1、The Readers Digest condensed version ofThe Road to SerfdomThe Road to SerfdomFRIEDRICH A. HAYEKThe condensed version of The Road to Serfdomby F. A. Hayek as it appeared in the April 1945edition of Readers DigestThe Institute of Economic AffairsFirst published in Great Britain in 1999 in the Rediscov
2、ered Riches series by The Institute of Economic Affairs2 Lord North StreetWestminsterLondon sw1p 3lbReissued in the Occasional Paper series in 2001This condensed version of The Road to Serfdom Readers Digest,reproduced by kind permissionThe Road to Serfdom is published in all territories outside the
3、 USA by Routledge.This version is published by kind permission.All other material copyright The Institute of Economic Affairs 1999, 2001Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders associated with thisedition. In some cases this has not been possible. The IEA will be pleased toinclude
4、 any corrections in the next edition.All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording
5、 or otherwise), without the prior writtenpermission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.isbn 0 255 36530 6Many IEA publications are translated into languages other than English or arereprinted. Permissi
6、on to translate or to reprint should be sought from theGeneral Director at the address above.Typeset in Stone by MacGuruinfomacguru.org.ukPrinted and bound in Great Britain by Hobbs the PrintersThose who would give up essential liberty to purchase a littletemporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
7、 safety.Benjamin FranklinThe authors 9Foreword by Edwin J. Feulner Jr 11Introduction: Hayek, Fisher and The Road to Serfdom by John Blundell 14Preface to the Readers Digest condensed version of The Road to Serfdom 26Summary 27The Road to Serfdom (condensed version) 31Planning and power 32Background
8、to danger 34The liberal way of planning 37The great utopia 39Why the worst get on top 43Planning vs. the Rule of Law 49Is planning inevitable? 51Can planning free us from care? 53Two kinds of security 58Towards a better world 62The Road to Serfdom in cartoons 63About the IEA 82CONTENTSFriedrich A. H
9、ayek Friedrich A. Hayek (18991992) was born in Vienna and obtainedtwo doctorates from the University of Vienna, in law and politicaleconomy. He worked under Ludwig von Mises at the Austrian In-stitute for Business Cycle Research, and from 1929 to 1931 was alecturer in economics at the University of
10、Vienna. His first book,Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, was published in 1929. In 1931Hayek was made Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statis-tics at the London School of Economics, and in 1950 he was ap-pointed Professor of Social and Moral Sciences at the University ofChicago. In 1962 he
11、 was appointed Professor of Political Economyat the University of Freiburg where he became Professor Emeritusin 1967. Hayek was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1944,and in 1947 he organised the conference in Switzerland which re-sulted in the creation of the Mont Plerin Society. He was aw
12、ardedthe Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 and was created a Compan-ion of Honour in 1984. In 1991 George Bush awarded Hayek thePresidential Medal of Freedom. His books include The Pure Theoryof Capital, 1941, The Road to Serfdom, 1944, The Counter-Revolutionof Science, 1952, The Constitution of Libe
13、rty, 1960, Law, Legislationand Liberty, 19739, and The Fatal Conceit, 1988.9THE AUTHORSJohn Blundell John Blundell is General Director of the Institute of Economic Af-fairs. He was previously President of the Institute for HumaneStudies at George Mason University and the Atlas Economic Re-search Fou
14、ndation, founded by the late Sir Antony Fisher to estab-lish sister organisations to the IEA. He serves on the boards ofboth organisations as well as on the board of the Mont PlerinSociety.Edwin J. Feulner Jr Edwin J. Feulner Jr has served as President of the Heritage Founda-tion since 1977. He is a
15、lso the immediate past President of theMont Plerin Society. He previously served in high-level positionsin both the legislative and executive branches of the federalgovernment. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Edin-burgh and was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal byRonald Reagan in
16、1989 for being a leader of the conservativemovement by building an organisation dedicated to ideas andtheir consequences . . . the road to serfdom10John Chamberlain characterised the period immediately fol-lowing World War II in his foreword to the first edition of TheRoad to Serfdom as a time of he
17、sitation. Britain and the Europeancontinent were faced with the daunting task of reconstruction andreconstitution. The United States, spared from the physical de-struction that marked Western Europe, was nevertheless recover-ing from the economic whiplash of a war-driven economicrecovery from the Gr
18、eat Depression. Everywhere there was adesire for security and a return to stability.The intellectual environment was no more steady. The rise andsubsequent defeat of fascism had provided an extremely wideflank for intellectuals who were free to battle for any idea short ofethnic cleansing and dictat
19、orial political control. At the sametime, the mistaken but widely accepted notion that the unpre-dictability of the free market had caused the depression, coupledwith four years of war-driven, centrally directed production, andthe fact that Russia had been a wartime ally of the United Statesand Engl
20、and, increased the mainstream acceptance of peace-timegovernment planning of the economy.At this hesitating, unstable moment appeared the slim volumeof which you now hold the condensed version in your hands, F. A.Hayeks The Road to Serfdom. Occupying his spare time betweenSeptember 1940 and March 19
21、44, the writing of The Road to11FOREWORDSerfdom was in his own words more a duty which I must notevade1than any calculated contribution to his curriculum vitae.As Hayek saw it, he was merely pointing out apprehensions whichcurrent tendencies in economic and political thought mustcreate in the minds
22、of many who cannot publicly express them.2But as is often the case, this duty-inspired task hadtremendous consequences unintended by the author.Hayek employed economics to investigate the mind of man,using the knowledge he had gained to unveil the totalitariannature of socialism and to explain how i
23、t inevitably leads to serf-dom. His greatest contribution lay in the discovery of a simple yetprofound truth: man does not and cannot know everything, andwhen he acts as if he does, disaster follows. He recognised thatsocialism, the collectivist state, and planned economies representthe ultimate for
24、m of hubris, for those who plan themattempt with insufficient knowledge to redesign the nature ofman. In so doing, would-be planners arrogantly ignore traditionsthat embody the wisdom of generations; impetuously disregardcustoms whose purpose they do not understand; and blithely con-fuse the law wri
25、tten on the hearts of men which they cannotchange with administrative rules that they can alter at whim. ForHayek, such presumption was not only a fatal conceit, but alsothe road to serfdom.The impact of the simple ideas encapsulated in The Road toSerfdom was immediate. The book went through six imp
26、ressionsin the first 16 months, was translated into numerous foreign lan-guages, and circulated both openly in the free world and clandes-the road to serfdom121 Hayek, F. A., The Road to Serfdom, London: Routledge, 1944, p. v.2 Ibid., p. vii.tinely behind the emerging iron curtain. It is no exaggera
27、tion tosay that The Road to Serfdom simultaneously prevented the emer-gence of full-blown socialism in Western Europe and the UnitedStates and planted seeds of freedom in the Soviet Union thatwould finally bear fruit nearly 45 years later. Socialist catchphrasessuch as collectivism were stricken fro
28、m the mainstream politicaldebate and even academic socialists were forced to retreat fromtheir defence of overt social planning.But the true value of The Road to Serfdom is to be found not inthe immediate blow it dealt to socialist activists and thinkers asimportant as that was but in the lasting im
29、pression it has madeon political and economic thinkers of the past 55 years. By Hayeksown admission, this book . . . has unexpectedly become for methe starting point of more than 30 years work in a new field.3edwin j. feulner jrNovember 1999foreword133 Although these words were written in 1976 it is
30、 safe to say that the influence ofThe Road to Serfdom guided Hayeks work until his death in 1992.My story begins with a young Englishman named LionelRobbins, later Lord Robbins of Clare Market. In 1929, at the age ofonly 30, he had been appointed Professor of Economics at theLondon School of Economi
31、cs and Political Science (LSE), a collegeof the University of London. He was arguably the greatest Englisheconomist of his generation, and he was fluent in German. Thisskill alerted him to the work of a young Austrian economist,Friedrich Hayek, and he invited his equally young counterpart tolecture
32、at the LSE. Such was the success of these lectures thatHayek was appointed Tooke Professor of Economic Science andStatistics at the LSE in 1931, and became an English citizen long be-fore such status had become a passport of convenience.In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes was in full flow. He was themo
33、st famous economist in the world, and Hayek was his only realrival. In 1936 Keynes published his infamous General Theory ofEmployment, Interest and Money.2Hayek was tempted to demolishthis nonsense but he held back, for a very simple and very humanreason. Two years earlier, a now forgotten Keynesian
34、 tract (A Trea-14INTRODUCTIONHAYEK, FISHER AND THE ROAD TO SERFDOM11 This introduction is based on a speech given by the author on 26 April 1999 to the 33rd International Workshop Books for a Free Society of the AtlasEconomic Research Foundation (Fairfax, VA) in Philadelphia, PA.2 Keynes, J. M., The
35、 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London,Macmillan, 1936.tise on Money)3had been ripped apart by Hayek in a two-part jour-nal review. Keynes had shrugged off the attack with a smile, sayingas they passed one day in Clare Market: Oh, never mind; I nolonger believe all that. Hayek was
36、 not about to repeat the demoli-tion job on The General Theory in case Keynes decided, at some fu-ture point, that he no longer believed in all that either a decisionI heard Hayek regret often in the 1970s.War came and the LSE was evacuated from central London toPeterhouse College, Cambridge. Typica
37、lly, Keynes arrangedrooms for his intellectual arch-rival Hayek at Kings College whereKeynes was Bursar and also typically Hayek volunteered for fireduty. That is, he offered to spend his nights sitting on the roof ofhis college watching out for marauding German bombers.It was while he sat out there
38、 at night that he began to wonderabout what would happen to his adopted country if and whenpeace came. It was clear to Hayek that victory held the seeds of itsown destruction. The war was called the Peoples War because unlike most previous wars the whole population had fought inone way or another. E
39、ven pacifists contributed by working theland to feed the troops. Hayek detected a growing sense of As inwar, so in peace namely that the government would own, planand control everything. The economic difficulties created by thewar would be immense: people would turn to government for away out. And s
40、o, as Hayek penned his great classic, The Road toSerfdom, he was moved not only by a love for his adopted countrybut also by a great fear that national planning, that socialism, thatthe growth of state power and control would, inevitably, lead theUK and the US to fascism, or rather National Socialis
41、m.introduction153Keynes, J. M., A Treatise on Money, London, Macmillan, 1930.Antony Fisher, the man who didSo let me talk now about The Road to Serfdom and one man in par-ticular who was moved by its lessons to do something. That man isthe late Antony George Anson Fisher, or AGAF as we referred tohi
42、m, and still do.Fisher came from a family of mine owners, members of parlia-ment, migrants and military men. He was born in 1915 and soonfollowed by his brother and best friend Basil. His father was killedby a Turkish sniper in 1917. Brought up in South East England byhis young widowed mother, an in
43、dependent New Zealander fromPiraki, Akaroa, AGAF attended Eton and Cambridge where he andhis brother both learnt to fly in the University Air Squadron. Ongraduating, Antonys several initiatives included: a car rental firm a success a plane rental firm also a success; and the design and manufacture o
44、f a cheap sports car called theDeroy a failure because of a lack of power.At the start of the war Antony and Basil volunteered for theRAF and were soon flying Hurricanes in III Squadron in the Battleof Britain. One day Basils plane was hit by German fire. He bailedout over Selsey Bill but his parach
45、ute was on fire and both planeand man plummeted to the ground, separately.A totally devastated Antony was grounded for his own safety,but used his time productively to develop a machine (the FisherTrainer) to teach trainee pilots to shoot better. He was also an avidreader of Readers Digest. Every co
46、py was devoured, read aloud tohis family, heavily underlined and kept in order in his study. Hisfirst child, Mark, recalls a wall of Antonys study lined with rowthe road to serfdom16upon row of years decades even of copies of Readers Digest.So how did our fighter pilot Fisher come across our academi
47、cHayek? What follows is the story I have pieced together. Not allparts of it are accepted by all interested parties, but the pieces dofit. So this is my story and Im sticking to it.The marriage of true mindsThe Road to Serfdom was published in March 1944 and, despitewartime paper shortages, it went
48、through five reprints in the UK in15 months. In spite of this, owing to wartime paper rationing, thepublishers, Routledge, were unable to keep up with demand andHayek complained that The Road to Serfdom had acquired a repu-tation for being that unobtainable book.4It was such an incredi-ble hit that
49、Hayek lost track of the reviews and critics were movedto write whole books attacking him in both the UK and the US. DrLaurence Hayek, only son of F. A. Hayek, owns his late fathersown first edition copy of The Road to Serfdom as well as the print-ers proof copy with Hayeks corrections. On the inside back coverof the former Hayek began listing the reviews as they came out.The list reads as follows:Tablet 11/3/44 (Douglas Woodruff)Sunday Times 12/3 (Harold Hobson one or two sentences)9/4 (
