Posted on 05/01/2005 5:49:32 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
The authors 9
Foreword by Edwin J. Feulner Jr 11
Introduction: Hayek, Fisher and The Road to Serfdom by John Blundell 14
Preface to the Reader’s Digest condensed version of The Road to Serfdom 26
Summary 27
The Road to Serfdom (condensed version) 31
Planning and power 32
Background to danger 34
The liberal way of planning 37
The great utopia 39
Why the worst get on top 43
Planning vs. the Rule of Law 49
Is planning ‘inevitable’? 51
Can planning free us from care? 53
Two kinds of security 58
Towards a better world 62
The Road to Serfdom in cartoons 63
About the IEA 82
CONTENTS
But in April 1945 it was not only condensed in the Readers' Digest, it was the first and still the only condensed book to be the first article in an issue of the Digest, rather than being in the back. Hayek was sailing to America for what he thought would be a modest book tour at the time the April 1945 edition hit the newsstands - and he arrived to learn that The Road to Serfdom was a sensation in America and he would be speaking to huge audiences.
The original uncondensed book has gone through multiple printings since then, at least as recently as a 50th anniversary printing in 1994. It has been printed in many languages, and was read sereptitiously behind the Iron Curtain.
F A Hayek ping.
The original should be required reading for every high school course and freshman college course in the country. Never will happen, though.
Thank you
Even though I majored in Economics in college I was never exposed to Hayek (or Von Mises or any of the other Austrian School), until after I graduated. This was no doubt due to the fact that I went to "Buckethead State University" which was dominated by liberals (the Econ chair had been on Pres. Carter's Counsel of Wage and Price Stability). I discovered Hayek after college and have read (and reread) his works ever since.
I have the bad habit of underlining and/or marketing up many of the books I read to more easily find passages of particular significance and insight. Unforetunately, with my copy of "The Road to Serfdom" most of the entire book is underlined and highlighted because Hayek had so many profoundly important (and in many ways prophetic), things to say about where socialism would lead us.
If you have a F A Hayek ping list please add me to it!
Prophetic is right.
BTTT
FANTASTIC book. All politicians should be required to read. High Fives for this post!
No doubt an American or English ‘fascist’ system would greatly differ from the Italian or German models; no doubt, if the transition were effected without violence, we might expect to get a better type of leader. Yet this does not mean that our fascist system would in the end prove very different or much less intolerable than its prototypes. There are strong reasons for believing that the worst features of the totalitarian systems are phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce.
Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian leader would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism. Who does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf which separates totalitarianism from the essentially individualist Western civilization.
. . . Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the supreme rule. There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole’, because that is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done.
To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, therefore, a man must be prepared to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. In the totalitarian machine there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous. Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet it is through such positions that the road to the highest positions in the totalitarian state leads.
A distinguished American economist, Professor Frank H. Knight, correctly notes that the authorities of a collectivist state ‘would have to do these things whether they wanted to or not: and the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation’.
"We're Going to Take Things Away From You on Behalf of the Common Good" - Hillary Clinton, June 2004
Well, I didn't have one . . . but having googled FR to make sure this wasn't already posted, I had a ready source for one!
. . . and by pinging them in small groups . . .
. . . I hope you can . . .
Enjoy!
As Hayek said, “...it is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.”
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.
The worst sufferer in this respect is the word ‘liberty’. It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a ‘collective freedom’, which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. ‘Collective freedom’ is not the freedom of the members of society, but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme.
It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb report of the position in every Russian enterprise: ‘Whilst the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt that the plan will be successful is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effect on the will and efforts of the rest of the staff.’
Control extends even to subjects which seem to have no political significance. The theory of relativity, for instance, has been opposed as a ‘Semitic attack on the foundation of Christian andNordic physics’ and because it is ‘in conflict with dialectical materialism and Marxist dogma’. Every activity must derive its justification from conscious social purpose. There must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide.
It will be in my home. I've worn out two copies myself.
I've got two copies myself! (gotta frame the cartoon copies for my kids, though... heh).
Thanks!
This is twisted! Reading the passages you posted *literally* fills my heart with joy... like hearing an old beloved hymm from childhood.
I can tell it's time for a reread. I've resisted for the past few years, because I was vainly hoping for an electric edition to come out. I've obviously waited too long as I've nearly forgotten *why* I despise socialists so much. So many of them are such nice people... Hayek taught me why they are just as dangerous as the ones who wear jack-boots.
A book every freedom-loving person should read and heed.
BTT!!!!!!!
He was also a bit of an historian. Every time some Leftie argues that the Nazis were "right wing", I throw his passage on Nazis, Communists, and Socialists, left-wing all, at them. After all, he was there, watching it all from Europe, at the time.
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
His "liberal of the old type" is of course what we would call a classical liberal, not a modern "liberal", who is a socialist who has Orwellianly appropriated the word "liberal".
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.Here Hayek nails the "Orwellian" (Hayek's notes have Orwell reviewing Serfdom, in late '44, and Orwell chose the date 1984 by inverting the last two digits of the year of publication - 1948. So Orwell cannot be said to have invented the concept of word-meaning inversion - or at least not as late as the publication date of 1984) "Newspeak."The worst sufferer in this respect is the word ‘liberty’. It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a ‘collective freedom’, which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. ‘Collective freedom’ is not the freedom of the members of society, but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme.
It is however ironic that Hayek, in a preface to a later edition of the full Serfdom text, discusses the American inversion of the word "liberalism" defensively. He mentions there his 'regret' at using so liberally a word which was perfectly understood in Britain at that time but which in America at that same time meant "very nearly its opposite" of the old British meaning.
It will take you a long way in translating leftist Newspeak if, whenever you hear the word "social" as a word or the root of a word, or you hear the word "public," you mentally pencil in the word "government" as a possible replacement. Thus "socialism" is accurately translated into "governmentism" - which is, aptly a synonym for "tyranny." And thus when the leftist says, "society should feed its children" no one can seriously question that someone in society should and must - but the leftist actually means nothing other than that the government should do it. "The public sector" is a circumlocution for "the government," too - and (as Milton Friedman vigorously asserts) a "public school" is a government school.
Thanks!
Well said, great post.
It will be when I am ruling the country with an iron fist. Bwahahahaha!
Oops. Get power first, then laugh maniacally
Me too. I've also given a few copies away. The recipients who actually read it were amazed.
I found the actual quote, which was sourced to the preface Hayek wrote for the 1956 edition:
The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term "liberal" in the original nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftist movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that "liberal" has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.As I mentioned elsewhere, American conservatism is a strange duck. Conservatism nurtures tradition, but American tradition is freedom - and freedom allows change. It is for that reason that conservatism is not really such a terrible name for Hayek's "liberalism."It is true, of course, that in the struggle against the believers in the all-powerful state the true liberal must sometimes make common cause with the conservative, and in some circumstances, as in contemporary Britain, he has hardly any other way of actively working for his ideals. But true liberalism is still distinct from conservatism, and there is danger in the two being confused. Conservatism, through a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power o f government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.
Note that from my perspective "the denial of all privilege, . . . understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others" would certainly include the dismantling of the FCC's licensing of some few of us to be broadcasters and its consigning of the rest of to the role of mere listeners.
Media bias bump.
This is a great thread. Thank you so much.
"As I mentioned elsewhere, American conservatism is a strange duck. Conservatism nurtures tradition, but American tradition is freedom - and freedom allows change. It is for that reason that conservatism is not really such a terrible name for Hayek's "liberalism." "
Pro-freedom American 'conservatism' is less a 'strange duck' than a hybrid of conservative instincts and classical Liberalism that IMHO stengthens the both the ideals of freedom and virtue.
Like alloyed steel, in politics there are certain concepts that need other supporting and somewhat contrary ideals to work. A society cannot be free unless it is virtuous, and a society cannot be moral unless it is free. So although liberalism's goal of freedom and conservatism's aim of 'soulcraft' are often opposed, both ideals are improved by the other.
That is why American-style conservatism works as a positive governing philosophy.
I would say, the two are nominally opposed, but in fact are two sides of the same coin - virtue isn't virtue unless it is freely chosen. That's D'nish d'Souza's formulation, in which he says that American women dress more provocatively than the burka-clad muslim woman - but since the muslim woman didn't have a choice in the matter, the American woman may actually be more modest than the muslim. Who can say how the muslim woman would dress if she wouldn't be whipped if she didn't wear a burka?So American freedom gives more scope for virtue, just as it gives more scope for vice.
dittos on your thoughts.
It is not to be thought that what the Establishment labels "dissent" necessarily is such in fact; "establishment dissent" is a classic oxymoron.In America only those whom the Establishment labels "conservative" truly dissent from the Establishment.
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
To: conservatism_IS_compassionHere's a link to the article, "Why I am not a Conservative," whose title Michelle borrowed for her essay, the subject of this thread. I couldn't say what her opinion is of Hayek's original, but even though it was written 45 years ago, it is amazingly insightful and appropos for the current discussions here on FR. I recommend it.
http://www.fahayek.org/index.php?article=177
217 posted on 05/04/2005 11:56:28 AM EDT by Sam Cree
Michelle Malkin: I'm No South Park Conservative The National Ledger ^ | May 4, 2005 | Michelle Malkin
Bump!
Pinging responders to this excellent thread:Marx's Legacy of Hatred (NAZI = Nationalistic Marxism).The Road To Serfdom, the subject of this thread, is a classic which is germane to the discussion of the relationship between NAZIism and Communism.
Thanks much!
Ditto. Instead they read "Our Global World" and get lessons on income distributions and the wonders of diversity in serfdom.
Mark
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language.The worst sufferer in this respect is the word ‘liberty’. It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere. Indeed, it could almost be said that wherever liberty as we know it has been destroyed, this has been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. Even among us we have planners who promise us a ‘collective freedom’, which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. ‘Collective freedom’ is not the freedom of the members of society, but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society that which he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1394906/posts?page=23#23
At the start of the Twentieth Century the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.I have my own Newspeak-English dictionary:But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us. And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation just as surely as marketers love to boldly proclaim that the product which they are flogging is NEW!
- objective :
- reliably promoting the interests of Big Journalism. (usage: always applied to journalists who are members in good standing; never applied to anyone but a journalist)
- liberal :
- see "objective," except that the usage is reversed: (usage: never applied to any working journalist)
- progressive :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- moderate:
- see "liberal." (usage: same as for "liberal").
- centrist :
- see "liberal" (usage: same as for "liberal").
- conservative :
- rejecting the idea that journalism is a higher calling than providing food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and security; adhering to the dictum of Theodore Roosevelt that: "It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena (usage: applies to people who - unlike those labeled liberal/progressive/moderate/centrist, cannot become "objective" by getting a job as a journalist, and probably cannot even get a job as a journalist.)(antonym:"objective")
- right-wing :
- see, "conservative."
- conservative :
- opposed to radical change of the sort which promote the idea that assigns authority to "liberals" while leaving the responsibility with those who work to a bottom line and therefore are subject to second guessing.
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