Oct 30th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Serfdom Correction
It’s been pointed out to me by several friends that The Road to Serfdom doesn’t actually make the argument I had believed it made. My impression had been that it was a statement about the inevitable development of Soviet-style totalitarianism from certain trends toward social democracy in postwar Europe. It seems that a lot of people think this is what the book argues, but that it’s not right. Hayek himself wrote “it has frequently been alleged that I have contended that any movement in the direction of socialism is bound to lead to totalitarianism. Even though this danger exists, this is not what the book says.”
Fair enough.
29 Responses to “Serfdom Correction”
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October 30th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Yes, but does it say what Nick Loris said it said? If so, don’t you think you should acknowledge that directly?
October 30th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Also, I think it was written in 1944…
October 30th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
In other conservative corrections, Ayn Rand was actually just trying to sell books. Put your tie, conform, and STFU. If it’s tough choking down the bile, learn to hate the other! That’s what the conservative hokey pokey is all about.
October 30th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
The main thesis is that a centrally planned economy doesn’t work and is destined to end badly. I don’t think this is a very controversial argument today. A progressive income tax hardly constitutes central planning of the economy.
October 30th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
“Serfdom Connection” is always the worst store in any mall. The merger with Everything Vassal didn’t help a bit.
October 30th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Bingo- give David a cigar. The book is a good read but essentially irrelevant today.
October 30th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
You know, there’s any easy way to figure out what the book says. I plead guilty to not reading it either, but at least in college I was assigned a few excerpts.
October 30th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
This seems like as good a time as any to recommend Jesse Larner’s wonderful essay on Hayek from last winter.
October 30th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
quoting hayek as evidence of what hayek’s book means?
as though the author has any privileged access to the meaning of his texts.
how retro. how bourgeois.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
George Orwell wrote an interesting review of Hayek’s book when it came out. He admits that the book has a great deal of truth: “Collectivism is not inherently democratic.” He also says that Hayek is “probably right” in that “intellectuals are more totalitarian minded than the common people.”
He goes on to say: “… Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led…. the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment.”
I think there is a place where both Orwell and Hayek are right. I would certainly prefer a “free market” to “State regimentation”, though Orwell is clearly not talking about Ingsoc and Oceania here. It clearly depends on where you set the dividing line.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Things only get more confusing when you read the intro by Milton Friedman (as pictured) who does seem to imply that some forms of state intervention (I think he mentions environmental regulations?) lead us on a slippery slope to serfdom. Maybe he never read the book either?
October 30th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I think you’re being to easy on Hayek, Matt. His objection to the “inevitability” reading of his position has to do with his beliefs about inevitability, not his beliefs about state intervention in the economy. In other words, state intervention does not “inevitably” lead to serfdom because we can choose to abandon interventionist policies. The key question is, “what did Hayek think would happen if W. Europe stayed statist for fifty years?”, and the answer is “serfdom”. Over the long term, state intervention could only be sustained by propaganda and brain-washing; turns out not to be true.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Eh, note from the Google Books thing that you linked that Hayek’s protest wasn’t that he thought that we would inevitably wind up at serfdom. This is compatible with “We’ll wind up at serfdom unless we reverse the social-democratic steps we’ve taken.”
In my opinion and as I recall, Hayek doesn’t always stay entirely focused on the centrally-planned economy; some of the time he talks about more localized government interventions as if they also lead down the road to serfdom. And in one of his other books he says truly insane things about unions (I don’t know, maybe they made a little sense in the UK in 1960). Anyway, if everyone misread his book it’s possible that it didn’t say what he thought it said.
October 30th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
I read it back in college, and I feel like I remember it pretty well. I think maybe he objects to the use of the term “inevitable” in saying statism will/could/might lead to totalitarianism. Most of the examples in the book were about the levels of control/input Imperial Russia and Germany had into their economies and how this facilitated the level of totalitarianism and coercion practiced by the Soviets and Nazis and how it was more or less accepted by their peoples.
The connection to postwar Europe, insofar as I remember, was Hayek’s concern that the postwar Labour government would set Britain on a similar path.
Overblown, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s irrelevant today at all. Even Trotsky eventually argued that the existence of the Tsarist bureaucracy made the excesses of the Stalin era more likely, if not inevitable.
October 30th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Woh, The Constitution of Liberty certainly does make the slippery slope argument you made earlier. And Robert Skidelsky’s discussion of JM Keynes’ thoughts on Road to Serfdom are worth considering: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0143036157/ref=sib_dp_ptu#reader-link
October 30th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
The link doesn’t seem to work. Put in “Road to Serfdom” and look at page 722 and 723
October 30th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Also, I think it was written in 1944…
In fact, “The Road To Serfdom” was intended as a tie-in to a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby comedy film of the same name released that year.
It was set in Czarist Russia and co-starred Barbara Stanwyck as the Samovar. There’s a famous musical number in the film that opens with Hope stepping into the main street of a sleeping village and bellowing, “Serfs Up!!!”
October 30th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Your “friends” are quoting from the 1976 preface. The 1956 preface sings a very different tune. Hayek (1956) agrees with you. Hayek (1976) agrees with them.
Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia!
October 31st, 2008 at 1:42 am
God forbid Matt actually has some clue about anything resembling libertarianism. It would interfere with his drive-by snark.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:18 am
Surely you have seen Brad Delong’s rebuttal to your correction: “Matthew Yglesias gets snookered by the Orwellian right”, saying that your original interpretation was correct, and that the quote you cite is from the 1970’s, after Hayek had realized he had been proven wrong and so was engaging in a bit of self-revisionism.
October 31st, 2008 at 7:37 am
Delong threw 1950s Britain down the memory hole (and Hayek down the understanding hole) in his rebuttal… [also posted a version of this at Delong's site, sorry about the length. Vermando, note the 1956 preface quote below]
From the 1950 Labour Party manifesto:
“There can be no advance without planning. … Only by price control and rationing can fair shares of scarce goods be ensured. Only control over capital investment, distribution of industry, industrial building and foreign exchange can … build up a permanently thriving national economy.”
I don’t think anyone actually believes that statement today.
[From Hayek's 1956 preface, right after Delong's quote ends]: “It now seems unlikely that, even when another Labour government should come to power in Great Britain, it would resume the experiments in large-scale nationalization and planning. But in Britain… the defeat of… systematic socialism has merely given those who are anxious to preserve freedom a breathing space in which to re-examine our ambitions and to discard all those parts of the socialist inheritance which are a danger to a free society…”
October 31st, 2008 at 9:31 am
At the end of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty he launches a “why I am not a Conservative” argument. I think it may have been made before the rise of Goldwaterism, but it paints a pretty accurate picture of what modern conservatism has become – a movement operating without any principle.
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