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The economist was Friedrich von Hayek, the book was “The Road to Serfdom” and the host was Glenn Beck, who compared Hayek’s book to “a Mike Tyson (in his prime) right hook to socialism in Western Europe and in the United States.” As it happens, “The Road to Serfdom” — a classic attack on government planning as an inevitable step toward totalitarianism, published in 1944 and kept in print since then by the University of Chicago Press — had already begun a comeback of sorts. It sold 27,000 copies in 2009, up from about 7,000 a year before the inauguration of Barack Obama. But Beck’s endorsement catapulted the book to No. 1 at Amazon.com, bringing a temporary end to at least one tyranny, that of Stieg Larsson. Since the program was broadcast on June 8, 100,000 copies have been sold.
That’s an impressive number for an academic-press book, if a bit anemic compared with the 1.2 million views for “Fear the Boom and Bust,” a Hayek versus John Maynard Keynes rap video that went up on YouTube in January. (Kickoff line: “Party at the Fed!”) But in fact “The Road to Serfdom” has a long history of timely assists from the popular media.
When Hayek began formulating his ideas in the early 1930s, he was an émigré professor at the London School of Economics, watching events in both Europe and Britain with alarm. Like many others, Hayek was frightened by the rise of Nazism. He interpreted it, however, in an unorthodox way, not as the defeat of democratic socialism but as its logical culmination. Hayek started writing the book after World War II began, as a contribution to the war effort. Looking ahead, “Hayek was also worried about what would transpire if the Allies won,” as Bruce Caldwell puts it in his introduction to “THE ROAD TO SERFDOM”: Text and Documents — The Definitive Edition (University of Chicago, $17). In ominously titled chapters like “The Totalitarians in Our Midst” and “Why the Worst Get on Top,” Hayek laid out his case against “socialists of all parties” who he believed were leading the Western democracies into tyranny that mirrored the centrally planned societies of Germany and the Soviet Union.
This theme, being taken up today by Beck and other antigovernment sorts, had a plausible basis at the time. Caldwell quotes a 1942 Labour Party pamphlet that declared, “There must be no return to the unplanned competitive world of the interwar years. . . . A planned society must replace the old competitive system.”
When it appeared in 1944, “The Road to Serfdom” received a courteous if mixed reception in Britain (where paper shortages limited the print run). Keynes, Hayek’s friend and lifelong intellectual opponent, called it “a grand book,” adding, “Morally and philosophically, I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it.” George Orwell, more equivocal, conceded that Hayek “is probably right” about the “totalitarian-minded” nature of intellectuals but concluded that he “does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse . . . than that of the state.”
It was in the United States, however, that Hayek met with his greatest success — and the most intense hostility. Rejected by several trade publishers, “The Road to Serfdom” was picked up by Chicago, which scheduled a modest print run. It got a boost when Henry Hazlitt, a prominent free-marketeer, assessing it on the cover of The New York Times Book Review in September 1944, proclaimed it “one of the most important books of our generation,” a call to “all those who are sincere democrats and liberals at heart to stop, look and listen.” The political scientist Herman Finer, on the other hand, denounced it as “the most sinister offensive against democracy to emerge from a democratic country for many years.” But the most important response came from the staunchly anti-Communist Reader’s Digest, which ran a condensed version of the book in April 1945, with reprints available through the Book of the Month Club for 5 cents each. The condensation sold more than a million copies.
Reading the book today, it’s easy to see why Hayek’s message caught on with a public divided over the New Deal, struggling with the transition from a regulated wartime economy and concerned about rising Soviet power. But unlike some of his champions in 2010, Hayek didn’t oppose all forms of government intervention. “The preservation of competition,” he wrote, is not “incompatible with an extensive system of social services — so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.” This qualification, however, was left out of a comic-book version of “The Road to Serfdom” printed in Look magazine in 1945 (and distributed as a pamphlet by General Motors), which showed well-intentioned regulation giving way to more sinister forms of control. “In an unsuccessful effort to educate people to uniform views,” one caption read, “‘planners’ establish a giant propaganda machine — which coming dictator will find handy.”
While Hayek, who moved to the University of Chicago in 1950, built an ardent following of admirers (including Milton Friedman),* his fame gradually waned. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1974 he was largely forgotten by the public and marginalized within his profession. In graduate programs in the early 1980s, the economist William Easterly recalled recently on his blog, “Hayek was seen as so far right that you would be considered a nut to read him.” (His sunny view of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet probably didn’t help.)
Today, Hayek continues to inspire noisy ideological debate. In his recent book “Ill Fares the Land,” a passionate defense of the democratic socialist ideal, the historian Tony Judt writes that Hayek would have been (justly) doomed to obscurity if not for the financial difficulty experienced by the welfare state, which was exploited by conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The economist Paul Samuelson, in a reminiscence of Hayek published last December, was more dismissive still. “Where are their horror camps?” he asked, referring to right-wing bugaboos like Sweden, with its generous welfare spending. Almost 70 years after Hayek sounded his alarm, “hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.”
Hayek also cropped up in the recent controversy over the Texas Board of Education’s new high school curriculum, which will now include him and Friedman alongside Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Keynes. In a post on The Times’s Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers, a professor at the Wharton School, noted that a search of scholarly literature found Hayek, with a mere 1,745 references, lagging far behind Smith (25,626), Keynes (4,945), Friedman (8,924) and even Lawrence Summers (2,064). “The message from the Texas Board of Education seems to be: If you can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, turn to government institutions to prop you up,” Wolfers wrote, adding sardonically, “I don’t think Hayek would approve.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/bo..._r=1&ref=books
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