The Road to Serfdom: Preface and Chapter 1

Meeting Name: Jagongbi (Let’s Study Liberalism and Soar)

Book Title: *The Road to Serfdom*

Scope: Preface, Chapter 1

Session: 1st session

Date and Time: Wednesday, October 30, 2024, 6:30 p.m.

Format: Offline reading group discussion

Participants: J, Mori, Mimi, Nanuri, Sunhyeong

*The Road to Serfdom*

Preface

In Cambridge in December 1943, Hayek makes it clear that this book is a political book. He says that he will clearly state the ultimate values he advocates. He also declares that although he is an economist, and although support for socialism is generally regarded as carrying far greater social importance, he does not sympathize with socialism. In addition, he says he is willing to accept whatever disadvantages may come to him from publishing such a political book. He says he has a duty to write this book, and that duty arises from the gravity he can foresee in the course of discussing issues related to future economic policy. He laments that most economists of the time, because of the official positions they held, remained silent about the dangers they could perceive as scholars, and he expresses his scholarly conscience that he cannot simply ignore a situation in which no one is stepping forward.

(Mimi: As a prominent economist at the time, Hayek must have felt a real burden in going beyond political remarks and actually publishing a book. Even today, in our society, when scholars speak on political matters outside the political sphere, they are often counterattacked as lacking expertise, as politically biased, as politicizing scholarship, or as engaging in armchair theory, and this instead damages their credibility as experts.... Because such speech can produce negative consequences. Hayek does not seem to care about that, and instead shows that the connection between his field of expertise and his political statements can make them even more persuasive and influential.)

Hayek says he had been living in Britain for ten years and regarded it as a second home (p.44), yet he points out that the intellectual current in Britain at the time resembled that of Germany during and after World War I.

(p.43)

More specifically, he says that in Britain, as in Germany, liberalism of the 19th century had become an object of contempt and ridicule, and that this phenomenon had greatly contributed to the birth of the Nazi regime in Germany in the past. (pp.43–44)

He recalls that British progressives at the time generally viewed German socialist policies as something to emulate, and also that during World War I German ideas and practices had deeply influenced British ideals and policies. (p.44)

Hayek writes that the emergence of Nazism in Germany did not arise from evil intentions, but from good intentions, and argues that if Britain wants to avoid the danger of falling into the same kind of totalitarianism as Germany, then even its most cherished hopes and ambitions must be revised if they are found to be the source of the danger. (p.45)

(Mimi: ...This brings to mind Adam Smith’s *The Theory of Moral Sentiments*. Intention and result... Just because an intention is good does not mean one can refuse to acknowledge errors in the result. But human beings often find it difficult to recognize when actions that began with good intentions start going wrong... functional fixedness, the trap of good intentions, and so on.... Hayek seems to be pointing out that people at the time were not perceiving this at all.) Hayek repeatedly insists on a fact that people of the time denied: Nazism and fascism were the inevitable results of socialism. In other words, he foresaw that the socialist worldview would ultimately lead toward a totalitarian state.

*The Road to Serfdom.* (p.45)

He points out that the British at the time, though differing in form, fundamentally wanted various kinds of socialism, and that we were all socialists. That was because most people wanted it.

(p.46)

(Mimi: I had never really separated Nazism, fascism, and socialism conceptually or thought about their interrelationship, and had only understood them in a lumped-together way. Seeing Hayek point this out like this helped me understand a little better the distinctiveness, relations, and plausibility of those ideologies.)

What we must again become aware of is this question: where will this dynamic of the majority lead society? Hayek says that to answer this, we must understand the driving force behind the establishment of German National Socialism and grasp its reality.

(p.47)

(Mimi: Hayek seems to be saying that the metaphor of National Socialism ultimately signifies Nazism and totalitarianism.)

He says that before and after the outbreak of war, Britain made many mistakes because it did not properly understand the enemy, and that this was because it did not understand what kind of intellectual development could culminate in totalitarianism. (p.49)

(Mimi: Before World War II? After? A lack of understanding, from Britain’s point of view, of Germany and German thought.... Anyway, this also seems to refer to a socialist way of thinking.... In an age of war, wouldn’t almost everyone have had a state-led way of thinking?)

Inspired by Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt, on the other hand, the theory that Germans themselves were innately evil cannot be trusted, and Hayek says we should remember that Thomas Carlyle, one of the pioneers of National Socialism, was Scottish, and that Houston Stewart Chamberlain was English. Therefore, he says it is very dangerous to hate everything German rather than the particular ideas that currently dominate Germans. (p.50)

Hayek emphasizes that it was not some special trait of the German nation that created totalitarianism; rather, the rapid rise of National Socialism was due to the prevalence of socialist views, and the rise of socialism came from the general public, not from classes steeped in the Prussian tradition. (p.53)

Chapter 1 / The Abandoned Road

Focusing on Britain at the time, the author says that everyone was striving according to what they believed to be the best judgment, yet the actual result had placed them in subjection and misery rather than their intended goal, and he mentions the presence of evil forces among the reasons. (p.57)

He reproaches us for being unable to accept that the cause of the crisis of our civilization lies in our own mistakes, or that in pursuing the ideals we valued most, we produced entirely different results. (p.58) He points out that although Britain is currently pouring all its energy into winning World War II, it fails to remember that its most important value, liberalism, had already been under threat in Britain even before the war and had been destroyed in other countries. (p.58)

(Mimi: Hmm... so this means socialist ways of thinking were already present in Britain even before World War II.)

He says that to win the war now before us would make it easier to distinguish Britain ideologically from enemy countries such as Germany, Italy, and Russia. However, if one looks at the history of those countries before the rise of totalitarianism, there was nothing especially unique about them compared with Britain. In other words, the war was the result of a transformation in European thought. Britain also changed slowly, but conflict broke out because other countries changed faster than Britain did. That is, it was changes in ideas, the power of the human will, that made the world as it is now—not some natural change in reality that forced our ideas to adjust accordingly. (p.59)

He says that until 1931 Britain had been slowly proceeding down the same road that other countries had taken, the road of becoming socialist, but had already gone so far that, except for those who could remember the period before World War I, Britain had changed to the point where people no longer really knew what a free world was like. (p.60)

(Mimi: So Hayek saw the period before World War I as a free world. Then does he mean the Victorian era? The era when people became prosperous through the Industrial Revolution, but class divisions were firmly in place, children also worked, and women lived in an oppressive society. (This reminds me of the novel *The Yellow Wallpaper* that I read before.) And I think John Stuart Mill discussed women’s liberation in works like *The Subjection of Women*.... Does Hayek not really address that side of things? Then perhaps the freedom Hayek is emphasizing here is individual economic freedom, focusing on the concept of “property”... since socialism does not permit individual ownership....)

Hayek emphasizes that Britain is giving up freedom in economic matters more and more rapidly, even though at no time in the past has there ever been personal or political freedom without freedom in economic matters. He laments that although truly great political philosophers such as Tocqueville and Lord Acton warned us that “socialism means slavery,” we continue steadily to move in the direction of socialism.

(p.61)

He points out that this means we are rapidly abandoning one of the characteristic features of the foundational ideas of Western civilization, cultivated by Christianity and the Greco-Romans, and are even radically giving up the basic liberalism inherited from both 19th-century and 18th-century liberalism. (p.62)

(Mimi: The fundamental compatibility between socialism and democracy is like atheism versus theism, and the roots of their ways of thinking are different.... So I think understanding the thought of Christianity and the Greco-Romans is key to grasping the essence. Here I briefly thought of liberalism as being in the same category as democracy and set against socialism in a binary opposition....)

The National Socialist revolution is also described as a counter-Renaissance. It is a decisive stage in the destruction of a civilization whose essential characteristic is individualism, and here individualism does not mean self-centeredness or selfishness, but something opposed to collectivism. (p.62)

The essential aspects of individualism can be expressed by the word tolerance: respect for each individual human being, acknowledgment of opinions and preferences, and belief in the development of talents and tastes. Individualism is closely related to the development of commerce, and social development in modern European history means the liberation of individuals’ daily activities from restraints. The awareness that order could arise in the complexity of economic activity appeared only after a certain degree of liberation, and only after political freedom had been granted did the free growth of economic activity emerge; accordingly, a consistent argument in favor of economic freedom became firmly established. (p.64)

With the arrival of individual liberation, science also advanced, which led to improvements in industrial technology such as invention and mining and watchmaking.

(p.65) However, attempts at the time to use mechanical inventions for industrial purposes were restricted by the state (policy), and it was only after industrial freedom found ways to make free use of new knowledge that anything could truly be attempted; only then, and even more so outside official institutions of academic training, did science make enormous advances and become able over the last 150 years to transform the appearance of the world. (p.65)

(Mimi: I don’t understand the latter part, the section about industrial freedom~~)

By the early 20th century, Western workers had become able to enjoy material comfort, security, and personal independence, and self-help and progress had arrived, while their desires wanted to grow ever faster. (pp.66–67)

The slow pace of liberal progress weakens the liberal position, but liberalism requires a detailed understanding of society and the best solution appropriate to it.

(Mimi: So this means liberalism emphasizes the importance of time and process~)

Among the basic principles of liberalism, there are no rigid rules; rather, its basic principle is that, in solving problems, one should rely on as little coercion as possible, and this can be adapted and applied endlessly. Since the task of the liberal is to support, or when necessary supplement, the operation of social “forces,” one must understand those social “forces,” and, like a gardener tending plants, must know a great deal about society. (p.67) But progress toward the ideal one seeks to reach through so-called “positive” movements is in practice inevitably slow, and liberalism, even for immediate improvement, must depend greatly on the gradual increase in wealth that freedom brings. (p.69)

(Mimi: So this means even if things are hard right now, we have to endure and hold out... right?)

Impatience with no longer being able to tolerate the slow progress of liberal policies, anger at those who misuse the liberal shield to defend antisocial privileges, and endless ambitions expanding in proportion to the material progress already achieved—all this gradually caused faith in the basic principles of liberalism to fade around the turn of the century. People regarded what had already been achieved as though, once obtained, it were an immortal and secure possession. (p.70)

(Mimi: I don’t really understand the sentence above.)

The attention of the general public turned toward new demands, and it seemed to them that the reason these new demands could not be satisfied quickly was that old principles were being maintained. The idea gradually spread that no further progress could be expected within the framework that had made past progress possible, and that progress would be possible only by completely reconstructing society. This led to a decline in interest in and understanding of how the existing society functioned, and as understanding of how the free system worked declined, awareness also retreated of the things that can exist only where a free system exists. This describes a transformation in our attitude toward society that proceeded gradually through imperceptible stages.

(p.71)

Germany Recognized as the Leader of a New Beginning

(Title re-added by Mimi: The irony in perceptions of German and British thought, with the sentences freely reorganized according to Mimi’s level of understanding)

Hayek says that for more than 200 years British thought had been a point of origin and spread outward, but after 1870 British liberal thought declined, and new ideas centered in Germany spread across Europe and into Britain. Even ideas that did not originate in Germany were perfected there and reached their peak in Germany during the last 25 years of the 19th century and the first 25 years of the 20th century, and he explains that Germany had already sent a major socialist party into parliament a generation earlier than Britain. The development of socialist doctrine took place almost entirely in Germany and Austria, and he says that the doctrinal discussions taking place in Russia continued from the point where Germans had stopped. He writes that most British socialists were only just beginning to discover things that German socialists had already dealt with long ago. (p.73)

He also notes that the reason German thinkers exerted worldwide intellectual influence was due both to Germany’s material progress at the time and to the prestige German thinkers and scientists had acquired over a hundred years. However, the intellectual influence of those German thinkers, who enjoyed such prestige, contributed to the spread of German socialism elsewhere. And here an irony appears: even before Nazism, Germany, already imbued with socialist thought, had set itself in opposition to European civilization, which was its own foundation, and openly came to despise European civilization by calling it “the West” and dismissing it as “shallow.”

Another irony occurred in that Westerners, without questioning this attitude, continued to accept German ideas. (p.74) Eventually they even came to regard the convictions they themselves had long upheld as nothing more than rationalizations based on selfish interests. Hayek says that this meant they no longer understood the origin and meaning of free trade, viewing it instead as merely a doctrine designed to advance British interests, and came to believe that the political ideals Britain had given to the world were hopelessly outdated and something to be ashamed of. (p.75)

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Original title: <노예의 길> 서문, 1장

Author: Ja-yu-ju-ui Ip-mun Dok-seo To-ron Mo-im

Date: 2024-10-30

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=2&idx=27001