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The Road to Serfdom Revisited

Originally published in SSRN

Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is often read as a policy book and a political tract for its time. It is also often read as little more than a “slippery slope” argument, leading inevitably down a road from a free society to the gulag. In this paper I will try to counter both of those claims by explaining that Hayek’s book is part of a broader project dealing with the institutional infrastructure within which economic activity takes place. His argument, rather than being a slippery slope, is an imminent critique of the socialist program as advocated by British socialists, who were his primary target in the 1940s.

Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is often read as a policy book and a political tract for its time. It is also often read as little more than a “slippery slope” argument, leading inevitably down a road from a free society to the gulag. In this paper I will try to counter both of those claims by explaining that Hayek’s book is part of a broader project dealing with the institutional infrastructure within which economic activity takes place. His argument, rather than being a slippery slope, is an imminent critique of the socialist program as advocated by British socialists, who were his primary target in the 1940s.