where the average citizen grew accustomed to this wellbeing. Impatient for more, people began to support greater government involvement in the marketplace, which in turn eroded the very freedom which had supported the original prosperity.

“[T]he people of the West continued to import German ideas and were even induced to believe that their own former convictions had merely been rationalizations of selfish interests, that free trade was a doctrine invented to further British interests, and that the political ideals of England and America were hopelessly outmoded and a thing to be ashamed of.”

Western liberal democracies became convinced that their founding principles were flawed and ought perhaps to be abandoned. The West was thus lulled into accepting as legitimate alternatives the socialist ideals inherent in the authoritarian regimes of Germany and Russia.

“There can be no doubt that the promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda and that the belief that socialism would bring freedom is genuine and sincere. But this would only heighten the tragedy if it should prove that what was promised to us as the Road to Freedom was in fact the High Road to Servitude.”

This quote is central to the book’s main theme: that the allure of socialism tempts us to hope for more freedom when, in fact, socialism’s centralized control strips away that freedom.

“The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth.”

Early French socialists, leery of personal freedom in the wake of the violence of the French Revolution, wanted to suppress individuality and return society to a hierarchical regime. But the ideal of liberty had grown too big to stop, so the socialists co-opted and reshaped the notion of freedom until it became the ideal of the political power to redistribute wealth.

“Liberalism then has the distinction of being the doctrine most hated by Hitler.”

Though Communists and Nazis often fought each other, they both knew that the real enemy was the Western classical liberal, whose fondness for freedom was a stark contrast to the authoritarians.

“[S]ocialism means 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.”

This definition is central to the book’s thesis: that the West struggles between the ideal of personal freedom and the forces that would funnel people’s energies into a centralized cause.

“What in effect unites the socialists of the Left and the Right is this common hostility to competition and their common desire to replace it by a directed economy.”

Authoritarians despise individual freedom, as people don’t always do what despots want them to do. Stifling the freedom to buy, sell, and own would go a long way toward empowering such leaders, whether socialists, Marxists, or Nazis.

“[P]lanning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition but not by planning against competition.”

Hayek does not begrudge governance in its proper place, as when providing for public safety, infrastructure, or dispute resolution. His criticism is reserved for edicts that replace beneficial market competition with central planning.

“From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step […]there could hardly be a more unbearable—and more irrational—world than one in which the most eminent specialists in each field were allowed to proceed unchecked with the realization of their ideals.”

Central planners are often so dedicated to the importance of their pet theories that, given enough power, they can pursue these obsessions far enough to cause great damage.

“It is this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions, that forms the essence of the individualist position.”

Hayek encapsulates the essence of the liberty movement that sees the individual as the arbiter of moral value, instead of a bureaucrat who makes unitary decisions for everyone.

“Majorities will be found where it is a choice between limited alternatives; but it is a superstition to believe that there must be a majority view on everything.”

Central planning ignores the nearly-endless varieties of human preferences and replaces them with a one-size-fits-all solution. On a topic so complex, it’s impossible to reach a consensus. For the most part, then, people need to make their own choices.

“It is the essence of the economic problem that the making of an economic plan involves the choice between conflicting or competing ends—different needs of different people.”

It is impossible to plan out a centralized economy without ignoring countless individual preferences. Most citizens will be dissatisfied with the results. In this way, a centralized economy ultimately works against—if not disallows for—individualism.

“A true ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ even if democratic in form, if it undertook centrally to direct the economic system, would probably destroy personal freedom as completely as any autocracy has ever done.”

The citizens of a nation-state may vote on what everyone must do with their resources, and this may still be considered a democracy, but Hayek contends that such a country is as oppressive to personal freedom as a tyrant.

“Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.”

Central planning involves many moral decisions that cause harm to some parties. Leaders unburdened by scruples will be ruthless enough to get the job done. These people rise to the top in an autocratic regime. Thus any such system, no matter how well-intentioned, will tend to fill its upper ranks with brutal and vicious types.

“Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity.”

Collectivism requires that people subordinate their own desires to the needs of the state. This lock-step obedience can only exist in a tyranny, and it seems ghastly to those in the West, who love liberty, and will seem so as well to collectivists, if they can admit to themselves the dangers to freedom from central planning.

“The probable effect on the people’s loyalty to the system becomes the only criterion for deciding whether a particular piece of information is to be published or suppressed.” 

Because planning is largely arbitrary, it will fail, unless all dissent is abolished. The truth must give way to propaganda that manipulates facts, words, and ethical standards, until the populace learns to accept the plan unquestioningly.

“There is a life higher than the individual life, the life of the people and the life of the state, and it is the purpose of the individual to sacrifice himself for that higher life.”

Hayek thus sums up the ethical viewpoint of German socialism, which morphed into Nazism, a collectivist cause that emphasized the warlike destiny of the Germanic people.

“There is no other possibility than either the order governed by the impersonal discipline of the market or that directed by the will of a few individuals; and those who are out to destroy the first are wittingly or unwittingly helping to create the second.”

The market will regulate itself, but the planners can never be regulated. Once the free market is gone, the rulers will have a free hand to do as they please.

“A movement whose main promise is the relief from responsibility cannot but be antimoral in its effect, however lofty the ideals to which it owes its birth.”

If you have no choice, you can’t act ethically, because it’s not your decision. As socialism removes the need to make economic decisions, it also removes all moral responsibility for actions, which are effectively compelled by the state.

“The powers which must devolve on an international authority are not the new powers assumed by the states in recent times but that minimum of powers without which it is impossible to preserve peaceful relationships, i.e., essentially the powers of the ultra-liberal ‘laissez faire’ state.”

A postwar agency set up to manage rebuilding must not try to control the economies of recovering nations but instead limit itself to protecting the freedoms of those people so that they may grow prosperous on their own terms.