Commissioned by the Tea Club
Many reviews and critiques have been written about Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” where the book is placed within its historical context, its position among Hayek’s publications is identified, and a brief analysis of its ideas is provided. As much as I would like to avoid all this academicism, it is impossible, as the entire book is a political pamphlet on the pressing issues of the day, and the only reason the work remains relevant to this day is that ideas do not die—and this applies not only to Hayek’s own ideas, but also to those he fought against.
“The Road to Serfdom” was published in Great Britain in 1944, when the country was finishing its fifth year of war with the National Socialist Reich. Victory over the Reich was simply a matter of time, and one could have calmly begun to reflect on the postwar restructuring of the world, but the author felt it was far more important to draw the public’s attention to the fact that the dragon-slayer was beginning to increasingly resemble the one he was fighting. Hayek saw the victory of the Labour Party in the upcoming general elections as the most terrifying danger for Britain. That is exactly what happened. As a result, Great Britain accumulated an economic lag behind freer countries right up until the Thatcher reforms.
The main idea Hayek fights against in his book is the notion that economic planning brings prosperity. He painstakingly demonstrates that the temptation to slightly regulate from above for the greater benefit of society is the first step toward regulating everything and everyone to the point where it is impossible to breathe: there is no natural optimum on this road, upon reaching which the government would stop on its own and declare that things are now good and nothing more needs to be tweaked. He also shows that regulation is total, and economic freedoms are inseparable from political ones, so people far removed from economics should not look benevolently upon interventionist efforts, thinking that as long as political freedoms are left untouched, economics is a narrow specialized topic and experts know best how to steer it.
Hayek did not claim that everything was hopeless and that, having stepped onto the road to serfdom, humanity would be unable to stop. If he had believed so, he would have had no need to write the book. He did, however, argue that the further one goes down this road, the harder it is to stop, and therefore socialism is best fought at the far approaches. Unfortunately, practice has shown the exact opposite: it is extremely difficult to deny socialists small concessions while society as a whole is liberal, but when everything is already regulated to shreds, both society and the government tire of the constant tightening of the screws. A sufficiently strong demand for deregulation emerges, it is carried out, and people breathe a sigh of relief, but it soon turns out that the leviathan, having retreated in one place, is already pressing in another.
In the article Barrier on the Road to Serfdom: Dead End or Detour?, Bitarch and I mentioned John Meadowcroft’s thesis that it is the hybrid society that proves to be stable, unlike the liberal or totalitarian ones, and we also pointed out that neither increasing transparency nor reducing direct state participation in the economy helps avoid the fact that the overall regulation of society continues to grow slowly.
The book “The Road to Serfdom” is a good example of rhetoric that can and should be used when working with politicians. The fact is that most of the arguments in the book are no longer relevant, unless, of course, you are dealing with hardline Marxists; against more or less modern supporters of state regulation, it makes sense to apply Hayek’s later texts, such as “The Fatal Conceit.”
