Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [27]
103 F. A. Hayek, “The Road to Serfdom, an Address before the Economic Club of Detroit,” op. cit., p. 4.
104 This volume, chapter 10, p. 159.
105 F. A. Hayek, “Freedom and the Economic System” [1939], op. cit., p. 205. When I have described Hayek’s argument in seminars, more than once members of the audience have noted its similarities with Arrow’s “Impossibility Theorem” in welfare economics.
106 See F. A. Hayek, preface to the 1976 edition, this volume, p. 53.
107 I thank Steven Horwitz for providing these apposite examples in his contributions to a session commemorating the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Road to Serfdom held at the 2004 History of Economics Society meetings in Toronto, Canada.
108 For many depressing examples of Hayek’s thesis, see Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). This introduction is being written during George W. Bush’s presidency, one that provides plentiful additional evidence.
109 John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money [1936], reprinted as vol. 7 (1973) of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, op. cit., p. 383.
THE ROAD TO SERFDOM
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
—David Hume
I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.
—A. de Tocqueville
To the socialists of all parties
PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITIONS1
When a professional student of social affairs writes a political book, his first duty is plainly to say so. This is a political book. I do not wish to disguise this by describing it, as I might perhaps have done, by the more elegant and ambitious name of an essay in social philosophy. But, whatever the name, the essential point remains that all I shall have to say is derived from certain ultimate values. I hope I have adequately discharged in the book itself a second and no less important duty: to make it clear beyond doubt what these ultimate values are on which the whole argument depends.
There is, however, one thing I want to add to this. Though this is a political book, I am as certain as anyone can be that the beliefs set out in it are not determined by my personal interests. I can discover no reason why the kind of society which seems to me desirable should offer greater advantages to me than to the great majority of the people of my country. In fact, I am always told by my socialist colleagues that as an economist I should occupy a much more important position in the kind of society to which I am opposed—provided, of course, that I could bring myself to accept their views. I feel equally certain that my opposition to these views is not due to their being different from those with which I have grown up, since they are the very views which I held as a young man and which have led me to make the study of economics my profession. For those who, in the current fashion, seek interested motives in every profession of a political opinion, I may, perhaps, be allowed to add that I have every possible reason for not writing or publishing this book. It is certain to offend many people with whom I wish to live on friendly terms; it has forced me to put aside work for which I feel better qualified and to which I attach greater importance in the long run; and, above all, it is certain to prejudice the reception of the results of the more strictly academic work to which all my inclinations lead me.
If in spite of this I have come to regard the writing of this book as a duty which I must not evade, this was mainly due to a peculiar and serious feature of the discussions of problems of future economic policy at the present time, of which the public is