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| The late F.A. Hayek |
Living in Western Europe gave him a front row seat to the most turbulent poliical upheavals of the 20th century. He witnessed both the rise of Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, and ultimately their demise.
When I read his book 40 years ago, I was unaware that he was still alive. Today, unable to interview him but eager to still ask questions, I created this imaginary interview in order to resurrect and share his ideas with a wider audience. You will notice his use of the word liberalism, which had a very different meaning a century ago than it does now. Liberalism used to mead small government plus free markets and individual freedom. Liberalism today mean government activism, social programs and progressive reforms.
Please forgive me for the length of this interview. Professor Hayek was far more loquacious than I had anticipated.
EN: Professor Hayek, when you began writing The Road to Serfdom during the Second World War, what personal concerns or observations compelled you to warn Western democracies about the dangers of centralized economic planning?
FAH: Ah, my dear interlocutor, it is a pleasure to engage in this dialogue, even across the veil of time. You ask about the genesis of The Road to Serfdom, that modest volume I penned amid the thunder of the Second World War. Allow me to reflect, as I might have in one of my lectures at the London School of Economics or in conversation with a thoughtful student.
I began sketching the ideas in the late 1930s, but the book took shape during the war years, from about 1940 to 1943, while I was in Cambridge, evacuated from London due to the Blitz. What compelled me? It was not mere academic fancy, but a profound unease born of observation and experience. You see, I had fled Vienna in 1931, witnessing firsthand the erosion of liberty in Central Europe—the Anschluss in 1938 only confirmed what I feared. But it was in Britain, that bastion of freedom, where I saw the true peril emerging.
The war had unleashed a fervor for planning: intellectuals, politicians, even well-meaning liberals, clamored for centralized control of the economy to win the fight against Hitler. "We must plan for victory," they said, and then "plan for peace." Yet I observed how this mirrored the very paths taken by Germany and Russia. In Germany, the socialists of the chair—the Kathedersozialisten—had paved the way for National Socialism not through malice, but through the illusion that experts could direct society like a machine. In Russia, the Bolsheviks' five-year plans had led straight to the gulags. I feared that the West, in imitating these methods to combat fascism, would unwittingly tread the same road to serfdom.
My concern was personal, yes: as an exile, I cherished the individual freedoms that Britain and America embodied—the rule of law, spontaneous order, the market's humble coordination of human endeavors. But I saw these under siege from within. Collectivist ideas, fashionable among the elite, promised equality and security but demanded the surrender of choice to a central authority. Who would wield that power? Not angels, but men, fallible and ambitious. And once planning begins, it cannot stop at economics; it must encompass all life, lest dissent disrupt the plan. Thus, liberty withers.
I wrote not as a prophet of doom, but as a warning to friends: to remind them that the noble ends of social justice could not justify means that destroy the very conditions of freedom. The book was my plea—addressed to the socialists of all parties—to reconsider before it was too late.
EN: You argue that well-intentioned economic planning can lead societies down a path toward authoritarianism and gradually erode individual freedom. What convinced you that this slide toward coercion was not merely theoretical but a real historical pattern?
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| Hayek in his lateryear |
Let me speak plainly, as I would have in 1944 or in my later reflections.
- Germany
In the 1920s and early 1930s almost every German professor of economics and sociology (men I had studied under or argued with) believed that the age of liberalism was over and that comprehensive planning was both inevitable and morally superior. The National Socialists did not invent planning; they inherited it. The Weimar Republic had already created cartels, price controls, huge public-works schemes, and a centralized “economic general staff.” When Hitler came to power in 1933 he simply took over the existing machinery and turned the dial from persuasion to terror. The same civil servants who had been enthusiastic planners under the Social Democrats and the Centre Party continued their work under the swastika. The road was continuous; only the pace changed. - Soviet Russia.
The Bolsheviks began with the noblest proclamations (peace, land, bread, equality). Within a few years the “war communism” of 1918–1921 had already shown where central direction leads: requisitions, forced labour, the shooting of peasants who hid grain. Lenin himself admitted in 1921 that they had gone too far and introduced the NEP as a tactical retreat. Yet even that retreat was abandoned under Stalin, and the same logic (the Plan must be fulfilled at all costs) produced the Ukrainian famine and the Great Terror. The coercion was not an accident; it was the necessary consequence of trying to allocate all resources from one centre. - Britain herself, during the war and immediately after.
By 1942 Britain had rationing, price controls, manpower direction, industrial conscription, and a Ministry of Food that decided what every citizen could eat. These measures were accepted as temporary necessities for total war. Yet almost overnight the Labour Party’s 1945 manifesto promised to make most of them permanent in peacetime: nationalisation of coal, railways, steel, the Bank of England, and “the planning of investment.” Distinguished men such as Beveridge and the Webbs spoke of the “planned society” as the next moral advance. I saw the same intellectual climate I had seen in Vienna and Berlin twenty years earlier, only now wearing a British tweed jacket instead of a brown or red shirt.
What struck me most forcibly was the identical sequence in each case:
- First, a moral revulsion against the inequalities and apparent chaos of the market.
- Then, the demand that “production must be for use, not for profit.”
- Then, the creation of a central plan and the administrative boards to execute it.
- Then, inevitably, the discovery that people will not voluntarily obey the plan.
- Finally, the replacement of voluntary cooperation by coercion, and the concentration of all power in the hands of those who control the plan.
This was no mere analogy; it was the same process driven by the same internal logic. The ends may differ (one party calls itself National Socialist, another democratic socialist), but once you accept the premise that the state must direct the economic process in detail, the destination becomes almost inevitable.
That is why I insisted the danger was not from evil men, but from good men who believed they could achieve admirable goals by methods that necessarily destroy freedom. History had already run the experiment three times in my lifetime. I merely reported the results.
EN: Many readers interpret The Road to Serfdom as an endorsement of laissez-faire capitalism. How would you clarify your actual position on the role of government, especially regarding social safety nets and regulation?
I am not, and never was, an advocate of laissez-faire in the nineteenth-century caricature sense. I stated this quite explicitly in Chapter VI (“Planning and the Rule of Law”) and again in Chapter IX (“Security and Freedom”), yet somehow the nuance is still lost on many friends as well as foes.
My position, then and now, is this:
The indispensable framework: A functioning market order requires a carefully thought-out legal framework that only the state can supply: clear and general rules of property, contract, tort, and fraud; an independent judiciary; sound money (preferably secured by a rule rather than discretionary management); and the prevention of monopoly, especially monopoly created by government itself. This is not “minimal” government; it is government discharging its most essential and most difficult task.
The proper sphere of coercion: The state may legitimately use coercion to enforce those general rules and to provide certain services that the market cannot supply at all or cannot supply in sufficient quantity (what we now call public goods). I have always accepted national defence, police, basic sanitation, and measures against contagious diseases as obvious examples.
A limited but real social minimum: I wrote, in the very book that is accused of opposing it, that there is “no reason why in a society that has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained … the assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, should not appear as a wholly legitimate protection against risks common to all.”
I repeated this in the 1956 preface and again in The Constitution of Liberty (1960). What I insisted upon was only that such a minimum be provided outside the market, on a uniform basis to all who fall below it, and not be used as an excuse to control the whole economic process. A guaranteed minimum compatible with freedom is perfectly possible; a system that tries to guarantee relative position or specific outcomes is not.
- The danger of “planning” versus the legitimacy of rules
The fatal step is the substitution of central direction of particular economic activities for a framework of general rules. Price controls, production quotas, investment licensing, industrial nationalization, and the like inevitably lead to discrimination, privilege, and the suppression of dissent. That is what I called “the road to serfdom.”
By contrast, general regulations (e.g., building codes, pure-food laws, working-hours limits, anti-pollution standards) that apply equally to all and merely set the boundaries within which individuals plan their own lives are entirely compatible with a free society. - Competition as a discovery procedure
I do not worship the market; I regard it as the only known mechanism that enables millions of separate individuals, each with dispersed and tacit knowledge, to coordinate their plans without anyone needing to comprehend the whole. The alternative is not wise planning but ignorance masquerading as omniscience.
In short, I am a defender neither of unrestrained capitalism nor of the welfare state as it has often developed. I am a defender of the liberal order of law, limited government, and the open society—one that can and should provide a decent safety net, but must never be allowed to degenerate into the totalitarian temptation of trying to plan the details of everyone’s life “for their own good.”
If that makes me a friend of freedom rather than a friend of any particular “-ism,” I shall wear the label gladly.
EN: During the four decades that followed publication of this book, did you see things in the U.S. that alarmed you, that gave you the impression that we were marching down a wrong path here?
FAH: Ah, America… the country that received The Road to Serfdom with such unexpected enthusiasm in 1944–45, and yet, over the decades that followed, often caused me the deepest unease.
Yes, I did see unmistakable signs that even the United States, for all its magnificent constitutional safeguards and its instinctive love of liberty, was drifting in the very direction I had warned against. I said so repeatedly, sometimes gently in lectures, sometimes more bluntly in interviews and prefaces. Let me mention the developments that most disturbed me.
- The steady expansion of the administrative state
When I first visited America in the 1920s and again after the war, the federal government was still relatively small and its interventions episodic. By the late 1960s and 1970s, however, I watched with dismay as agency after agency (EPA, OSHA, EEOC, CPSC, and dozens more) acquired quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial powers. Laws became ever vaguer (“clean air,” “fair housing,” “consumer protection”), delegating to bureaucrats the authority to write thousands of pages of specific commandments and to punish infractions without the old safeguards of the common law. This is precisely the replacement of the Rule of Law by administrative discretion that I described in Chapter VI as the hallmark of the road to serfdom. - The Great Society and the belief in “fine-tuning”
President Johnson’s programmes, and later the ambition of both parties to manage the economy through deficit spending, wage-and-price controls (Nixon 1971–74!), and ever more detailed regulation of industry, reminded me strongly of the British planning euphoria of 1945. The underlying assumption was the same: that a handful of clever people in Washington could know enough to direct the lives of 200 million citizens better than those citizens could direct themselves. The results, inflation, stagflation, the energy crises, were not accidental; they were the predictable fruits of suppressing the price mechanism. - The growth of the transfer state and the erosion of personal responsibility
I have never opposed a decent social minimum, as I said earlier. But when transfer payments grow until they become the chief occupation of a large part of the electorate, and when benefits are made conditional on particular behaviours decreed from above (housing subsidies that dictate where you may live, medical subsidies that dictate what treatments doctors may offer), the citizen is no longer free. By the 1970s I could already see the beginnings of what Tocqueville had feared: a soft despotism that administers people “for their own good” and gradually infantilises them. - The intellectual climate
Perhaps most alarming of all was the capture of the universities and the media by a new generation that regarded the very idea of economic freedom as obsolete or immoral. By the time I received the Nobel Prize in 1974, it was fashionable in many American campuses to treat profit, competition, and even private property with open contempt. I found myself having to remind audiences that the alternative to profit is not virtue, but political allocation; and that political allocation inevitably favors the powerful and the articulate.
I must in fairness add that America retained enormous strengths that Europe largely lost: federalism, a written constitution that is still taken seriously, a vigorous civil society, and above all a population that instinctively distrusts government. These acted as brakes. Yet the direction of travel from the New Deal through the Great Society to the regulatory explosion of the 1970s was unmistakable.
In my last visits, especially after the publication of the three volumes of Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–1979), I warned Americans that they were perhaps thirty or forty years behind Western Europe on the same path, but that the path was nevertheless the same. I hoped, and still hope, that the American constitutional tradition and the American character might yet reverse the trend before the point of no return is reached.
That, my friend, was my sober assessment when I last looked upon your great republic with living eyes.
EN: Thank you, sir, for your invaluable insights.
This interview was created in collaboration with Grok, an X.com LLM. Essentially, I asked Grok to channel the ideas of Friedrich Hayek as he wrote and spoke in the 1940s-1980s, precise, courteous, slightly formal English with a faint Austrian cadence, deeply principled but never shrill, and always ready to draw distinctions that others overlook.
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