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Loading... The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek) (Volume 2) (original 1944; edition 2007)by F. A. Hayek, Bruce Caldwell (Editor)
Work InformationThe Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition by F. A. Hayek (1944)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A great criticism of collectivism and a fundamental read for the dangers of socialism. ( ) A somewhat difficult read due to time elapsed since its original release. However, this Nobel prize winner leaves no doubt that socialism always ends in failure. While 20th century Americans knew this and fought against it and its related "isms", we have too many blindly embracing this economic and political loser. Hayek argues passionately against central planning of the economy, stating quite firmly that it leads to totalitarianism. The way this happens is rather subtle, but Hayek claims that to have a centrally planned economy would require a moral judgment on all of the decisions made. This is my basic take on his argument; since all people are different, they all have different things that they value over other things. Even in the United States, we have the NRA, and then we have people who don't like guns at all. This is a bold oversimplification of what he says, but the gist is that it is too difficult to make decisions about the economy since you wouldn't know what to focus on. This would require you to make a moral judgment on what is better or more needed. It is easy to look back at Communist Russia, for example, and how they had the massive lines of people waiting for bread or shoes. Hayek repeats himself a lot, and his ideas don't really change from chapter to chapter. He does tell us that laissez-faire Capitalism might be the cause of a lot of inequality in income, but that it is also the only system that allows for people to have the most freedom. no reviews | add a review
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An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in 1944-when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program-The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial bestseller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century. This new edition includes a foreword by leading Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought. Caldwell has also standardized and corrected Hayek's references and added helpful new explanatory notes. Supplemented with an appendix of related materials ranging from prepublication reports on the initial manuscript to forewords to earlier editions by John Chamberlain, Milton Friedman, and Hayek himself, this new edition of The Road to Serfdom is the definitive version of Hayek's enduring masterwork. No library descriptions found. |
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