The Road to Serfdom
By F.A. Hayek
ISBN: 0-226-32061-8

As a native of Austria in the late nineteenth-century, Hayek saw first-hand the growth of central planning ideology born of philosophies hostile to individual freedom and free market capitalism. First published during World War II, Serfdom details in clear terms those totalitarian ideas and attitudes. 

Hayek provides a clear warning that when societies disregard free markets, individual freedom, and limiting the power of the state, then turn to the siren song of socialism, serfdom awaits: "Few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of those tendencies." (p.6)  Europe's rejection of nineteenth-century classical liberalism laid the way for her twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Hayek noticed similar prejudices against individual freedom in Great Britain and the United States.  He provides a vivid historical case that the West is no less susceptible to the same totalitarian temptations and, though culminating in much less violent forms than Naziism and communism, the loss of freedom is no less real.  Hayek goes further to illustrate that the same central-planning, socialistic assumptions underlay the progressive agendas in Great Britain and the U.S.

Serfdom closes with Hayek's admonition that the West return to and stay the course of freedom: "The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth-century." (p.262)  Certainly a classic, Serfdom needs read and reread by friends of freedom around the world.

An economist by training, Hayek was an author, teacher, and a tireless defender of classical liberalism, that is, individual freedom, free society, free market economy, and limiting the power of government.