The Road to Serfdom

A GOOD many intellectual crimes have been committed in the name of liberty ever since Mme. Roland was guillotined for the greater glory of the Jacobin interpretation of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” In our own age especially it has become fashionable in some “advanced” circles to sneer at “Bill of Rights democracy,” to place individual liberty in a category with crinolines and other outmoded Victorian relics.

The paradoxical fallacy that collective liberty and well-being are somehow served by restrictions and curtailments of individual freedom has made considerable progress. Perception of the evils of uncontrolled wealth is sometimes associated with a blind spot as to the far greater evils of uncontrolled power.

Professor Hayek, an internationally famous economist who is Austrian by birth and a British subject by naturalization, is a man who loves liberty and knows its essential social and economic conditions. Profoundly, almost intuitively aware of the evils of the totalitarian system that, in one form or another, had engulfed most of Europe before the war, he is pained to find totalitarian thinking in the economic field winning many converts in his adopted country.

Out of that love of liberty, out of that grief, has come a great book, worthy to rank with John Stuart Mill’s “Essay on Liberty.” Hayek possesses the rare combination of great historical, political, and economic erudition with a brilliant, flashing style. He has the knack of getting to the heart of a problem in a few words, as when he writes: “Who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?”

And there are many sharp epigrams of which this is typical: “While the last resort of a competitive society is the bailiff, the ultimate sanction of a planned economy is the hangman.”

Russia, Germany, and Italy all supply plenty of illustrations.

The supreme value of intellectual freedom is not that everyone exercises it with equal facility, but “that any cause or idea may be argued by somebody.”

Professor Hayek does not argue for a rigid doctrinaire laissez faire; he recognizes that a system of social security is both feasible and desirable in a modern industrial society. But he directs a withering fire against what he regards as the illusions of the planned economy. As he sums up his case: “Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable.”

And an aggregation of nationally planned economies, as the author argues convincingly, would make for stagnation and all-around impoverishment in the field of international trade. Democratic socialism, in Hayek’s opinion, is “the great utopia of the last few generations.” He lays stress on the strongly authoritarian character of much early socialist thought and on the links between some German Social Democrats of strongly nationalist inclination and the theory and practice of the Nazi state.

Hayek’s work should be a banner for those who believe that the state needs constant watching if it is not to be a tyrant. And even advocates of a planned economy can scarcely deny either his intellectual integrity or the searching, fundamental quality of some of his questions and criticisms. University of Chicago Press, $2.75.

WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN