How Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” became relevant again
19 July 2024
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On 17 and 18 July, the Vinson Centre at Buckingham University held its annual “Conference in the Classical Liberal Tradition”. The IEA’s Editorial Director, Dr Kristian Niemietz, was invited to give a talk on “The meaning of The Road to Serfdom today”, as part of the session “Hayek Beyond Academia”. The article below is based on his talk.
I am going to talk about how Hayek’s Road To Serfdom has – sadly – become a lot more relevant again over the past ten years or so.
I say “sadly”, because I would prefer to live in a world where The Road To Serfdom is not relevant anymore. Where we could treat is as a 20th-century book about a 20th-century ideological conflict, perhaps interesting historically, but without any obvious implications for the present day.
This would not even have to be a world in which Classical Liberals have won the argument. The purpose of The Road To Serfdom was not to make the case for the best possible type of society. It was merely to make the case against the most hellish type of society. Winning on that front would not mean that the job of Classical Liberals is done; it would just mean that we are out of the woods.
And there was a time when it seemed that way. For about a quarter-century, after the end of the Cold War, it seemed as if there was a broad consensus, across most of the mainstream political spectrum, that a successful modern economy had to be, in the main, a market economy.
There was never a “neoliberal hegemony”; that was always a complete myth. But there was a time when people who rejected capitalism outright, and who openly advocated a non-market alternative, were on the backfoot.
During the second half of the last decade, though, we saw a socialism revival. The Economist, the New Statesman and other publications talked about “the rise of Millennial Socialism”.
This phenomenon completely destroyed the illusion that “we are all capitalists now”. A flurry of surveys showed that millions of people are very much not.
In the 2010s, Millennial Socialism was wrapped up with electoral projects, namely, Corbynism in the UK, and Bernie Sanders’s candidacy in the US. These projects ultimately did not come to fruition. But the wider socialist movements that had sprung up around them did not disappear afterwards. They just dispersed, and took over other movements. For example, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil etc can all justifiably be described as socialist movements. They do not have to be. There is nothing intrinsically socialist about the causes they care about. But in practice – they just are.
How widespread are socialist views today?
Last year, the IEA co-published a survey with the Fraser Institute, which showed that more than half of Millennials and (adult) Zoomers in Britain believe that socialism is “the ideal economic system.”
So what?, you might think. These people are probably just confused about what “socialism” means. They think it means spending more money on the NHS, and being nice. They’re not talking about Marxism-Leninism.
That’s where the Fraser study is interesting, because they also try to tease out what people mean when they use that word.
They do this in two ways. Firstly, they simply repeat the same question, but substitute the more radical-sounding word “communism” for the more ambiguous word “socialism”, to check whether support drops when you do that.
Which it does – but one in four Zoomers, and one in three Millennials, still say that communism is “the ideal economic system”. That’s not a majority, but that’s millions of people. It’s a mainstream opinion.
Secondly, they ask people directly. They present three possible descriptions of socialism, and ask respondents whether those accurately describe socialism. One of them is a simplified description of a state-run economy, in which the state owns the means of production – the classic definition of socialism.
Among the population as a whole, the results are not clear-cut. Four out of ten people agree that, yes, this is an accurate description of what socialism means, but three out of ten disagree. But if we specifically look at the self-described supporters of socialism, we get a very different picture. More than half of them agree with the classic definition of socialism, and only one in five disagree.
So, in short: does everyone who claims to support “socialism” want a fully state-run, state-planned economy? No. But enough of them do.
None of those survey results are surprising if you have been to a bookstore recently. You will have noticed that the “Politics” section is full of pro-socialist books: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Vulture Capitalism, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, Understanding Socialism, Time for Socialism, and so on, and so forth. There seems to be an infinite demand for this. None of those books are going to become the next Da Vinci Code, but they are doing far, far better than any pro-capitalist book. We are losing the battle of ideas.
Why did this happen? What changed?
I’d say, until the middle of the last decade, the socialist idea was still somewhat tarnished by its association with Actually Existing Socialism. The idea that the systems of the old Eastern Bloc were just not “proper” socialism is not new. That’s what I was taught at school, in the 1990s. Marx had all these wonderful ideas about an egalitarian, democratic society, and then bad people like Lenin, Stalin, and later, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, came along, and perverted it all. That idea was always there. There’s nothing new about it.
But the thing is: it just rings a bit hollow when the failure of Actually Existing Socialism is still so present. Which it was, in the 1990s and 2000s. But during the last decade, it has faded from popular memory. It has become history. Against this backdrop – the claim that previous socialist regimes just did not do socialism “properly”, and that we should give it another try, sounds more plausible to a lot of people.
And it is this claim which is really at the heart of the socialism revival.
For example, in his book Why You Should Be A Socialist, Nathan Robinson, the founding editor of the socialist magazine Current Affairs, says:
“[T]he authoritarian “socialist” regimes of the twentieth century did not deserve to be called socialist at all. […] Socialism does not mean control by the government, it means control by the people.”
So there you have it. There have never been any socialist regimes – just regimes that fraudulently called themselves socialist. And anyone can call themselves anything, right? Talk is cheap.
Similarly, in his book The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara, one of the founders of the socialist magazine Jacobin, also says:
“[S]ocialism in the twentieth century […] was a false start”,
which, I guess, is one way of putting it. And elsewhere:
“[S]ocialism essentially meant radical democracy. […] It was not […] an authoritarian dictatorship; Marx described an egalitarian, participatory democracy.”
You can easily find hundreds of quotes of that kind, but I won’t bore you. The point is that the Millennial Socialists see the totalitarian, top-down, command-and-control nature of Actually Existing Socialism as a perversion of the original socialist idea. There is no particular reason why socialism has always turned out this way, other than that the people in charge wanted it to be this way. It was simply a choice.
This is, of course, the opposite of Hayek’s argument in The Road To Serfdom, which was that the totalitarian, top-down, command-and-control aspects of Actually Existing Socialism were a feature, not a bug. Socialist systems will always end up that way, even if that’s not what its proponents want. The intentions of its proponents are completely irrelevant. They could be the loveliest people in the world, but the system they want will still produce terrible outcomes.
This is the part that Millennial Socialists still don’t get. They think it’s all about intentions. They think “their” version of socialism couldn’t possibly produce bad outcomes, because they don’t have bad intentions. They see a criticism of socialism as a criticism of their intentions.
It is no such thing. Hayek said in The Road To Serfdom:
In order to achieve their ends the planners must create power – power over men wielded by other men – of a magnitude never before known’.
And he also said about the USSR:
“There is no other government in the world in whose hands the fate of the whole country is concentrated to such a degree. […] [T]he Soviet government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise.”
Or actually – he didn’t. This last quote is from Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1936). But it’s correct, and it could very easily have been from The Road To Serfdom.
On the possibility of democratic socialism, Hayek said:
“To draw up an economic plan in this fashion is even less possible than, for example, successfully to plan a military campaign by democratic procedure. […] [I]t would become inevitable to delegate the task to the experts. Yet the difference is that, while the general who is put in charge of a campaign is given a single end […] there can be no such single goal given to the economic planner”.
In other words, even in the current system, we do not have a “pure” democracy, where everything is decided by democratically elected representatives. Even in the current system, we delegate highly specialist tasks to what we would now call Quangos and technocrats. In some areas, that’s not a problem. In the case of a military campaign, almost all of us agree on the outcome we want to see, and we are not that bothered about how exactly that outcome is achieved. So we can leave the details to the technocrats. It’s still democratic in a roundabout way, because the technocrats are still ultimately accountable to democratically elected politicians.
Economic planning, however, is not like that at all. We don’t agree on the outcomes. And we cannot separate the big picture from the details. Only the people in command of the technical details can make meaningful decisions about the big picture.
Hayek also said about Britain’s system of governance:
“[T]he present parliamentary machine is quite unsuited to pass rapidly a great body of complicated legislation. The National Government […] has […] admitted this by implementing its economy […] measures not by detailed debate in the House of Commons but by a wholesale system of delegated legislation.”
Or actually, again – he didn’t. That was the socialist Harold Laski in 1932. But it’s correct, which is why Hayek quotes it approvingly in The Road To Serfdom.
Even arch-socialists agreed with important bits of Hayek’s analysis. They just failed to join the dots, and draw the right conclusions.
When Hayek wrote The Road To Serfdom, there weren’t many examples of socialist economies. There would be many more, in subsequent years: Albania, North Vietnam, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, North Korea, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, Cuba, South Yemen, Somalia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola…
They all turned out the way Hayek said they would. As will the next one. And the one after that.
I can’t remember when I first read The Road To Serfdom. I do vaguely remember that I didn’t hugely enjoy it at first: it’s not really a fun read. But it is a good investment. Since the lessons have still not been learned, the book is not going to lose its relevance any time soon.
I am going to talk about how Hayek’s Road To Serfdom has – sadly – become a lot more relevant again over the past ten years or so.
I say “sadly”, because I would prefer to live in a world where The Road To Serfdom is not relevant anymore. Where we could treat is as a 20th-century book about a 20th-century ideological conflict, perhaps interesting historically, but without any obvious implications for the present day.
This would not even have to be a world in which Classical Liberals have won the argument. The purpose of The Road To Serfdom was not to make the case for the best possible type of society. It was merely to make the case against the most hellish type of society. Winning on that front would not mean that the job of Classical Liberals is done; it would just mean that we are out of the woods.
And there was a time when it seemed that way. For about a quarter-century, after the end of the Cold War, it seemed as if there was a broad consensus, across most of the mainstream political spectrum, that a successful modern economy had to be, in the main, a market economy.
There was never a “neoliberal hegemony”; that was always a complete myth. But there was a time when people who rejected capitalism outright, and who openly advocated a non-market alternative, were on the backfoot.
During the second half of the last decade, though, we saw a socialism revival. The Economist, the New Statesman and other publications talked about “the rise of Millennial Socialism”.
This phenomenon completely destroyed the illusion that “we are all capitalists now”. A flurry of surveys showed that millions of people are very much not.
In the 2010s, Millennial Socialism was wrapped up with electoral projects, namely, Corbynism in the UK, and Bernie Sanders’s candidacy in the US. These projects ultimately did not come to fruition. But the wider socialist movements that had sprung up around them did not disappear afterwards. They just dispersed, and took over other movements. For example, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil etc can all justifiably be described as socialist movements. They do not have to be. There is nothing intrinsically socialist about the causes they care about. But in practice – they just are.
How widespread are socialist views today?
Last year, the IEA co-published a survey with the Fraser Institute, which showed that more than half of Millennials and (adult) Zoomers in Britain believe that socialism is “the ideal economic system.”
So what?, you might think. These people are probably just confused about what “socialism” means. They think it means spending more money on the NHS, and being nice. They’re not talking about Marxism-Leninism.
That’s where the Fraser study is interesting, because they also try to tease out what people mean when they use that word.
They do this in two ways. Firstly, they simply repeat the same question, but substitute the more radical-sounding word “communism” for the more ambiguous word “socialism”, to check whether support drops when you do that.
Which it does – but one in four Zoomers, and one in three Millennials, still say that communism is “the ideal economic system”. That’s not a majority, but that’s millions of people. It’s a mainstream opinion.
Secondly, they ask people directly. They present three possible descriptions of socialism, and ask respondents whether those accurately describe socialism. One of them is a simplified description of a state-run economy, in which the state owns the means of production – the classic definition of socialism.
Among the population as a whole, the results are not clear-cut. Four out of ten people agree that, yes, this is an accurate description of what socialism means, but three out of ten disagree. But if we specifically look at the self-described supporters of socialism, we get a very different picture. More than half of them agree with the classic definition of socialism, and only one in five disagree.
So, in short: does everyone who claims to support “socialism” want a fully state-run, state-planned economy? No. But enough of them do.
None of those survey results are surprising if you have been to a bookstore recently. You will have noticed that the “Politics” section is full of pro-socialist books: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, Vulture Capitalism, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, Understanding Socialism, Time for Socialism, and so on, and so forth. There seems to be an infinite demand for this. None of those books are going to become the next Da Vinci Code, but they are doing far, far better than any pro-capitalist book. We are losing the battle of ideas.
Why did this happen? What changed?
I’d say, until the middle of the last decade, the socialist idea was still somewhat tarnished by its association with Actually Existing Socialism. The idea that the systems of the old Eastern Bloc were just not “proper” socialism is not new. That’s what I was taught at school, in the 1990s. Marx had all these wonderful ideas about an egalitarian, democratic society, and then bad people like Lenin, Stalin, and later, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, came along, and perverted it all. That idea was always there. There’s nothing new about it.
But the thing is: it just rings a bit hollow when the failure of Actually Existing Socialism is still so present. Which it was, in the 1990s and 2000s. But during the last decade, it has faded from popular memory. It has become history. Against this backdrop – the claim that previous socialist regimes just did not do socialism “properly”, and that we should give it another try, sounds more plausible to a lot of people.
And it is this claim which is really at the heart of the socialism revival.
For example, in his book Why You Should Be A Socialist, Nathan Robinson, the founding editor of the socialist magazine Current Affairs, says:
“[T]he authoritarian “socialist” regimes of the twentieth century did not deserve to be called socialist at all. […] Socialism does not mean control by the government, it means control by the people.”
So there you have it. There have never been any socialist regimes – just regimes that fraudulently called themselves socialist. And anyone can call themselves anything, right? Talk is cheap.
Similarly, in his book The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara, one of the founders of the socialist magazine Jacobin, also says:
“[S]ocialism in the twentieth century […] was a false start”,
which, I guess, is one way of putting it. And elsewhere:
“[S]ocialism essentially meant radical democracy. […] It was not […] an authoritarian dictatorship; Marx described an egalitarian, participatory democracy.”
You can easily find hundreds of quotes of that kind, but I won’t bore you. The point is that the Millennial Socialists see the totalitarian, top-down, command-and-control nature of Actually Existing Socialism as a perversion of the original socialist idea. There is no particular reason why socialism has always turned out this way, other than that the people in charge wanted it to be this way. It was simply a choice.
This is, of course, the opposite of Hayek’s argument in The Road To Serfdom, which was that the totalitarian, top-down, command-and-control aspects of Actually Existing Socialism were a feature, not a bug. Socialist systems will always end up that way, even if that’s not what its proponents want. The intentions of its proponents are completely irrelevant. They could be the loveliest people in the world, but the system they want will still produce terrible outcomes.
This is the part that Millennial Socialists still don’t get. They think it’s all about intentions. They think “their” version of socialism couldn’t possibly produce bad outcomes, because they don’t have bad intentions. They see a criticism of socialism as a criticism of their intentions.
It is no such thing. Hayek said in The Road To Serfdom:
In order to achieve their ends the planners must create power – power over men wielded by other men – of a magnitude never before known’.
And he also said about the USSR:
“There is no other government in the world in whose hands the fate of the whole country is concentrated to such a degree. […] [T]he Soviet government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise.”
Or actually – he didn’t. This last quote is from Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1936). But it’s correct, and it could very easily have been from The Road To Serfdom.
On the possibility of democratic socialism, Hayek said:
“To draw up an economic plan in this fashion is even less possible than, for example, successfully to plan a military campaign by democratic procedure. […] [I]t would become inevitable to delegate the task to the experts. Yet the difference is that, while the general who is put in charge of a campaign is given a single end […] there can be no such single goal given to the economic planner”.
In other words, even in the current system, we do not have a “pure” democracy, where everything is decided by democratically elected representatives. Even in the current system, we delegate highly specialist tasks to what we would now call Quangos and technocrats. In some areas, that’s not a problem. In the case of a military campaign, almost all of us agree on the outcome we want to see, and we are not that bothered about how exactly that outcome is achieved. So we can leave the details to the technocrats. It’s still democratic in a roundabout way, because the technocrats are still ultimately accountable to democratically elected politicians.
Economic planning, however, is not like that at all. We don’t agree on the outcomes. And we cannot separate the big picture from the details. Only the people in command of the technical details can make meaningful decisions about the big picture.
Hayek also said about Britain’s system of governance:
“[T]he present parliamentary machine is quite unsuited to pass rapidly a great body of complicated legislation. The National Government […] has […] admitted this by implementing its economy […] measures not by detailed debate in the House of Commons but by a wholesale system of delegated legislation.”
Or actually, again – he didn’t. That was the socialist Harold Laski in 1932. But it’s correct, which is why Hayek quotes it approvingly in The Road To Serfdom.
Even arch-socialists agreed with important bits of Hayek’s analysis. They just failed to join the dots, and draw the right conclusions.
When Hayek wrote The Road To Serfdom, there weren’t many examples of socialist economies. There would be many more, in subsequent years: Albania, North Vietnam, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, North Korea, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, Cuba, South Yemen, Somalia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola…
They all turned out the way Hayek said they would. As will the next one. And the one after that.
I can’t remember when I first read The Road To Serfdom. I do vaguely remember that I didn’t hugely enjoy it at first: it’s not really a fun read. But it is a good investment. Since the lessons have still not been learned, the book is not going to lose its relevance any time soon.
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This is an interesting and thoughtful article.
I’d like to add something, however, and that is the unpopularity of Capitalism amongst a proportion of the population. Capitalism and Socialism/Communism are often presented as two opposing systems – when ‘capitalists’ behave badly (or are perceived as doing so) it leads some people to support socialist solutions . However, it is not the case that they are opposites.
The two opposites here are the Free Market (and freedom more generally) and Socialism. Socialism has to be implemented through state action, i.e. compulsion. The free market, on the other hand requires just some rules under which players can operate freely as they please. It doesn’t dictate who the players should be – anyone is free to enter the market. The players in a free market do not have to be capitalist organisations – capitalism isn’t mandated. The players can also be co-ops, mutual organisations, charities, family-run organisations, etc.. John Lewis or the Co-op, for example. In fact, capitalist organisations may behave terribly in the absence of a free market – it’s the free market that keeps them honest. In a free market, capitalist organisations only become dominant if that’s the most efficient way of satisfying the requirements of the market.
Most people, unfortunately, are not going to read Hayek and his arguments are not easy to get across quickly. So might it be better simply to frame the argument in terms of freedom and the free market vs Socialist control? When capitalist organisations become unpopular, the answer then is not Socialism but how the public can better exercise control directly through the market rather than, as seems to be generally assumed, through government control.
Every politician in every country that was once aspiring to be a liberal democracy should be forced to read Hayeks’s “Road to Serfdom” and to reflect on how far down the road to tyranny our countries have travelled in the last few decades.