Road to Serfdom, The - Hayek, F. A. & Caldwell, Bruce [7]
“Planning” is the grand panacea of our age. But unfortunately its meaning is highly ambiguous. In popular discussion it stands for almost any policy which it is wished to present as desirable. . . . When the average citizen, be he Nazi or Communist or Summer School Liberal, warms to the statement that “What the world needs is planning,” what he really feels is that the world needs that which is satisfactory.28
As Robbins’s passage suggests, planners were to be found all along the political spectrum. Sorting out exactly what planning implied for a complex society was to be yet another major theme in Hayek’s coming work.
By 1939, in short, most of the elements for Hayek’s book were present. But its form was not yet in place. When he was not fighting against socialist planners, Hayek had spent much of the rest of his time in the 1930s exhausting himself writing and rewriting a major theoretical work in economics, ultimately published in 1941 as The Pure Theory of Capital.29 That project was finally winding down in August 1939. In a letter to his old university friend Fritz Machlup, Hayek spoke of a new project, one that, through a study of the relationship between scientific method and social problems, would provide a systematic investigation of intellectual history and reveal the fundamental principles of social development of the last one hundred years (from Saint-Simon to Hitler).30 This was to become Hayek’s Abuse of Reason project, and from it would emerge The Road to Serfdom.
Hayek’s War Effort
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and two days later England and France declared war. Within a week, Hayek had sent a letter to the director general of the British Ministry of Information offering his services to aid with any propaganda campaign that might be directed at the German-speaking countries. He enclosed a memo with various suggestions about how to proceed. Hayek proposed a campaign with a historical dimension, one that demonstrated that the principles of liberty that England and France stood for were the same as those that had been enunciated by the great German poets and thinkers of the past, but showing that these had been eclipsed by “the distorted view of history, on which they have been brought up during the last sixty years,” that is, since Bismarck’s time.31 Hayek’s efforts had little effect; in a letter from a staff member dated December 30th his offer to help was politely but firmly turned down.
Once the war began in earnest the next May most of his colleagues from the LSE had been called to duty in various government departments. Though he was naturalized as a British subject in 1938, as an émigré Hayek was not offered a post, so he spent the war teaching his classes and writing. Hayek was clearly frustrated that the British government had no place for him, complaining in a letter to Machlup that he was “getting really annoyed by the refusal to use a person like myself on any useful work. . . .”32 By this time, however, Hayek’s intellectual history was well under way. In his letter to Machlup, Hayek provided an outline of the book, noting that “[t]he second part would of course be an elaboration of the central argument of my pamphlet on Freedom and the Economic System.”33 The first part of the book would be called “Hubris,” the second, “Nemesis.”
Hayek worked on the Abuse of Reason project for the rest of 1940, completing a number of historical chapters and beginning some others on methodology.34 Toward the end of the year, though, he began transforming the last part of the book into what would become The Road to Serfdom, a book that he initially envisioned as coming out “as a sixpence Penguin volume.”35 Why did Hayek decide to abandon his larger historical endeavor—he never completed the Abuse of Reason project—to focus on a shorter, more popular, and admittedly “political” tract? We will probably never have a definitive answer, but certain plausible reasons stand out. Were