Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [10]
Having come to his majority in interwar Vienna, Hayek doubtless experienced an intense and disquieting sense of déjà vu on reading such words. In his book he sought to reverse the trends that were everywhere evident in Britain. Making the economic case against socialist planning was not enough. He needed to remind the British of their liberal democratic heritage, to contrast it with the collectivist or corporativist authoritarian modes of social organization promoted by its enemies, and finally, to make clear (notwithstanding the rhetoric of “planning for freedom”) that the actual implementation of a centrally planned society would be inimical to liberty.
Finding an American Publisher
In a letter dated August 8, 1942, Hayek asked Fritz Machlup, who was by then in Washington at the Office of Alien Property Custodian, for his help in securing an American publisher. Machlup’s wartime letters to Hayek may have helped him to realize that his message might be needed as an antidote in the States as well as in Britain: “If you talk here with people over 40 years of age— except Hansen—they sound sane and relatively conservative. It is the generation brought up by Keynes and Hansen, which is blind to the political implications of their economic views.”47 By summer’s end Hayek sent Machlup a typescript that included all but the final three substantive chapters, two of which would deal with his recommendations for the postwar period. He would mail these to his friend over the course of the next year.48
Machlup’s first stop was Macmillan, but they turned him down.49 Machlup later reported to Hayek what they said in their letter: “Frankly, we are doubtful of the sale which we could secure for it, and I personally cannot but feel that Professor Hayek is a little outside the stream of much present-day thought, both here and in England.”50 Machlup’s next move was, at Hayek’s request, to send the (by now completed) typescript to Walter Lippmann, who would promote it to Little, Brown. This was done, but they also declined, on the grounds that “the exposition was too difficult for the general reader.”51 Machlup then turned to Henry Gideonse, by now the President of Brooklyn College, but who previously had served as the editor of the series of public policy pamphlets in which “Freedom and the Economic System” had appeared. Gideonse took the manuscript with his strong endorsement to Ordway Tead, the economics editor at Harper and Brothers. This initiative also failed. In a sentence that in some ways exemplifies his own complaint, Tead explained why Harper would not publish it: “I do feel that the volume is labored, is over-written and that he can say all that he has to say in about half the space.”52
Nearly a year had gone by and Machlup’s search for an American publisher had yielded nothing. It was at this point that Aaron Director came to the rescue.53 Director worked alongside Machlup in Washington, and had read the typescript in the summer of 1943. In October, Director wrote to fellow Chicago economists Frank Knight and Henry Simons to see if the University of Chicago Press might want to consider publishing it. Though he never received an answer, apparently Knight did recommend that the Press have a look. Toward the end of the next month Director sent the galley proofs from the English edition (which had arrived in the interim) to Chicago, asking for an immediate decision.54
The Press complied, asking Knight to evaluate the manuscript. In his reader’s report, dated December 10, 1943, the irascible Chicago professor provided a decidedly lukewarm endorsement. He began the report by calling the book “a masterly performance of the job it undertakes” and admitted that he was sympathetic to its main conclusions. But he followed this with a two-page discussion of the book’s weaknesses, concluding