July 12, 2010
THE FUNNY THING IS...:
Hayek: The Back Story (JENNIFER SCHUESSLER, 7/01/10, NY Times Book Review)
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.”
...how many of the advocates of the End of History would be just as shocked by its arrival as the opponents.