Andrew Farrant

Does F.A. Hayek's Deserve to Make a Comeback?

As anger at President Barack Obamas social policies grows in some quarters, scholars and talk show hosts alike have said Friedrich von Hayeks 1944 best-seller The Road to Serfdom warrants another look. But does it? Hayek maintained that even the U. S. social welfare net would lead to totalitarian government. It has not. But that does not stop some from citing the book as a foundation for ominous warnings about the United States.

Hayek, Thatcher, and the Muddle of the Middle

This chapter provides a detailed examination of one of Hayek’s rather less well-known forays into macroeconomic controversy: in particular, the policy advice which Hayek gave to Margaret Thatcher in early 1982. Hayek urged her to pay much heed to the way in which the Pinochet junta had speedily restructured the Chilean economy in the 1970s and early 1980s. There is much speculation about what particular aspects of Chilean social and economic policy Hayek may have urged Thatcher to adopt in Britain—this chapter addresses this aspect of Hayek and Thatcher’s early-1980s correspondence.

Can a Dictator Turn a Constitution into a Can-opener? F.A. Hayek and the Alchemy of Transitional Dictatorship in Chile

Abstract Commenting on the Pinochet regime, Friedrich Hayek famously claimed in 1981 that he would prefer a ‘liberal’ dictator to ‘democratic government lacking liberalism.’ Hayeks defense of a transitional dictatorship in Chile was not an impromptu response. In late 1960, in a little known BBC radio broadcast, Hayek suggested that a dictatorial regime may be able to facilitate a transition to stable limited democracy. While Hayeks comments about Pinochet have generated much controversy, this paper neither provides a blanket condemnation of his views (he did not advocate dictatorship as a first-best ‘state of the world’) nor tries to excuse his failure to condemn the Pinochet juntas human rights abuses, but instead provides a critical assessment of Hayeks implicit model of transitional dictatorship.

Sir Waldron Smithers and the Muddle of the Tory Middle

Waldron Smithers was highly critical of Attlees post‐war Labour government and placed much weight on Hayek having dedicated The Road to Serfdom to ‘the Socialists of all parties’. Accordingly, Smithers was assiduous in combating what he saw as a dangerous turn towards middle‐way policy within his own party in the late 1940s.

A Response to Caldwell on F. A. Hayek and The Road to Serfdom

We are gratified that Bruce Caldwell, general editor of F. A. Hayek’s Collected Works, has taken the time and trouble to reply to our article in the July/August issue of Challenge (Farrant and McPhail 2010a). Caldwell has a variety of objections to our evaluation of Hayek’s message. In particular, he argues that we do not take sufficient heed of the historical and ideological backdrop against which Hayek initially wrote The Road to Serfdom. Caldwell also maintains that Hayek’s ire in The Road to Serfdom is exclusively directed against wholesale command planning. Accordingly, he thinks that we misread Hayek’s work when we argue that Hayek thought any dogged adherence to interventionist policy—the mixed economy and nascent welfare state—would ultimately mutate into wholesale central economic planning. In this article, we assess Professor Caldwell’s response to our original

Hayek, Keynesian Economics, and Planning Against Competition: A Caveat?

Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom as a warning to intellectuals who were supposedly much taken with the idea of a ‘planned’ economy. Jeremy Shearmur (1997) makes use of unpublished material drawn from the Hayek archives to suggest that Hayek did not seemingly deem Keynesian full-employment policy to be incompatible with what Hayek would view as a free society. Our reading of the archival material invoked by Shearmur arrives at a rather different conclusion. Hayek’s view of the logic supposedly inherent in Keynesian policy is markedly congruent with the general tenor of The Road to Serfdom. We demonstrate that Hayek deemed activist monetary policy incompatible with Hayek’s favoured planning for competition.

Hayek's New Popularity

As FOXNews talk show host Glenn Beck and others champion Friedrich von Hayeks The Road to Serfdom, its sales have soared. Hayek warned that even a moderate social safety net would lead to a totalitarian government. It did not happen. But this does not deter his avid supporters. The authors follow up on their article on the subject in the previous issue of Challenge to identify how misplaced the fear invoked by Beck and others is—and how wrong Hayek was.

Supporters Are Wrong: Hayek Did Not Favor a Welfare State

Some supporters claim that Friedrich Hayek was more accepting of some aspects of the welfare state than is generally believed. Is that a way to sugarcoat his central laissez-faire message? The authors say there is no disguising his belief that the contemporary welfare state will lead to serfdom.

Hayek, Orwell, and the Road to Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Hayek and Orwell are justifiably famous for their mid-late 1940s analyses of the inherent logic of totalitarianism. Indeed, Hayek’s arguments in The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Orwell’s mid-late 1940s writings—e.g., Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949a)—are usually viewed as having provided very similar assessments of the sundry ‘perversions to which a centralized economy is liable.’ And the similarities between aspects of Hayek’s 1944 analysis of planning and Orwell’s scathing 1949 analysis of Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism) were the topic of much discussion when the Mont Pelerin Society met in England in early September 1984 for a fortieth anniversary celebration of the publication of The Road to Serfdom. But Orwell had explained that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not meant to be viewed as an ‘attack on socialism’ or the ‘British Labor party (of which I am a supporter)’ but as an account of the ‘perversions to which a centralized economy is liable.’ And any ‘return to “free” competition’ would, Orwell insisted, virtually assure that the ‘mass’ of the populace subsequently found themselves subject to a ‘tyranny probably worse … than that of the state.’ This chapter provides some basic graphical machinery to help to illustrate the analytical tenor of Orwell’s largely implicit model of the way in which a society might ultimately find itself saddled with full-blown oligarchical collectivism.

The Control of Engagement Order: Attlee’s Road to Serfdom?

F. A. Hayek’s ideas have repeatedly reared their head in political debate and commentary over the past 70 years. For example, Hayek’s arguments in The Road to Serfdom are widely thought to have influenced the caustic tenor of Winston Churchill’s infamous “Gestapo” election broadcast of June 4, 1945.1 According to Churchill, any “Socialist Government” that sought to conduct “the entire life and industry of the country … would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo … [and] would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants—no longer servants and no longer civil.”2 Unsurprisingly, the average voter viewed Churchill’s charges with much dismay. As Ford Moran (Churchill’s personal physician) noted in his diary, the Gestapo jibe had “not gone down with anybody … No one agreed with the line that Winston had taken.”3 Similarly, The Recorder (a rabidly pro-Churchill popular newspaper) reported that many voters who heard “Mr. Churchill’s broadcast … [were much] surprised by his statement that Socialism must inevitably lead to totalitarianism.” As The Recorder went on to note, however, “the fact has already been well proved. Fast year appeared a book ‘The Road to Serfdom.’ It was recognized as one of the most important books of our generation.”4