Progress pill
Apogee and Decline: From the 19th to the 20th Century

The Road to Serfdom

A Philosophical History of Freedom

The Road to Serfdom

  • The Allure of Collectivism
  • The Socialist Roots of Nazism
Alarmed by the rise of government interventionism in the economies of Western democracies, Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom as a philosophical critique of collectivism, whether from the right or the left. Published in several million copies, thanks to the Reader’s Digest, this book has greatly contributed to Hayek's fame in the United States.

The Allure of Collectivism

Written between 1940 and 1943, this brief essay aims to provide an initial assessment of the dirigiste experiments undertaken in the latter half of the 1930s, specifically the nationalizations and Keynesian management of demand that emerged in social democratic Europe and the New Deal era in the United States. Dedicated to "socialists of all parties," it seeks to demonstrate that "the West has gradually abandoned the principle of economic freedom without which no individual or political freedom has previously been possible." Indeed, the same process of political centralization and the same desire to replace a dirigiste organization with traditional market mechanisms are evident everywhere. In Great Britain, as in the United States, it is asserted that the public power must plan everything and can solve everything.
As for authentic liberalism, it is concerned with justice. However, Hayek reminds us that it belongs to civil society, not the State, to organize this solidarity. What differentiates liberalism and socialism is not the ends, but the means. According to Hayek,
Liberalism wants us to make the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of coordinating human efforts; it does not want us to leave things as they are.
That's why, Hayek adds, the State has an undeniable area of activity:
To create the conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to replace it where it cannot be effective, to provide services that are of such a nature that profit, according to Smith's formula, cannot reimburse the cost to any group.
Conversely, the planning of the economy and society in general, the essence of socialism, is directed against competition as such. However, according to Hayek, there is an incompatibility between the ends of socialism (social justice, equality, and security) and the means socialism envisions to achieve them (abolition of private property, collectivisation of the means of production, and a planned economy).

The Socialist Roots of Nazism

From the first pages, Hayek establishes a parallel between the triumph of socialist ideals in the West and the concurrent success of totalitarian utopias.
Few people, he warns in his preface, are willing to recognize that the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the trends (...) of the previous period, but an inevitable result of these trends. This is something that most people have refused to see, even at the moment when they realized the resemblance offered by certain negative traits of the domestic regimes of Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. The result is that many people who consider themselves very much above the aberrations of Nazism and who sincerely hate all its manifestations, are at the same time working for ideals whose realization would lead directly to this abhorred tyranny. According to Hayek, socialism and Nazism share a number of fundamental commonalities, particularly the rejection of individualism and the spontaneous order of the market. Both ideologies prioritize the well-being of the group over the rights and freedoms of individuals, aiming to create a homogeneous society united by shared values and goals. Neither socialists nor Nazis hesitate to use force and coercion to achieve their objectives. They are willing to suppress individual liberties and repress dissent in the name of the greater good of society. In the chapter titled "The Socialist Roots of Nazism," Hayek points out that Nazism claims socialist planning (hence its name, national-socialism) of the economy as a means of establishing total control over the population.
German and Italian socialists merely paved the way for Nazism by setting up political parties that directed all activities of the individual, from birth to death, dictating their opinions on everything. It was not the fascists but the socialists who began to regiment children into political organizations, to control their private lives and their thoughts.
The Nazis merely adopted the statist, dirigiste, and interventionist discourse already popularized by the Marxists. Many fascist leaders, such as Mussolini in Italy, Laval in France, and Oswald Mosley in Great Britain, had started their political careers as left-wing activists before converting to fascism or Hitlerism, due to ideological proximity.
In conclusion, Hayek calls on his contemporaries to turn their backs on the "madness" and "contemporary obscurantism" to rid humanity of the "errors that have dominated our lives in the recent past." According to him, the best guarantee of freedom is private property. When all means of production are concentrated in the hands of a few organizers, we are subjected to total power, as this economic power becomes a political instrument of control over our entire lives.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
What is Hayek's critique of socialism?