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Is There a ‘Road to Serfdom’?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Norman P. Barry
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Extract

A PREDOMINANT THEME OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICAL liberal thought is the claim that piecemeal acts of intervention by government in a free economy and society will, if continued over an unspecified period of time, bring about the transformation of that society into a totalitarian regime in which all but the most trivial decisions affecting an individual are taken by the state. The crucial feature of the liberal's argument is that this process generates an outcome which was not intended by the originators of the acts of intervention: it is the method or mechanism of intervention itself which produces a state of affairs undesired by both non-statists and (at least moderate) collectivists alike. Thus, in addition to general economic and moral arguments that a classical liberal might raise against, say, a nationalized health service, he also maintains that an abridgement of the right to provide health care privately, which the collectivist does not value, must set in motion a process which culminates in the direction of medical personnel, and the prevention of the emigration of doctors by the state, to which, presumably, the moderate collectivist would himself object.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1984 , pp. 52 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1984

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References

1 London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

2 See von Mises, L., Socialism, London, Cape, 1936 Google Scholar; Bureaucracy, Yale University Press, 1944; Omnipotent Government, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1944.

3 Encounter, November, 1976.

4 The Anti‐Capitalistic Mentality, New Jersey, van Nostrand, 1956, p. 65.

5 Hayek’s anti‐collectivist reasoning was directed mainly towards its Fascist and Nazi variant. This was because when The Road to Serfdom was being written the Soviet Union was an ally of Britain.

6 The Political Economy of a Free People, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

7 The Road to Serfdom, p. 3.

8 Ibid., pp. 42–54.

9 This term is equivalent to Popper’s concept of the ‘Open Society’. See Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1. Rules and Order, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

10 The Road to Serfdom, p. 43.

11 Ibid., ch. VII.

12 Stigler, G., The Citizen and the State, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1975, p. 17.Google Scholar

13 The Road to Serfdom, p. 8.

14 See ‘The Road to Serfdom after Twelve Years’, in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967, pp. 216–28.

15 See Buchanan, James, The Limits of Liberty, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1975 Google Scholar; Tullock, G., The Vote Motive, London, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1976 Google Scholar; Downs, A., An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York, Harper & Row, 1957 Google Scholar; Brittan, S., ‘The Economic Contradictions of Democracy’, British Journal of Political Science, 1975, 5, pp. 129–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barry, Norman P., An Introduction to Modern Political Theory, London, Macmillan, 1981, ch. 10.Google Scholar

16 See Schumpeter, J. S., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London, George Allen & Unwin, Fifth Edition, 1976, pp. 291–3.Google Scholar

17 Britain has no significant substantive limitations on the sovereignty of Parliament and a ‘first past the post’ electoral system: this makes government in that country the least constrained of the Western democracies.

18 See Crick, B., In Defence of Politics, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1964 Google Scholar. For a critique of this approach from the standpoint of classical liberalism, see Barry, Norman P., ‘A Defence of Liberalism Against Politics’, Indian Journal of Political Science, 1980, 42, pp. 171–97.Google Scholar