Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

Location: The Heritage Foundation's Lehrman Auditorium

An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, The Road to Serfdom – originally published in 1944 – was seen at the time 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.  A perennial best seller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and been translated into more than twenty languages.

With this new edition, The Road to Serfdom takes its place in the series The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek.  In addition to explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought, series editor and leading Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell has 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 envisioned to be the definitive version of Friedrich Hayek's enduring masterwork.