Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [14]
We must also remember the sorts of arguments he was trying to confront with his thesis. As Hayek frequently repeated, many intelligent and informed people of his day had been taken in by the claim that National Socialism was the next logical and historical phase of a collapsing capitalism. His point, one that most would accept today as evident, was that fascism and communism both represent totalitarian systems that have much more in common with each other than either does with the sorts of governments and economic systems that exist under liberal free market democracies. The Nazis demonized and persecuted the communists, to be sure, but it was not because they were themselves capitalists. Hayek simply sought to establish the true commonalities.
Another oft-voiced complaint was that Hayek’s book was long on criticism but short on or vague concerning proposed alternatives. After ten years of economic depression, many people felt that capitalism had finally breathed its last and that something new had to replace it. What was Hayek offering? Writing in The New Republic, Alvin Hansen noted that Hayek distinguished in his book between “good planning” and “bad planning,” then asked Hayek to inform his readers precisely how he would draw the line between the two.85 John Maynard Keynes read the book on the way to the Bretton Woods conference, and delighted Hayek when he wrote him that it was “a grand book” and that “morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement.”86 Keynes went on to say, though, that “You admit here and there that it is a question of knowing where to draw the line. You agree that the line has to be drawn somewhere, and that the logical extreme is not possible. But you give us no guidance whatever as to where to draw it.”87
Hayek evidently took these criticisms to heart, for in the coming years he would make two further important contributions to political philosophy that would refine and extend the arguments made in The Road to Serfdom. In The Constitution of Liberty he laid out the philosophical foundations of liberal constitutionalism, wherein a private sphere of individual activity is defined, the state is granted a monopoly on coercion, and then is constitutionally limited by the rule of law in its use of those coercive powers. In the last third of the book Hayek outlined the specific sorts of government policies that were consistent with such a political setup.88 In Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek lamented how western democracies were increasingly circumventing the spirit of liberal constitutionalism by passing coercive legislation, typically under the guise of achieving social justice, but in reality serving well-organized coalitions of special interests. The book also included a unique proposal for legislative reform aimed at reestablishing the ideal of a constitutionally constrained liberal democratic commonwealth.89
A third complaint is that Hayek’s argument against socialism in The Road to Serfdom is unconvincing because, by failing to address “market socialism,” it must be viewed as incomplete. Evan Durbin, Hayek’s old sparring partner at the LSE, was one of the first to enunciate the argument, chiding Hayek in his review in the Economic Journal for making “only one reference to the work of those of us who are both practicing economists and also Socialists, and that in a footnote,” thereby