The most ardent of these dreams of order would be “realized” in the multiyear plans of China and Russia, but the Germany of the Nazis wanted to impose order not just on its own country but on all of Europe. Complexity was to be conquered by planning. The focus of the intellectual classes, and indeed many of the governing classes, was to bring order to the chaos of complexity. (10–11*)Įven at the time Hayek was writing this, the world seemed impossibly more complex than it had been only a generation earlier. We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected. We all are, or at least were until recently, certain of one thing: that the leading ideas which during the last generation have become common to most people of good will and have determined the major changes in our social life cannot have been wrong. The Road to Serfdomasks fundamental questions about how we as humans can live together, not just tolerably well, but in a way that allows us to thrive. Yet Hayek’s book has stood the test of time, because its key messages are not constricted by the politics of the moment or passing economic fashions. It is also focused on conditions to be found in prewar England and Germany, which takes the book into questions of not just economics but politics too. If its style and language appear somewhat dated, that’s because it was published in 1944. Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom is firmly established as one of those books you’re supposed to read.īut on the spectrum of works about economics, it probably falls more on the Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital side than on the Economics in One Lessonor even Freakonomics side.
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