The Road to Serfdom

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The Road to Serfdom is a book written by the economist Friedrich A. Hayek and originally published by Routledge Press in March 1944 in the UK and then by the University of Chicago in September 1944. In April, 1945, Reader's Digest published a slightly shortened version of the book, which eventually reached more than 600,000 readers. Around 1950 a picture-book version was published in Look Magazine, later made into a pamphlet and distributed by General Motors. There exist translations of the book to about 20 languages. The book is sarcastically dedicated to "The socialists of all parties".

Hayek's central argument is that the goals and methods of socialism and economic planning use central planning that must necessarily reduce individuals' economic freedom to sell products and services and form businesses. Hayek believes that suppressing trade and business formation requires powerful state intervention, and that such intervention must either fail in its economic goals, or cause totalitarianism. Finally, Hayek states that countries such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had already gone down the "road to serfdom", and that various democratic nations are being led down the same road.

Hayek discusses individualism, collectivism and economic control. The book examines the relationship between individual liberty and government authority, and argues that granting government control of the economy inevitably leads to economic chaos and disaster.

John Maynard Keynes read The Road to Serfdom and said of it: 'In my opinion it is a grand book...Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement'. [1]

Sir Winston Churchill was, according to Harold Macmillan, 'fortified in his apprehensions [of a Labour government] by reading Professor Hayek's The Road to Serfdom ' Template:NamedRef when he warned in an election broadcast in 1945 that a socialist system would 'have to fall back on some form of Gestapo'. The Labour leader Clement Attlee responded in his election broadcast by claiming that what Churchill had said was the 'second-hand version of the academic views of an Austrian professor, Friedrich August von Hayek'. [2]