The Road to Serfdom’s status as a classic of economic and political philosophy is well-deserved. Hayek makes political theory compelling as he describes the dire consequences of the schemes of central planners. An Austrian, he wrote from a unique vantage point, having spent his early life in eastern European nations that were far down the socialist rabbit hole and his later life in England when it was still committed to individual liberty and political freedom. He experienced the consequences of socialism and fascism as they matured in his country of birth, and realized while in England that the West was in the early stages of accepting the same premises and committing the same mistakes that so devastated eastern Europe.
While the writing is mostly theoretical and occasionally dry, the benefit is that it does not come across as polemical or ideological in any negative sense. If anything, Hayek is ideological in that he is driven by ideas–ideas that have had direct and disastrous consequences in front of his very eyes, and vice versa. Central planning is the height of political, intellectual and moral arrogance: The very idea that so-called experts can adequately plan an economy at a national level is patently absurd, not to mention immoral, and Hayek patiently and deliberately walks the reader through all the implications, assumptions and consequences involved. Anyone interested in true equality under the law, in freedom to organize one’s life according to one’s own principles, in genuine justice, cannot but oppose the vision of the central planners. Individual liberty, Hayek shows, must be the foundation of a free and just society.
