Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [17]
A final criticism has sometimes been called the “inevitability thesis” or the “slippery slope” argument: Hayek is claimed to have said that, once a society engages in a little planning, it is doomed to end up in a totalitarian state. Durbin was among those making this charge, writing that Hayek believed that “any departure from the practice of free enterprise, any hope that reason and science may be applied to the direction of economic activity, any attempt at economic planning, must lead us remorselessly to serfdom. . . .”98 If Durbin’s statement of the inevitability thesis seems unusually stark, he was certainly not alone in thinking that Hayek had said that any expansion of state control over the economy would necessarily lead to a totalitarian outcome. Those who so interpreted him spanned the ideological spectrum from Barbara Wootton to George Stigler.99 Paul Samuelson even expressed the idea diagrammatically in his principles of economics text, drawing political freedom on one axis, economic freedom on the other, and a movement down the curve (slippery slope indeed!) from high to low levels of both being what Hayek supposedly predicted: “that government modification of laissez faire must lead inevitably to political serfdom.”100
This interpretation occurred despite Hayek’s frequent protests to the contrary. Sometimes he objected publicly, as he did in the preface to the 1976 edition: “It has frequently been alleged that I have contended that any movement in the direction of socialism is bound to lead to totalitarianism. Even though this danger exists, this is not what the book says.”101 In private he could be both more forceful and explicit, as may be seen in his letter to Paul Samuelson:
I am afraid in glancing through the 11th edition of your Economics I seem to have discovered the source of the false allegation about my book The Road to Serfdom which I constantly encounter, most resent and can only regard as a malicious distortion which has largely succeeded in discrediting my argument . . . [Y]ou assert that I contend that “each step away from the market system and towards the social reform of the welfare state is inevitably a journey that must end in a totalitarian state” and that “government modification of market laissez faire must lead inevitably to political serfdom.” . . .
How anyone who has read my book can in good faith say this when ever since the first edition I say right at the beginning . . . “Nor am I arguing that these developments are inevitable. If they were, there would be no point in writing this. They can be prevented if people realize in time where their efforts may lead. . . .”102
Given the ubiquity of the “inevitability thesis” interpretation among both his friends and his foes, as well as Hayek’s own insistence that this was not his argument, it is important to try to figure out exactly what has given rise to the confusion.
Hayek’s letter to Samuelson allows us to rule out one way of interpreting the word “inevitability.” Hayek was decidedly not making the historical claim that, no matter what future moves were made in Britain and America, there was no turning back, that a socialist future that would end in totalitarianism was inevitably coming. This kind of inevitability thesis was, after all, exactly what Hayek was criticizing in his essay “Scientism and the Study of Society,” when he attacked historicism, the belief that there were historical laws knowledge of which allowed one to predict a necessary future.
A more plausible way to read Hayek’s words is to see him as