The Road to Serfdom

Info: Your browser does not accept cookies. To put products into your cart and purchase them you need to enable cookies.

The Road To Serfdom The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth

View Full-Size Image	The Road to Serfdom

	Ask a question about this product
	Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) The Road to Serfdom, one of the most noteworthy books of the twentieth century, has been published in several dozen languages and has seen printing after printing since its first appearance in 1944. In a new Foreword to the book's twentieth impression, Hayek provides some background to it: The book was written in England during the war years and was designed almost exclusively for English readers.... It was in no spirit of mockery that I dedi¬cated it "To the Socialists of All Parties." It had its ori¬gins in many discussions which, during the preceding ten years, I had with friends and colleagues whose sympathies had been inclined toward the left. Three American publishers rejected his manuscript on the dangers of socialism and central planning be¬fore the University of Chicago Press issued it. The reason, Hayek tells us, was "political prejudice." Unexpectedly, he continues, the book "soon began to sell at a rate almost unprecedented for a book of this kind, not intended for popular consumption." In March 1945, it was the Reader's Digest featured condensed selection (prepared by writer and editor Max Eastman). It was also widely circulated by the Book of the Month Club. For more than half a century, The Road to Serf¬dom has influenced statesmen and thinkers, some of whom credit the recovery of freedom in Eastern Europe in part to this book. Professor Hayek reminded readers who wondered why The Road to Serfdom focused so little on the U.S.S.R. that the book was written when Russia was England's wartime ally. He saw his primary audience as the intelli¬gentsia of England, who were, he believed, dangerously sympathetic toward socialism. John Chamberlain, in his Foreword to the first edition, sees the book as "a warn¬ing, a cry at a time of hesitation. It says to the British and by implication to Americans: Stop, look, and listen." Chamberlain sums up Hayek's concern: The shibboleths of our times are expressed in a variety of terms: "full employment," "planning," "social secu¬rity," "freedom from want." The facts of our time sug¬gest that none of these things can be had when they are made conscious objects of government policy.... To date, only a handful of writers has dared to trace a connection between our shibboleths and the terror that haunts our world. Among these writers is F. A. Hayek, an Austrian economist now living in England. Hayek served as an artillery officer in World War I and received degrees in law and economics from the University of Vienna. He began teaching at the London School of Economics in 1932 and later taught at Stan¬ford University and the University of Chicago, among other institutions. Along the way, he helped organize the young scholars who became known as the Vienna Circle, was president of the London Economics Club (1936), and founded (1947) and was president of the Mont Pelerin Society. In 1974, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, and the year before he died the United States gave him the Medal of Freedom. This last honor was deeply fitting, freedom having been central to Hayek's thinking throughout his long career.
Availability Not currently available for individual sale.