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.