On the Road Again
Brad DeLong says I was right the first time about The Road to Serfdom and that the 1976 preface’s disavowal of the claim that postwar western Europe was on a slippery slope to totalitarianism is a post hoc revision. He observes that the 1956 preface certainly seemed to be arguing that Britain was, yes, on the road to serfdom. Which would, of course, be a logical thing for a book titled The Road to Serfdom to argue:
Of course, six years of socialist governmnet in England have not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state. But those who argue that this has disproved the thesis of The Road to Serfdom have really missed one of its main points; that the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people. This is necessarily a slow affair, a process which extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations. The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude towar authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit. The consequences can of course be averted if that spirit reasserts itself in time and the people not only throw out the party which has been leading them further and further in the dangerous direction but also recognize the nature of the danger and resolutely change their course. There is not yet much ground to believe that the latter has happened in England.
Of course I suppose Hayek would say that Britain was on the road to serfdom from the mid-1940s through to the end of the 1970s and that the election of Margaret Thatcher then represented the resolute change of course necessary to prevent the UK from becoming a totalitarian dictatorship. But even that seems pretty slipshod and absurd. I think it’s fair to say that the UK, like most countries, was experiencing some serious economic problems by the end of the seventies and that Britain’s were perhaps more severe than usual. But the country was pretty clear not on the verge of becoming a Stalinesque totalitarian dictatorship on the eve of Thatcher’s election. Nor has a country like France that never really followed the US and UK down the neoliberal path become a totalitarian dictatorship.
Interpretive issues aside, clearly Hayek’s general critique of central planning as economics was essentially right and has proven extremely influential over the decades. His political views, on the other hand, look to me to have been pretty alarmist and off-base.
48 Responses to “On the Road Again”
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October 31st, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Maybe, instead of posting more and more about this, you actually- here’s the strange part- READ THE BOOK FIRST.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Matt, why don’t you just read the book and make up your own mind?
October 31st, 2008 at 12:18 pm
And of course, Thatcher only became PM in 1979, so using her as an
excuse for the 1976 preface would be doubly post hoc.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Matt has a bee in his bonnet.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Hayek is a hack. There’s a reason he’s Jonah Goldberg’s favorite economist. Not that Goldberg’s read him. Maybe the illustrated Hayek for Kids or some shit.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Re Matt’s last pargraph, I think of Hayek as a sort of anti-Marx as the latter was/is not very useful on the econmics side but some of the political analysis has rather more to say for itself.
October 31st, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Best explanation of the Road to Serfdom is this handy, illustrated, comic book like guide:
http://mises.org/books/TRTS/
If you look at it, it is all about central planning, propoganda efforts on the governemnt, and crushing of political dissent “for the good of the state” and the central planners in the name of “efficiency.”
It’s really more anti-totalitarian than anything; if there is still a lot of economic vitality, free elections without massive government progaganda, and civil liberties, you aren’t waltzing down the road to serfdom. But the ideas espoused would be distrubed by the type of “central planning” associated with, say, a national health care system. Also, the road to serfdom starts with increased statism caused by foreign conflict… just sayin…
October 31st, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Not only is France not a dictatorship — the French have a long tradition of a powerful State as well as long traditions of rising up in revolt against the State, and of participation in electoral politics and exercising liberties. I don’t think there’s any evidence that a socialist state has made the French meek, cowed, or serf-like.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Has anyone ever written on the parallel paranoia on the part of both von Hayek and his fellow travelers on the right and the Frankfurt School Marxists (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, et al.) on the left–paranoia about the immanent and imminent totalitarianism stalking postwar capitalist democracy? Anybody know?
October 31st, 2008 at 1:03 pm
“it’s fair to say that the UK, like most countries, was experiencing some serious economic problems by the end of the seventies and that Britain’s were perhaps more severe than usual”
I would respectfully suggest to all, including but not limited to right-wing political “thinkers”, that the UK, unlike most European countries, was experiencing some serious economic problems by the mid-forties, having ruined itself saving the rest of mankind from slavery. Me, I prefer Myrdal.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:24 pm
hayek argued for a very tight link between economic freedom and political freedom, or economic oppression and political oppression.
that things are not that simple is shown by my’s european examples, but surely even more clearly by the example of china in the last decade or so.
‘free your economy and your mind will follow’ just hasn’t played out in china. i don’t think hayek predicted this.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Re: Interpretive issues aside, clearly Hayek’s general critique of central planning as economics was essentially right and has proven extremely influential over the decades.
Is it really essentially right? It seems to me that it’s too early to tell. Central planning has some advantages in conditions of war, crisis, and generalized poverty, and the market has advantages in producing consumer goods and generating wealth. It seems to me that the economic climate in the coming century is going to be driven by natural resource shortages, and characterized more by desperation and poverty than by wealth, which leads me to think that planned economies may be in for a major comeback.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Of course the sad thing is that you could say that the UK now is in much more danger of being on the road to serfdom, with cameras everywhere, government proposals to record all Internet traffic, etc., etc.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:44 pm
None of the totalitarian governments that have existed in the world – none of them – came into being as a result of a welfare-state or social democracy gradually expanding until it become totalitarian. Not one have travelled that road, they all came to be through revolutions.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:57 pm
‘free your economy and your mind will follow’ just hasn’t played out in china. i don’t think hayek predicted this.
Yeah but Hayek looked great in from Dusk til Dawn. Oh wait, wrong Hayek…
October 31st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Hayek’s whole problem is precisely that he couldnever acknowledge that, besides the central planning versus markets debate (in which he makes a great argument against central planning), there’s a whole variety of ways that market economies are underpinned by non-market institutions – if you like, there’s no such thing as “the market” but rather an infinite number of markets with different rules and constraints. Hence his simply wishing away the category of “mixed economy” through his slippery slope to serfdom argument.
I think Hector’s comment @ 12 is interesting because, although I’m incredibly ignorant of Soviet economic history, the USSR’s economic record actually seems a lot better (until the 1980s) than one would expect based on Hayek’s argument against central planning.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
I’d like to add my voice to the chorus: if you want to argue that The Road to Serfdom argues this or that, prove it by quoting from it, using passages you found yourself, which you know are representative of the larger argument because you read the whole thing. It now seems like you ridiculed someone else for misrepresenting the argument of a book you have not read, and that gives me less faith in your posts from here on out.
Otherwise, you can always 1) link to other people’s readings of The Road to Serfdom while making it clear that you haven’t read it, or 2) argue the underlying economic and political issues without reference to the book.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:30 pm
“clearly Hayek’s general critique of central planning as economics was essentially right and has proven extremely influential over the decades.”
Clearly, you need remedial help in economics.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Hegel said in the preface to the Phenomenology that the supposed royal road to philosophy was by reading prefaces and book reviews. He didn’t like that so he wrote impenetrable, misleading prefaces in part in order to fool with people.
MY’s previous post was a perfect example of a preface competing with the book review! People who’ve read the preface were going around correcting people who haven’t read the book but have read some account of it.
It makes me want to recommend the great recent book, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. One of the great points of that book is that actually having read a book doesn’t always qualify you to talk about it, either. Some people read books badly; some forget.
On a more general note, I still think people should read Hayek! Read the Constitution of Liberty; it’s a lot better than Road to Serfdom.
October 31st, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Britain is actually a very good example of a nation going down the Road to Serfdom.
British acquiescence to the surveillance state is just the tip of the iceberg. Read Theodore Dalrymple’s Life At The Bottom to learn how British serfs live nowadays.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Yes, as Thatcher and Blair moved the nation even further from socialism. Perfect example of how utterly wrong Hayek was. Then again, so is his slobbering love-fest for Pinochet, who magically wasn’t at all totalitarian, because he wasn’t left-wing.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:33 pm
James (#12),
Don’t be fooled; the USSR’s economic record was actually pretty poor. They just went up from a very peasant based agrain society through a forced industrialization that involved massive famine and death in the 30s (not usually a hallmark of success). They did receive a boost through the looting of eastern europe after the war and the forced labor of german prisoners and scientiests, and did manage to turn a lot of farmer’s kids into engineers in the 50s (both of which helped their aerospace). But if it wasn’t for the dramatic spike in oil prices in the 70s, they probalby would have collapsed sooner (and when oil prices collapesed in the 80s, so did they). Even Kruschev’s big agrian policies in the early 60s failed; they initally led to a brief boom in grain output in the steppes, but the poor central planning led these to collapse just a few years later.
Central planning is more useful for the output of military hardware than for any functional economy based on actual consumer needs. Which is why it has its charms for totalitarian tyrants.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Thatcher, Blair, Major, and their predecessors all consolidated power and authority into Downing Street. They all had their excuses, and among them were this and that extension of the welfare state. (Though yes, Thatcher’s excuses were not on that vein.) Pinochet is not a valid comparison. We’re talking about the road to serfdom, not the express train there.
October 31st, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Matt,
With all due respect, Britain in the 1970s wasn’t like the rest of the Western world in terms of its economic problems, it was at the bottom. It was referred to as the sick man of Europe and was in debt to the IMF. To consider what Thatcher did to resurrect that nation is a truly historic achievement that I don’t think many people (especially in the U.S.) realize. She was that astounding a person, and her system was that astounding a system (although she never did all that she wanted to do).
I think that something to point out in all of this is that if you give folks an inch, they’ll take a mile. Once you start down the road of giving folks a hand-out rather than a hand-up, they demand more and more and more. This was the problem for the world during that time…Progressivism in the beginning is a nice idea and usually functions relatively well…but human nature will necessarily take it to it’s logical (and economically destructive) conclusion.
October 31st, 2008 at 5:57 pm
There evidence that the real threat to British Democracy in the late 1960s and 1970s came from the intelligence services and the political right. The right wing conspiring even involved the royal family – specifically Lord Mountbatten. MI5 and others seem to have genuinely believed that the moderate social democrat Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson might lead Britain into the Soviet camp. Even though the radical left of Wilson’s day attacked him as a sell-out for (among other things) refusing to criticize the US war in Vietnam. Perhaps MI5 were taking ‘Road to Serfdom’ literally?
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16819862&method=full&siteid=94762&headline=who-was-plotting-an-army-coup-to-get-rid-of-harold-wilson–name_page.html
October 31st, 2008 at 5:59 pm
> To consider what Thatcher did to resurrect that
> nation is a truly historic achievement that I
> don’t think many people (especially in the U.S.) realize.
She put that oil under the North Sea all by herself? Sort of like in _Hitchhiker’s Guide_?
October 31st, 2008 at 6:11 pm
So Fritz von Papen and Paul von Hindenberg’s putting Adolf Hitler into power as Chancellor as part of a coalition government was a revolutionary act ? Who knew ? (They certainly didn’t.)
October 31st, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Agorabum (#22) – I’m sure all you say is true, but still, 3 points:
1) The USSR did (did it not?) achieve good growth rates (in so far as these can be known) for a long time.
2) Living standards (consumption, education) did (did it not?) improve pretty dramatically between pre-revolutionary times and, say, the 1960s.
3) The economy was productive enough to sustain Russia as a superpower for a long time.
October 31st, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Marshall, we can get a lot more personal about Hayek if we look at Austria. As I remember seeing the history in Charles Gulick’s Austria from Hapsburg to Hitler, a major factor in the destruction of democracy there was the Vienna landlords association. Rent control was at the core of the Social Democrats’ program that kept them in the majority in the city, so the landlords supported the destruction of local democracy, which was an important step toward Austrian fascism. If I remember correctly (I read the book a long time ago, and this 1948 book isn’t easily accessible to me), Hayek shows up extensively in the footnotes as the theorist of the Vienna landlords.
This does not of course prove Hayek’s theory wrong, but it’s not an irrelevant piece of history. This is not the only time (Chile, cited above, is another) that the road to dictatorship was paved by the advocates of “free enterprise.”
October 31st, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Of course I suppose Hayek would say that Britain was on the road to serfdom from the mid-1940s through to the end of the 1970s and that the election of Margaret Thatcher then represented the resolute change of course necessary to prevent the UK from becoming a totalitarian dictatorship. But even that seems pretty slipshod and absurd.
More slipshod than putting words in someone’s mouth in order to disparage him?
October 31st, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Mike, that’s not putting words in someone’s mouth. That’s testing someone’s theory against the facts.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Yglesias apparently thinks that because Obama is evidently going to be President that this proves the US not going down the road to serfdom.
Except the US has been in serfdom for decades now.
Yglesias is the perfect example of a serf who thinks the state can solve all problems – as long as it’s run by Democrats anyway.
Bottom line: As I said in the earlier threads, this is just another one of Matt’s “drive-by anti-libertarian snarks” based on nothing more than his imagination about what libertarianism is about.
Clearly some libertarian fucked him up in a philosophy class one day in Harvard and he’s never forgiven the guy.
Puerile, pathetic and juvenile.
November 1st, 2008 at 3:23 am
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.
I should have written that book in my early twenties – I was a true master of the craft. Over the years I gradually moved towards truthfulness in these matters, but I’m still not sure of that was such a wise decision after all, since you either have to spend all your time reading or severely limit the scope of your intellectual discussions.
November 1st, 2008 at 4:37 am
Brad DeLong has to be taken with a grain of salt. He has always abhored Hayek or really any economic school (Marxists, and Austrians particularly) too far outside his comfort zone (though he adores Milton Friedman for some reason). Here’s a few excerpts from a reecent conversation on socialism at Mark Thoma’s page by Barkley Rosser; a heterodox economist of some note;
November 1st, 2008 at 4:38 am
Brad DeLong has to be taken with a grain of salt. He has always abhored Hayek or really any economic school (Marxists, and Austrians particularly) too far outside his comfort zone (though he adores Milton Friedman for some reason). Here’s a few excerpts from a reecent conversation on socialism at Mark Thoma’s page by Barkley Rosser; a heterodox economist of some note;
November 1st, 2008 at 9:44 am
James,
Yes, that’s true. I think that a pretty good (and somewhat critical) account of the basic problems of central planning comes from Alec Nove’s “The Soviet Economic System”- Nove was a market-socialist economist, sympathetic to Yugoslavia. In general I think it’s important to bear some things in mind about whether or not the problems of the Soviets and their allies permanently discredit “central planning” and “socialism”.
1. Socialism isn’t the same thing as central planning- you can have one without the other, as in Yugoslavia.
2. Central planning isn’t an “either-or” system, you can have certain industries and goods be controlled and others subject to the market.
3. Central planning as we know it historically was basically the creation of Stalin, not Marx, and owes most of its bloody and brutal features to that fact. Who knows what the Soviet economy would have looked like if Bukharin, or the Socialist-Revolutionaries had been in charge? I strongly suspect that there would have been no Ukrainian Famine, no Great Purge, and no gulag as we know it.
4. There were other socialist centrally-planned economies that didn’t have equivalents of the Ukrainian famine- Cuba, or Vietnam, or Hungary (though Hungary certainly had its own problems).
5. Centrally planned economies tended to have higher growth rates than market economies during the early phase of industrialization, and much lower growth rates during the later phases.
6. Planned economies like Cuba have an advantage in mobilizing the whole society to deal with a problem- that’s how they were able to eliminate illiteracy in the 1960s, eliminate AIDS in the 1980s, and switch to a largely low-input, organic agriculture in the 1990s. That approach has costs, of course, like anything else, but at least in Cuba those costs did not involve things like Ukrainian famines or Red Terrors.
7. It’s dubious, anyway, whether _economic growth_ per se is the only feature why we should judge a system- what about things like equality, social solidarity, and the decline of greed and self-interest as motivating values? High economic growth rates don’t change the fact that Stalinism was evil, and similarly neither do they prove much about the moral virtue or vice of capitalism.
So it seems to me why the, in retrospect, lamentable and predictable collapse of the Soviet system should not discredit a possible socialist system of the future which would have some aspects of central planning and some aspects of the market, and in fact there’s reason to believe such a system might be better at dealing with a sustained global natural-resource crisis.
November 1st, 2008 at 10:21 am
Only a grain? I would take delong with roughly the same amount of salt that he would need to cut out of his diet in order to look vaguely human and not like a trembling mound of lard. Here are just a few brief quotes from the road to serfdom that debunk the idea that delong is pushing:
“no development is inevitable”
“Nor am I arguing that these developments are inevitable. If they were, there would be no point in writing this. They can be prevented if people realize in time where their efforts
may lead”
“It is important not to confuse opposition against the latter kind of planning with a dogmatic laissez faire attitude”
“The successful use of competition does not preclude some types of government interference. For instance, to limit working hours, to require certain sanitary arrangements, to provide an extensive system of social services is fully compatible with the preservation of competition.”
I hope these quotes prove helpful in your understanding of the book, but of course nothing is as helpful in this regard as actually fucking reading it.
November 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Hector,
I think I agree with pretty much all your points. In particular I agree that “high economic growth rates don’t change the fact that Stalinism was evil” – in fact, I’ve always had a pet theory that economic efficiency and destalinisation were inversely proportional in the USSR, i.e. the more politically liberal it became the less central planning worked. The reason would be that under Stalin the “negative feedback mechanism” (which Hayek held to be the motor of market efficiency) did in fact exist – in the form of a bullet rather than bankruptcy…
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