Future Projects:
"THE ROAD TO SERFDOM" (2005)

For anyone who's ever read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, there is little that is new in The Road to Serfdom. Hayek's basic argument is that central planning is by it's very nature inefficient; only a free market allows for the exchange of information that can provide efficiency. It is hard to believe that there are any serious political philosophers or economists who would still argue with this thesis. Indeed, it was not Hayek's basic argument that made the book so controversial, instead what made this text a particular object of Left wing animus was Hayek's corollary that such central planning inevitably leads to totalitarianism.
The very title of the book refers metaphorically to his argument that Socialism, even the somewhat benign form of socialism that was popular in Europe at the time, represented simply a step along the path to the same kind of tyranny that held sway in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
This powerful idea, that every type of centralized authority is a deadly threat to democracy and freedom, is always timely, but it was especially important coming, as it did, towards the end of a Depression and a War which had seen most of the democracies come to increasingly depend on just such centralization. To the extent that Hayek was responsible for sounding the alarm against complaisance in the face of the rise of the mammoth Social-Welfare State, he must be considered one of the most significant political philosophers of the Century.
Nor did he stop after stating the negative, that all central planning is necessarily the enemy of freedom, he went on to enunciate a philosophy of individualism.
This point is frequently misunderstood, both by libertarians, who tend to be absolutists about freedom, and by those, say in Russia, who think that free markets in and of themselves offer a quick fix and an easy solution to problems. It is also ignored by those who wish to cast capitalism as little more than Social Darwinism.
There isn't much that is new in Hayek's ideas as presented here--the antecedents can be found in Hobbes and Locke and Adam Smith--what was new at the time was that he applied these theories of classical liberalism to modern social planning and thereby illuminated the threat that such central planning posed to liberty. Sadly for us, the threat remains even today and so this book remains, almost sixty years after it's publication, a vitally important restatement of the principles which guide free market capitalism. At a time when everyone claims to be an adherent of these ideas, it is refreshing to see them laid out in such clear and convincing fashion so that we may measure folks' actions against these words.