Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [12]
Hayek arrived in the States in the beginning of April 1945 for a five-week lecture tour to promote his book. He crossed the Atlantic by boat, and while he was in transit the Reader’s Digest issue appeared. Though the tour was initially envisioned to consist of academic lectures before various university departments of economics, by the time he arrived the tour had been turned over to a professional organization (the National Concerts and Artists Corporation) that had added a number of public appearances. The first event, a lecture sponsored by the Town Hall Club in New York, drew an overflow crowd of more than 3,000 listeners and was broadcast over the radio. Hayek was initially overwhelmed by the idea of speaking to such large, popular audiences, but, as he later recounted, he eventually warmed to the task.66
But it is also clear (and quite understandable, given his personality) that Hayek was a bit embarrassed by all the adulation, especially from those who might have gotten their only knowledge of his views from a 20-page condensation (or worse, from the cartoon edition that had appeared in the February 1945 issue of Look magazine).67 He seemed particularly worried about being misinterpreted. Thus in a Chicago newspaper under a banner that read in part “Friedrich Hayek Comments on Uses to Which His Book Has Been Put” he stated, “I was at first a bit puzzled and even alarmed when I found that a book written in no party spirit and not meant to support any popular philosophy should have been so exclusively welcomed by one party and so thoroughly excoriated by the other.”68 He repeatedly emphasized in his talks before business groups that he was not against government intervention per se: “I think what is needed is a clear set of principles which enables us to distinguish between the legitimate fields of government activities and the illegitimate fields of government activity. You must cease to argue for and against government activity as such.”69
He also feared that certain parts of his message would be ignored. For example, businessmen who might be quite eager to get “government off of our backs” might be equally eager to demand that the government protect their industries from foreign competition. Responding to a question about tariffs in a discussion following his speech in Washington, DC, Hayek bluntly asserted: “If you have any comprehension of my philosophy at all, you must know that one thing I stand for above all else is free trade throughout the world.” The man offering the anecdote added that, with that, “the temperature of the room went down at least 10 degrees.”70
The trip to the United States gave Hayek his “15 minutes of fame,” but it was also important for more substantive reasons. On the trip he first encountered Mr. Harold Luhnow, a Kansas City businessman who was interested in funding a study of how to foster an effective competitive order in the United States. After subsequent negotiations it was agreed that the study would be undertaken at the University of Chicago, and though it was never completed, the project helped to bring together in one place the various principals who would help create the “Chicago School of Economics”—Aaron Director, Milton Friedman, and, later, George Stigler. These men would all attend, in 1947, the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international society of scholars founded by Hayek whose goal was “to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free society.”71 A few years later Hayek would himself emigrate from London to the University of Chicago, though there he would join the Committee on Social Thought rather than the Economics Department.72
If Hayek was surprised by the enthusiastic reception of the book in some quarters, he was likely equally surprised at how it was savaged in others. Hayek had expected criticism, of course, and as an academic was looking forward to it, for it would