Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [40]
The reader will probably ask whether this means that I am still prepared to defend all the main conclusions of this book, and the answer to this is on the whole affirmative. The most important qualification I must add is that during the interval of time terminology has changed and for this reason what I say in the book may be misunderstood. At the time I wrote, socialism meant unambiguously the nationalization of the means of production and the central economic planning which this made possible and necessary. In this sense Sweden, for instance, is today very much less socialistically organized than Great Britain or Austria, though Sweden is commonly regarded as much more socialistic. This is due to the fact that socialism has come to mean chiefly the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state. In the latter kind of socialism the effects I discuss in this book are brought about more slowly, indirectly, and imperfectly. I believe that the ultimate outcome tends to be very much the same, although the process by which it is brought about is not quite the same as that described in this book.
It has frequently been alleged that I have contended that any movement in the direction of socialism is bound to lead to totalitarianism. Even though this danger exists, this is not what the book says. What it contains is a warning that unless we mend the principles of our policy, some very unpleasant consequences will follow which most of those who advocate these policies do not want.
Where I now feel I was wrong in this book is chiefly in that I rather under-stressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russia—a fault which is perhaps pardonable when it is remembered that when I wrote, Russia was our wartime ally—and that I had not wholly freed myself from all the current interventionist superstitions, and in consequence still made various concessions which I now think unwarranted. And I certainly was not yet fully aware how bad things already were in some respects. I still regarded it, for example, as a rhetorical question when I asked, If Hitler had obtained his unlimited powers in a strictly constitutional manner, “who would suggest that the Rule of Law still prevailed in Germany?” only to discover later that professors Hans Kelsen and Harold J. Laski, and probably many other socialist lawyers and political scientists following these influential authors, had maintained precisely this.4 Quite generally, further study of the contemporary trends of thought and institutions has, if anything, increased my alarm and concern. And both the influence of socialist ideas and the naïve trust in the good intentions of the holders of totalitarian power have markedly increased since I wrote this book.
I have long resented being more widely known by what I regarded as a pamphlet for the time than by my strictly scientific work. After reexamining what I wrote then in the light of some thirty years’ further study of the problems then raised, I no longer do so. Though the book may contain much that I could not, when I wrote it, have convincingly demonstrated, it was a genuine effort to find the truth which I believe has produced insights that will help even those who disagree with me to avoid grave dangers.
F. A. Hayek
1 [See the preface to the original editions, note 2. —Ed.]
2 [The nameless philosopher was the positivist Rudolf Carnap; for the full quotation, see my introduction to this volume, p. 2. —Ed.]
3 [The second and third volumes appeared in 1976 and 1979 respectively. See F. A. Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, vol. 2 (1976), and The Political Order of a Free People, vol. 3 (1979) of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, op. cit. —Ed.]
4 [English political scientist Harold J. Laski (1893–1950) was a colleague of Hayek’s at the LSE and, prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, an avid defender of Stalin and his policies. Hayek remarks on Laski’s “pathological” proclivity toward prevarication in Hayek