An Analysis of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom

• Early criticisms of The Road to Serfdom rejected Hayek’s claim that planning and freedom are incompatible.

• There were more negative reactions to the book in the United States than in Europe. In Hayek’s view, this was because Americans were less familiar with the dangers of economic planning.

• Hayek made no changes to the ideas in his book in subsequent editions and did not try to appease his critics.

The main aspect of The Road to Serfdom that attracted criticism was Friedrich Hayek’s suggestion that increased economic planning* would lead to a situation where society has “abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.”¹ In her book Freedom Under Planning, the sociologist Barbara Wootton argued that “there is nothing in the conscious planning of economic priorities which is inherently incompatible with the freedoms which mean most to the contemporary Englishman or American. Civil liberties are quite unaffected. We can, if we wish, deliberately plan so as to give the fullest possible scope for the pursuit by individuals and social groups of cultural ends which are in no way state-determined.”²

A more heated attack came from the socialist Herman Finer,* who, in his book The Road to Reaction, attempted to show that “Hayek’s apparatus of learning is deficient, his reading incomplete; that his understanding of the economic process is bigoted, his account of history false … and that his attitude to average men and women is truculently authoritarian.”³

“The Road to Serfdom was a popular success but was not a good book. Leaving aside the irrelevant extremes, or even including them, it would be perverse to read the history, as of 1944 or as of now, as suggesting that the standard regulatory interventions in the economy have any inherent tendency to snowball into ‘serfdom’”

Robert Solow, Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics

Another critique argued that The Road to Serfdom was not a work of economics at all. When the book was about to be published in the United States, a reader’s report by the University of Chicago economist Frank Knight said that the non-economic chapters were open to criticism on “the ground of over-simplification” and that the book was “limited in scope.”⁴ Knight also attacked Hayek’s treatment of the government’s role in the economy, saying that he “inadequately recognizes the necessity, as well as political inevitability, of a wide range of governmental activity in relation to economic life in the future.”⁵

Hayek was prepared for criticism of his book, but he was not prepared for the extent of the criticism. After The Road to Serfdom was published in 1944, his London School of Economics* colleague Harold Laski* “believed it was a book written especially against him” and stopped speaking to Hayek.⁶

But Hayek welcomed criticism he thought was fair and directed at the book. He believed that “the English socialists, with few exceptions, accepted the book as something written in good faith, raising problems they were willing to consider.”⁷ The debate heated up, however, when the book was published in the United States. Hayek thought he was “exposed to incredible abuse … It went so far as to completely discredit me professionally.”⁸ An example of this was Finer’s 1945 book The Road to Reaction. According to Hayek, American hostility was due to “the new enthusiasm of all the New Dealers,” who supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s positive government action to try to fix a failing economy via public building works and increased government action. According to Hayek, the less hostile reaction to the book in Britain was because it had been published there “at a stage where people had already become aware of the dangers of socialism.”⁹

Hayek did not get into a dialogue with his opponents, but when he travelled to the United States for a book tour in 1945 he took part in several public debates. Many critics said The Road to Serfdom was a work of party politics. Hayek replied that he was not for or against any political party; it was simply against governmental planning.* In a radio debate he emphasized that he was “a convinced free trader,” which meant he was also against tariffs* and the idea that government should support or bail out companies in difficulty.¹⁰

In the foreword to the 1956 American paperback edition of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek said that he was surprised “by the lavish praise the book received from some quarters no less than by the passionate hatred it appeared to arouse in others.”¹¹ His American opponents saw him as a defender of circumstances that had led to economic depression and mass unemployment in the 1930s. But Hayek did not revise the important content of the book for the American editions. An original reader’s report for the American market had complained that the book was written from a “distinctly English point of view” that “might limit the appeal.”¹² The only changes Hayek made were in small details, such as writing “Britain” when he had previously referred to “this country.”

While most people were in favor of economic planning when the book was first published, this generally held view was undermined by the debate sparked by The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s initial ambition was to transform opinion in the British Liberal Party,* but he actually succeeded in doing so among members of the country’s Conservative Party*. In the words of British political historian Richard Cockett, the book “reorientated the political discourse within the Party along an individualist–collectivist axis, thus laying the parameters for a post-war debate within the party.”¹³ What Cockett meant was that The Road to Serfdom had set the debate along the lines of the benefits of the individual versus those of the collective group. It also gave a voice to broader anti-collectivist* feelings, which led to the foundation and work of the Institute of Economic Affairs* in London.

All this debate around The Road to Serfdom most likely strengthened the book. First of all, it enabled its criticisms of government planning to be heard by a wide general public. Second, it allowed these ideas to become influential in a major British political party—the Conservatives. And third, Hayek achieved his aim of convincing individuals that they should invest both time and resources in resisting government planning.

Hayek’s views became influential in the decades that followed the book’s publication. The work of those who criticized him, however, did not. Hayek did not make any changes to The Road to Serfdom on the basis of the criticism he received, and therefore we can conclude that his ideas became more dominant than those of anyone who tried to counter them.

1 F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Texts and Documents – The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008), 67.

2 Barbara Wootton, Freedom Under Planning (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945), 158.

3 Herman Finer, The Road to Reaction (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1945), Preface.

6 Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 56.

7 F. A. Hayek, Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue – The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, ed. Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar (London: Routledge, 1994), 102.

11 F.A. Hayek, “Foreword to the 1956 American Paperback Edition,” in Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 41.

13 Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (London: HarperCollins, 1994), 97.