Remembering The Road to Serfdom
by Bradley J. Birzer, The Imaginative Conservative:
Friedrich Hayek believed that the very institutions of liberalism and republicanism, when misused, can foster the totalitarianism of democracy…
Professor Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) wrote The Road to Serfdom while a professor at the London School of Economics as the allied war with Germany raged. A native of imperial Austria, Hayek brought an outsider’s perspective to Britain and found close parallels between Britain’s and Nazi Germany’s social thought over the century leading up to the Second World War; both exercised a form of social engineering derived from common collectivist roots. Still, Hayek was not as much an outsider as one would understandably first assume. He found the British people as well as the historic thought of Britain (prior to the kinship with the Germans) profoundly attractive. In particular, he identified with the Celtic thinkers Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Adam Smith.
Thus, the self-admitted Anglophile Hayek wrote this polemic work of intellectual history and political science as a warning to the English-speaking public. Both the British and American public received the book favorably, though intellectuals of the left absolutely hated it. To be sure, it has become since 1944 a classic in the history of conservative and libertarian thought. Indeed, one might regard it as the pre-opening salvo that would find its full bombardment with Russell Kirk’s 1953 masterpiece, The Conservative Mind. In the long run, Kirk’s dissertation speaks more mightily to those still fighting the good fight in 2017 than does Hayek’s work, but both are essential to the fight.
Hayek sharply distinguished the intellectual development of Britain from that of Germany, though he warned that each might ultimately end in some form of despotic socialism. Following the great Western tradition harkening back to the Republics of Greece and Rome and the Italian Renaissance, Britain’s legal and political system evolved into one of liberty and equality through an embrace of the common law. The British system—in language as well as in law—treated human persons as distinct and unrepeatable ends, not as means to a third thing. For Hayek, Britain reached the apex of its civilization in the later half of the nineteenth century. Such classical liberals as Lords Acton and Prime Minister Gladstone represented the true intellectuals of cultured Britain. But, as Hayek clearly perceived, Great Britain had lost its interest in classical liberalism before the First World War and, by 1944, the British as a whole considered nineteenth-century liberalism as little more than passe, Victorian, and even downright embarrassing.
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