Road to Serfdom in Cartoons

The Road to Serfdom Friedrich Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974) which had significantly shaped the political ideologies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the concepts of ‘Thatcherism’ and of ‘Reagonomics’. The Road to Serfdom is among the most influential and popular expositions of classical liberalism and libertarianism.

The book was originally published by Routledge Press in 1944 and then by the University of Chicago Press 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. In February 1945 a picture-book version was published in Look Magazine, later made into a pamphlet and distributed by General Motors. The book has been translated into approximately 20 languages and is dedicated to "The socialists of all parties".

Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which had gone down “the road to serfdom” and reached tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system, the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group, which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal.
 

Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners’ resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved. Hayek further argued that the failure of central planning would be perceived by the public as an absence of sufficient power by the state to implement an otherwise good idea. Such a perception would lead the public to vote more power to the state, and would assist the rise to power of a “strong man” perceived to be capable of “getting the job done”. After these developments Hayek argued that a country would be ineluctably driven into outright totalitarianism. For Hayek “the road to serfdom” inadvertently set upon by central planning, with its dismantling of the free market system, ends in the destruction of all individual economic and personal freedom.

Hayek argued 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. In The Road to Serfdom he wrote: "The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule."

Significantly, Hayek challenged the general view among British academics that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism, instead arguing that fascism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and the power of the state over the individual.

Criticism:

"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".

--John Maynard Keynes

"in the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of".

--George Orwell