Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [36]
F. A. Hayek
1 [Hayek was a visiting professor in the Economics Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) during the 1931–32 academic year, at the end of which he was appointed to the Tooke Chair of Economic Science and Statistics. The chair was founded at King’s College, London, in 1859, the year after Thomas Tooke died. In 1919 the chair was transferred from King’s to the LSE, both of which were then part of the University of London. Though Hayek’s appointment was technically with the University of London, his teaching took place at the LSE. —Ed.]
2 [Hayek refers here to “Freedom and the Economic System,” op. cit. See the preface to the original editions, note 2. —Ed.]
3 [That is, the Soviet Union. —Ed.]
4 [See my introduction to this volume, note 75, for more on this. —Ed.]
5 The most representative example of British criticism of the book from a left-wing point of view is probably Mrs. Barbara Wootton’s courteous and frank study, Freedom under Planning, op. cit. It is often quoted in the United States as an effective refutation of my argument, though I cannot help feeling that more than one reader must have gained the impression that, as one American reviewer expressed it, “it seems substantially to confirm Hayek’s thesis.” See Chester I. Barnard, “Review of Freedom under Planning,” Southern Economic Journal, vol. 12, January 1946, p. 290.
6 [Hayek visited the United States as a student from March 1923 until May 1924. —Ed.]
7 I did not know then, as has since been admitted by a person advising one of the firms, that this appears to have been due not to any doubts of the success of the book but to political prejudice, which went to the extent of representing the book as “unfit for publication by a reputable house.” See on this the statement by William Miller quoted by W. T. Couch in “The Sainted Book Burners,” The Freeman, vol. 5, April 1955, p. 423, and also William Miller, The Book Industry: A Report of the Public Library Inquiry of the Social Science Research Council (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 12. [The first printing of Miller’s book on the book industry contained the following sentence: “That university presses have done this is suggested by the publication and promotion by the University of Chicago Press a few years ago of Friedrich A. von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a sensational book previously rejected by at least one notable trade house which was quite aware of its sales possibilities.” What university presses “had done” was to try to increase their profits by looking for profitable best-sellers, regardless of quality. W. T. Couch, then director of the University of Chicago Press, sent Miller a letter on October 7, 1949, stating that Miller had his facts wrong. Couch provided documentary evidence that the Press did not expect a big market for the book, and demanded a retraction of the sentence from subsequent printings of Miller’s book. In his reply to Couch, Miller acquiesced to the removal of the offending lines in subsequent printings, but also called Hayek’s book “a despicable performance” and went on to make the statements, reproduced by Couch in his article in The Freeman, that Hayek alludes to in his note. —Ed.]
8 Not a little of this was due to the publication of a condensation of this book in the Reader’s Digest, and I should like to pay here to the editors of this journal a public testimony to the extremely skillful manner in which this was done without my assistance. It is inevitable that the compression of a complex argument to a fraction of its original length produces some oversimplification, but that it was done without distortion and better than I could have done it myself is a remarkable achievement. [Hayek discusses this episode at more length in Hayek on Hayek, op. cit., 104–5; cf. my introduction to this volume, pp. 18–22. —Ed.]
9 To any reader who would like to see a specimen of abuse and invective which is