Road to Serfdom - Abandoned Road

Monrovians - Unite!  F.A. Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom, captured the essence of the conflicts of ideas we are now struggling with in the United States.  This is the first of what I hope is a series of entries summarizing and discussing his important book.

Hayek first outlines the fact that we have abandoned, in recent times, the belief in the value and primary of the individual.  The importance of each individual is a basic foundation of Western Civilization.

We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.  Although we had been warned by some of the great political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Action, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.  And now that we have seen a new form of slavery arise before our eyes, we have so completely forgotten the warning that it scarcely occurs to us that the two things may be connected.

Then:

Individualism has a bad name today, and term has come to be connected with egotism and selfishness.  But the individualism of which we speak in contrast to socialism and all other forms of collectivism has no necessary connection with these.  . . . But the essential features of that individualism which, from elements provided by Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity, was first fully developed during the Renaissance and has since grown and spread into what we know as Western civilization - are the respect for the individual man qua man, that is, the recognition of his own views and tastes as supreme in his own sphere, however narrow that may be circumscribed, and the belief that it is desireable that men should develop their own individual gifts and bents.

Hayek then explains how the growth of the importance of the individual is closely connected to economic freedom.

The gradual transformation of a rigidly organized heirarchical system into one where men could at least attempt to shape their own life, where man gained the opportunity of knowing and choosing between different forms of life, is closely associated with the growth of commerce.  . . . During the whole of this modern period of European history the general directon of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which had bound him to the customary or prescribed ways in the pursuit of ordinary activities.  The conscious realization that the spontaneous and uncontrolled efforts of individuals were capable of producing a complex order of economic activities could come only after this development had made some progress.  The subsequent elaboration of a consistent argument in favor of economic freedom was the outcome of a free growth of economic activity which had been the undesigned and unforeseen by-product of political freedom.

Hayek begins to lay out the idea that without economic freedom, we cannot maintain personal and political freedom.

The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek (2007 U. Chicago Press)