Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [19]
The Continuing Relevance of The Road to Serfdom
Reading (or perhaps rereading) The Road to Serfdom will be a pleasurable experience for some, and induce apoplexy in others: it continues to be a lightning rod, as well as a Rorschach test, revealing as much about the reader’s prior commitments as it does about Hayek’s ideas. For younger readers the book may also be a bit of a mystery, for though it has elements of a general treatise (more on which anon), it was also very much (as he himself once admitted) a “tract for the times.”106 Modern readers who are not familiar with the history of the Third Reich may stumble over names like Julius Streicher or Robert Ley. And who today still recalls Sir Richard Acland’s “Forward March” movement, or the Temporary National Economic Committee? As editor, I have tried to provide brief notes that place these individuals, groups, and ideas in context, in an effort to make it easier for readers today to enter the world that Hayek inhabited.
At the same time, the book is also filled with timeless ideas. Hayek’s immediate objective was to persuade his British audience that their heritage of liberal democracy under the rule of law should be viewed as a national treasure rather than an object of scorn, as a still-vital roadmap for organizing society rather than an embarrassing relic of times gone by. Though much depends on how one defines one’s terms, his was a message that invites more than occasional reexamination.
Another theme, evident perhaps more explicitly in this introduction than in specific passages in Hayek’s own text, but nonetheless very much a part of his underlying motivation in writing the book, is Hayek’s warning concerning the dangers that times of war pose for established civil societies—for it is during such times when hard-won civil liberties are most likely to be all-too-easily given up. Even more troubling, politicians instinctively recognize the seductive power of war. Times of national emergency permit the invocation of a common cause and a common purpose. War enables leaders to ask for sacrifices. It presents an enemy against which all segments of society may unite. This is true of real war, but because of its ability to unify disparate groups, savvy politicians from all parties find it effective to invoke war metaphors in a host of contexts. The war on drugs, the war on poverty, and the war on terror are but three examples from recent times.107 What makes these examples even more worrisome than true wars is that none has a logical endpoint; each may be invoked forever.
Hayek’s message was to be wary of such martial invocations. His specific fear was that, for a war to be fought effectively, the power and size of the state must grow. No matter what rhetoric they employ, politicians and the bureaucracies over which they preside love power, and power is never easily surrendered once the danger, if there ever was one, has passed. Though eternal vigilance is sage advice, surely “wartime” (or when politicians would try to convince us that it is such a time) is when those who value the preservation of individual liberty must be most on guard.108
Finally, what one finds in this book, and in all of Hayek’s work, is a clear recognition of the power of ideas. It was perhaps John Maynard Keynes who said it best, in the closing chapter of The General Theory:
the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated