Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [4]
By the following year, however, Hayek had secured his chair, and for his inaugural lecture, delivered on March 1, 1933, he turned to a new subject.10 He began with the following question: Why were economists, whose advice was often so useful, increasingly regarded by the general public as out of step with the times during the perilous years that had followed the last war? To answer it Hayek drew upon intellectual history. He claimed that public opinion was unduly influenced by an earlier generation of economists who, by criticizing a theoretical approach to the social sciences, had undermined the credibility of economic reasoning in general. Once that had been accomplished, people felt free to propose all manner of utopian solutions to the problem of the depression, solutions that any serious study of economics would show were infeasible. Toward the end of his talk Hayek cited the new enthusiasm for socialist planning in Britain as an example of such misguided ideas. The economists who had paved the way for these errors were members of the German Historical School, advisors to Bismarck in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Hayek’s choice of the German Historical School economists was significant on a number of levels. First, the German Historical School had before the war been the chief rival of the Austrian School of Economics, of which Hayek was a member.11 Next, though the German Historical School economists were conservative imperialists, cheerleaders for a strong German Reich and opponents of German social democracy, they also were the architects of numerous social welfare reforms. Bismarck embraced these reforms while at the same time repressing the socialists; indeed, the reforms were designed at least in part to undermine the socialist position and thereby strengthen the Empire. Hayek probably hoped that his audience would see certain parallels to the present day. Only a month before Adolf Hitler, who detested democracy and favored instead the reconstitution of another (third) Reich, had become Chancellor of the Weimar Republic. Within days he had convinced President Hindenburg to sign a decree prohibiting meetings and publications that could endanger public security, a measure aimed squarely at the communists and socialists. The morning before Hayek’s address the world had learned that the Reichstag building had been set on fire and burned; the Nazis were quick to blame the act on the communists and used it to justify further acts of repression. A half century before, Bismarck had used an attempt on the Emperor’s life to put his own anti-socialist laws in place.
After Hayek’s speech the situation in Germany continued to deteriorate. In March there were wholesale arrests of communists and harassment of the social democratic leadership. Opposition newspapers were closed, constitutional protections swept away, and a notorious “enabling law” passed that gave Hitler virtually dictatorial powers. On April 1 a nationwide boycott against German Jews was called, and later in the month action against the trade unions began. In May students on university campuses across Germany held book-burning celebrations, cleansing their libraries of suspect volumes. One such event was staged in the Berlin Opernplatz on May 10, 1933, and the martial songs and speeches of the participants were broadcast live across Germany. It was a horrific spring.
Hayek’s criticisms of socialism in his address were not well received. He would later recall that, following the talk, “one of the more intelligent students had the cheek to come to see me for the sole purpose of telling me that, though hitherto admired by the students, I had wholly destroyed my reputation by taking, in this lecture, a clearly anti-socialist position.”12 But even more disquieting for Hayek was the interpretation of events in Germany