Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [16]
Hayek might be forgiven if he were to infer from this letter that Lange had basically accepted his criticisms about the practical feasibility of market socialism. Though obviously Durbin thought differently, Hayek felt that market socialism was little more than an interesting theoretical exercise, the sort of thing that economists like to play with on the blackboard, but not something to be taken seriously as practical proposal.
But even more to the point, Hayek did not write The Road to Serfdom chiefly with theoretical economists like Lange or Durbin in mind. Unlike such economists, most advocates of “planning” had not even begun to think through what it meant to have a planned society. For them, planning itself was, as Robbins had put it, a panacea. It was this vague but widespread sentiment for which The Road to Serfdom was meant to be an antidote. Hayek was trying to show his readers that planning, everyone’s favorite remedy for the ills of the world, might sound good in theory, but would not work in practice (or, at least, not unless the western democracies were prepared to accept severe constraints on personal liberty of the sort on display in the systems against which they currently were fighting.)
This explains, I think, why Hayek did not bother to lay out the argument against market socialism in his book. He felt that market socialism was only a theoretical dream, and that the details of the argument against it would be out of place in a general book. His economist readers, he doubtless presumed, were already aware of the arguments he had made in 1940, arguments he felt had succeeded. If they weren’t, he reminded them with a note.
As such, one could understand that Hayek felt a bit miffed by Durbin’s insinuation that he had neglected all the recent work. His irritation is evident in the unpublished version of his 1948 postscript.
Mr. Durbin . . . is especially pained that I have not taken more seriously and devoted no more than a note to the interesting schemes of a competitive socialism which have been put forward in recent years in a number of learned books and articles. I am quite ready to discuss their theoretical merits and have in fact done so at some length in an article quoted in the footnote just referred to. And I shall be very glad to examine these plans further as soon as there are any signs that they are taken seriously by, and exercise any practical influence on the politics of, the socialist parties. But I have yet to find any socialist party which is willing even to consider using competition as the method for organizing economic activity, and until this is the case I cannot see that anyone but the specialist need be bothered with the objections to those ingenious schemes. But I may perhaps be allowed to add that I should have more confidence in the genuineness of the desire to reconcile freedom and socialism by means of a “competitive socialism” if one of the main advocates of these schemes, Professor Oskar Lange, had not chosen to become one of the main spokesmen of the Russian point of view on the Council of the United Nations and if Mr. Durbin were not now himself a member of the Socialist British Government which is doing most of the things of which he apparently disapproves.95
Durbin would die in a drowning accident in 1948, which may explain why this passage was never included in the foreword. Alas, Lange’s accommodation to the political realities in his native Poland would only increase through time: he went on to write apologetics for Stalin and, renouncing his earlier views on market socialism, even went so far as to forbid their republication in Polish.96
Though Lange and Durbin are gone, the dreams for market socialism among economic theorists never seem to die, the most recent revival occurring after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the last decade of the last century. Its longevity is easy to explain: for those who seek a middle way, market socialism is the ideal system. In more recent discussions, Hayek’s original critique has been substantially