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warning that, unless we change our ways, we are headed down the road to serfdom. It was certainly part of Hayek’s intent to issue such a warning. He was in particular afraid that we might embark on such a path without really realizing it, or, as he put it in his speech before the Economic Club of Detroit, “the danger is the greater because we may choose the wrong way, not by deliberation and concerted decision, but because we seem to be blundering into it.”103 As the title of his fourth chapter makes clear, some of Hayek’s opponents had made the claim that planning was “inevitable,” that unless we embraced “planning for freedom” we were headed toward totalitarianism. Hayek presumably was hoping to stand such an argument on its head, to show that, rather than the only means of counteracting totalitarianism, planning itself constituted a significant step along the way toward the totalitarian state.

Yet another way to read Hayek is to see him as offering a logical rather than a historical argument. Hayek recognized that “liberal socialists” value freedom of choice and the honoring of individual preferences. What he denied was that they could maintain those values and still carry out their proclaimed program of extensive central planning. As he succinctly put it, “socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove.”104 Even if it were to begin as a “liberal socialist” experiment (none of the real-world cases have ever done so, one might add), full-scale planning requires that the planning authorities take over all production decisions; to be able to make any decisions at all, they would need to exercise more and more political control. If one tries to create a truly planned society, one will not be able to separate out control of the economy from political control. This was Hayek’s logical argument against planning, one that he had succinctly articulated in 1939 in “Freedom and the Economic System.”

In the end agreement that planning is necessary, together with the inability of the democratic assembly to agree on a particular plan, must strengthen the demand that the government, or some single individual, should be given powers to act on their own responsibility. It becomes more and more the accepted belief that, if one wants to get things done, the responsible director of affairs must be freed from the fetters of democratic procedure.105

Now evidently, in the years since he wrote, the countries that Hayek was most concerned about (the Western European democracies and the United States), despite the rhetoric of their left-wing politicians, did not go to anything like complete central planning or full nationalization of the means of production. For example, though there was a movement in this direction in Britain directly after the war, it reached its high point by the late 1940s, and even then only about 20 per cent of British industry was nationalized.

Those who see Hayek as issuing a prediction of an inevitable trend would view this history as refuting his claim. Those who see him as providing a warning might consider thanking him for saving them from disaster. If one confronts Hayek’s logical argument, however, the subsequent paths of the western European democracies are not really tests of Hayek’s thesis. To be sure, many of them did develop substantial welfare states, and Hayek spoke about the separate dangers of these in his later writings. But the existence of such states, and whatever successes they may or may not have had, does not undermine Hayek’s logical argument from The Road to Serfdom: a welfare state is not socialism.

The proper way to evaluate Hayek’s logical thesis is to ask, How many actually existing, real-world political systems have fully nationalized their means of production and preserved both some measure of economic efficiency and freedom of choice over goods and occupations? Count them up. Then compare the number with those that nationalized their means of production and turned to extensive planning and control, and with it the curtailment of individual