The Road to Serfdom

by Hayek, Friedrich A. Von

• ISBN13: 9780226320557
• ISBN10: 0226320553
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-03-30
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics,The Road to Serfdomhas inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program The Road to Serfdomwas seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944,The Road to Serfdomgarnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945, Reader's Digestpublished a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best seller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century. With this new edition,The Road to Serfdomtakes its place in the seriesThen Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. The volume includes a foreword by series editor and leading Hayek scholar Brude Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought. Caldwell has also standardized and corrected Hayek's references and added helpful new explanatory notes. Supplemented with an appendix of related materials ranging from prepublication reports on the initial manuscript to forewords to earlier editions by John Chamberlain, Milton Friedman, and Hayek himself, this new edition of The Road to Serfdom will be the definitive version of Friedrich Hayek's enduring masterwork.

Author Biography

F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 and cowinner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and a leading proponent of classical liberalism in the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

Editorial Foreword	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The Road to Serfdom
Preface to the Original Editions	p. 37
Foreword to the 1956 American Paperback Edition	p. 39
Preface to the 1976 Edition	p. 53
Introduction	p. 57
The Abandoned Road	p. 65
The Great Utopia	p. 76
Individualism and Collectivism	p. 83
The "Inevitability" of Planning	p. 91
Planning and Democracy	p. 100
Planning and the Rule of Law	p. 112
Economic Control and Totalitarianism	p. 124
Who, Whom?	p. 134
Security and Freedom	p. 147
Why the Worst Get on Top	p. 157
The End of Truth	p. 171
The Socialist Roots of Naziism	p. 181
The Totalitarians in Our Midst	p. 193
Material Conditions and Ideal Ends	p. 210
The Prospects of International Order	p. 223
Conclusion	p. 237
Bibliographical Note	p. 239
Related Documents
Nazi-Socialism (1933)	p. 245
Reader's Report	p. 249
Reader's Report	p. 251
Foreword to the 1944 American Edition	p. 253
Letter from John Scoon to C. Hartley Grattan (1945)	p. 255
Introduction to the 1994 Edition	p. 259
Acknowledgments	p. 267
Index	p. 269
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