The Road to Serfdom

Friedrich A. Hayek

First published 1944

The Road to Serfdom

by Friedrich A. Hayek

University of Chicago Press, 194473 pagesISBN 0255365764

The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek is available as a free PDF download at freecapitalists.org.

Author: Friedrich A. Hayek
First published: 1944
Format: PDF
Pages: 73
ISBN: 0255365764
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
License: Unverified

The description below is written for the Definitive Edition of Road to Serfdom which is sold in the Mises Store and can be previewed here: Google Preview. Finally, here is an edition of Road to Serfdom that does justice to its monumental status in the history of liberty. It contains a foreword by the editor of the Hayek Collected Works, Bruce Caldwell. Caldwell has added helpful explanatory notes and citation corrections, among other improvements. For this reason, the publisher decided to call this "the definitive edition." It truly is. This spell-binding book is a classic in the history of liberal ideas. It was singularly responsible for launching an important debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom. It made the author a world-famous intellectual. It set a new standard for what it means to be a dissident intellectual. It warned of a new form of despotism enacted in the name of liberation. And though it appeared in 1944, it continues to have a remarkable impact. No one can consider himself well-schooled in modern political ideas without having absorbed its lessons. What F. A. Hayek saw, and what most all his contemporaries missed, was that every step away from the free market and toward government planning represented a compromise of human freedom generally and a step toward a form of dictatorship--and this is true in all times and places. He demonstrated this against every claim that government control was really only a means of increasing social well-being. Hayek said that government planning would make society less liveable, more brutal, more despotic. Socialism in all its forms is contrary to freedom. Nazism, he wrote, is not different in kind from Communism.

Questions

About this book and this copy

Is The Road to Serfdom free to download?: Yes. The complete 73-page PDF downloads directly from this page (1.2 MB). There is no signup, no account and no paywall.
How long is The Road to Serfdom?: 73 pages in the edition this archive serves.
Who wrote The Road to Serfdom?: Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992) was an Austrian-British economist and one of the most influential free-market thinkers of the 20th century. This archive holds 22 of Hayek's works.

About the author

Friedrich A. Hayek 1899–1992

Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992) was an Austrian-British economist and one of the most influential free-market thinkers of the 20th century. Read more about Friedrich A. Hayek.

In the lecture archive

Lectures that discuss The Road to Serfdom

32 recorded talks in this archive name this book. The 6 that discuss it most, each linked to the moment it comes up:

The Road to Prosperity

Peter G. Klein · Freedom: The One Way Out

Let me begin by talking to you a little bit about the classic book that is evoked by the title of my talk today, and that's the book by Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944.

Hear it at 8:23
Austrian Economics

Friedrich A. Hayek · The Austrian School of Economics: An Introduction

Have you considered rewriting your book, The Road to Serfdom, and taking into account any increases in the amount of books you've written?

Hear it at 33:27
Examining the Hayek-Friedman Hypothesis on Economic and Political Freedom

Robert A. Lawson · Austrian Scholars Conference 2009

After all, Hayek really said the same thing about 18 years earlier in the Road to Serfdom.

Hear it at 0:00
Creating the Next Great Depression

Thomas J. DiLorenzo · Economic Downturn: Cause and Cure

Friedrich Hayek in the 1976 edition of The Road to Serfdom, his famous book The Road to Serfdom, in the preface he wrote that at the beginning of the 20th century socialism meant government ownership of the means of production.

Hear it at 13:32
The Regulatory Imperium

Thomas J. DiLorenzo · Liberty versus Power

In the Road to Serfdom, Hayek says in the 1976 revised edition, they reprinted it in 1976, and he says that when he wrote the original version of The Road to Serfdom in 1944, socialism meant the nationalization of industry …

Hear it at 0:00
19. Birth of a Movement

Jörg Guido Hülsmann · Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism

And in the same year, Friedrich August Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, the book that made him famous.

Hear it at 4:47