Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [25]
65Reader’s Digest provided its circulation figures for 1945. Croswell Bowen, “How Big Business Raised the Battle Cry of ‘Serfdom,’” PM, Sunday, October 14, 1945, p. 13, estimated the Reader’s Digest readership at 10 million, and is also the source for the Book-of-the-Month Club reprint figure. (Newsstand sales may account for the discrepancy between the circulation and readership figures for the Reader’s Digest.) In his “Note on Publishing History” Milton Friedman estimated the reprint figure as 600,000 (rather than “more than one million”), but this was probably based on John Scoon’s identical estimate in his letter of May 2, 1945. The number presumably had grown between May and October when Bowen’s article appeared.
66 Hayek recounts the story of his trip in more detail in Hayek on Hayek, op. cit., pp. 103–5.
67 Both the Reader’s Digest condensation and the cartoon version from Look are reprinted in a pamphlet released by the Institute of Economic Affairs: F. A. Hayek, Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of The Road to Serfdom, Rediscovered Riches no. 5 (London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1999). The Director of the IEA John Blundell reported to me on February 25, 2005, that in the last year there had been over 40,000 downloads from their website of a PDF containing the text of the condensed version of The Road to Serfdom.
68 F. A. Hayek, “Planning and ‘The Road to Serfdom’: Friedrich Hayek Comments on Uses to Which His Book Has Been Put,” Chicago Sun Book Week, May 6, 1945.
69 F. A. Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom, an Address before the Economic Club of Detroit,” April 23, 1945, p. 6. A transcript of the address may be found in the Hayek Papers, box 106, folder 8, Hoover Institution Archives.
70 Marquis W. Childs, “Apostle Hot Potato: Austrian for Whom Senator Hawkes Gave Party Embarrassed Republicans,” Newark Evening News, May 6, 1945.
71 This is from the closing sentence of the Society’s “Statement of Aims,” adopted April 10, 1947, and reproduced in Fritz Machlup, ed., Essays on Hayek (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. xiii.
72 As Hayek later recounted in Hayek on Hayek, op. cit., p. 103, “practically all my contacts that led to later visits and finally made my move to Chicago possible were made during this trip.”
73 In a letter to Machlup dated March 20, 1944, Hayek noted with some surprise the initial warm reception the book had received in the British press, then added, “But I hope the attacks will begin soon.” The letter may be found in the Machlup Papers, box 43, folder 15, Hoover Institution Archives.
74 See the foreword to the 1956 American paperback edition, this volume, p. 40.
75 During the 1945 election both Clement Atlee and Hugh Dalton, soon to be the Labour Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, respectively, accused Winston Churchill of getting his ideas from Friedrich August von (with an emphasis on the “von”) Hayek. In one speech (later dubbed the “Gestapo” speech), Churchill had predicted that a Labour victory would lead to a severe restriction on individual liberties. For more on all this see F. A. Hayek, Hayek on Hayek, op. cit., pp. 106–7; cf. Jeremy Shearmur, “Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, and the British Conservative Party,” op. cit.
76 Herman Finer, Road to Reaction (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945), p. ix.
77Ibid., p. 36. It is true that Hayek believed that constitutional limits were essential for protecting individuals against the “tyranny of the majority.” But he was an opponent of planning, not of democracy. And indeed, if his arguments are correct, democracy is much more likely to be preserved under liberal political and economic institutions than under planning, whatever form it might take.
78Ibid., p. 210.
79 George Soule, “The Gospel according to Hazlitt: A Review of Economics in One Lesson,” The New Republic, vol. 115, August 19, 1946, p. 202.
80 Croswell Bowen, “How Big Business . . . ,” op. cit., p. 16.
81 F. A. Hayek, “Postscript,” Hayek Papers, box 106, folder 8, Hoover Institution Archives.
82 See the foreword