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Essay
Hayek:
The Back Story
By
JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published:
July 1, 2010
Last
month, a funny thing
happened on the way to the best-seller list. A 66-year-old treatise by
a
long-dead Austrian-born economist began flying off the shelves,
following an
hourlong endorsement from a right-wing television host better known for
pumping
political thrillers than for rocking political theory.
The
economist was Friedrich
von Hayek, the book was “The Road to Serfdom” and the host was Glenn
Beck, who
compared Hayek’s book to “a Mike Tyson (in his prime) right hook to
socialism
in Western Europe and in the United States.” As it
happens, “The Road to
Serfdom” — a classic attack on government planning as an inevitable
step toward
totalitarianism, published in 1944 and kept in print since then by the University of Chicago Press — had already
begun a
comeback of sorts. It sold 27,000 copies in 2009, up from about 7,000 a
year
before the inauguration of Barack Obama. But Beck’s endorsement
catapulted the
book to No. 1 at Amazon.com, bringing a temporary end to at least one
tyranny,
that of Stieg Larsson. Since the program was broadcast on June 8,
100,000 copies
have been sold.
That’s
an impressive number
for an academic-press book, if a bit anemic compared with the 1.2
million views
for “Fear the Boom and Bust,” a Hayek versus John Maynard Keynes rap
video that
went up on YouTube in January. (Kickoff line: “Party at the Fed!”) But
in fact
“The Road to Serfdom” has a long history of timely assists from the
popular
media.
When
Hayek began formulating
his ideas in the early 1930s, he was an émigré professor at the London
School
of Economics, watching events in both Europe and Britain
with alarm. Like many
others, Hayek was frightened by the rise of Nazism. He interpreted it,
however,
in an unorthodox way, not as the defeat of democratic socialism but as
its
logical culmination. Hayek started writing the book after World War II
began,
as a contribution to the war effort. Looking ahead, “Hayek was also
worried
about what would transpire if the Allies won,” as Bruce Caldwell puts
it in his
introduction to “THE ROAD TO SERFDOM”: Text and Documents — The
Definitive
Edition (University
of Chicago, $17).
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-marketer, 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.” This
qualification, however, was left out of a comic-book version of “The
Road to
Serfdom” printed in Look magazine in 1945 (and distributed as a
pamphlet by
General Motors), which showed well-intentioned regulation giving way to
more
sinister forms of control. “In an unsuccessful effort to educate people
to
uniform views,” one caption read, “‘planners’ establish a giant
propaganda
machine — which coming dictator will find handy.”
While
Hayek, who moved to the
University
of Chicago in
1950, built an ardent
following of admirers (including Milton Friedman), his fame gradually
waned.
By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1974 he was largely forgotten by
the
public and marginalized within his profession. In graduate programs in
the
early 1980s, the economist William Easterly recalled recently on his
blog,
“Hayek was seen as so far right that you would be considered a nut to
read
him.” (His sunny view of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet probably
didn’t
help.)
Today,
Hayek continues to
inspire noisy ideological debate. In his recent book “Ill Fares the
Land,” a
passionate defense of the democratic socialist ideal, the historian
Tony Judt
writes that Hayek would have been (justly) doomed to obscurity if not
for the
financial difficulty experienced by the welfare state, which was
exploited by
conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The economist
Paul
Samuelson, in a reminiscence of Hayek published last December, was more
dismissive still. “Where are their horror camps?” he asked, referring
to
right-wing bugaboos like Sweden,
with its generous welfare spending. Almost 70 years after Hayek sounded
his
alarm, “hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future
turned
out to be.”
Hayek
also cropped up in the
recent controversy over the Texas Board of Education’s new high school
curriculum, which will now include him and Friedman alongside Adam
Smith, Karl
Marx and Keynes. In a post on The Times’s Freakonomics blog, Justin
Wolfers, a
professor at the Wharton School, noted that a search of scholarly
literature
found Hayek, with a mere 1,745 references, lagging far behind Smith
(25,626),
Keynes (4,945), Friedman (8,924) and even Lawrence Summers (2,064).
“The
message from the Texas Board of Education seems to be: If you can’t win
in the
marketplace of ideas, turn to government institutions to prop you up,”
Wolfers
wrote, adding sardonically, “I don’t think Hayek would approve.”
Another
blogger, redoing
Hayek’s count, tallied 9,385 citations. But intellectual legacies don’t
stand
or fall on such bean-counting. Besides, Hayek, whose later work on the
self-organizing nature of information has been influential far beyond
economics, himself said “The Road to Serfdom” was more a “political
book” than
an economic one.
But how
relevant is the book
to Glenn Beck’s America?
In his 1960 essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek observed,
“Conservatism
may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any
guiding
principles which can influence long-range developments.” Then again,
his own
strange road to best-sellerdom illustrates that a book’s reputation can
be
determined not just by its contents but by the company it keeps.
Jennifer
Schuessler is an
editor at the Book Review.
Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/books/review/Schuessler-t.html?_r=2&ref=books
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