“Poor Fritz,” said Harold Laski in 1946 of Friedrich A. Hayek, who had recently published The Road to Serfdom, “poor Fritz. He’s just a 1906 liberal.” But the “1906 liberal,” who cared more for sound principle than he did for contemporary fashions, is riding considerably higher today than the late Harold Laski. Although socialism, in its many allotropes and disguises, is still very much with us, the Laski books have lost considerable intellectual ground in just ten short years of time. And people who were damning Hayek in 1946 as a “reactionary” are now listening to his doctrine with interest and even some measure of respect.

Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in England during the lean and dreary war years as a warning to the “socialists of all parties.” He could feel it in his bones that postwar England would go “labor” with a vengeance, and out of his experience with continental European socialism he wanted to cry a “Stop, look, and listen” before the madness descended. The book was not intended for consumption in the United States, and it made virtually no capital out of New Deal experiences. Nevertheless it made its mark in this country when the University of Chicago Press brought it out. Two pertinacious men—Aaron Director of the University of Chicago and John Davenport of Fortune Magazine—were instrumental in getting it published in this country, and they deserve a place in intellectual history for their efforts in Hayek’s behalf.

Somewhat strangely, Hayek remarks that the book has not “had here the kind of effect I should have wished or which it had elsewhere.” I submit that Hayek does not have any idea of the influence it has had: intellectual stimulation and conversion are frequently “underground” phenomena, and seeds become lodged and spring to growth in the unlikeliest places. The very fact that The Road to Serfdom has just been reissued as a paperback in the Phoenix Books series (University of Chicago Press, $1.00) with a new foreword by the author proves something about the place it has made for itself on these shores.

The original aim of The Road to Serfdom, as Hayek explains, was to combat “hot socialism.” But “hot socialism” is pretty well discredited by now, at least in nations which still have freedom of speech. Today the issue is something that might be termed socialism by indirection, or socialism by cumulation or accretion. Says Hayek” “A great many still believe in measures which, though not designed completely to remodel the economy, in their aggregate effect may well unintentionally produce this result.”

As most readers will recall, the thesis of The Road to Serfdom is that planning by the State, pushed from a central control tower in accordance with a master pattern, must end by robbing the individual of all his freedoms, both social and cultural as well as economic. A State “plan” means by its very nature that individuals must be told what to produce, what to consume, and how and where to apportion their time. It also means freezing people in their jobs, or arbitrarily shifting them from one job (and geographical location) to another. Naturally, parliaments are defective instruments for planning, for “talkshop” methods cannot cope with engineering problems, whether of means or ends. (A Five-Year Plan is not open to haphazard amendment once the factors of production have been set to work.) And, simply because a centrally administered “plan” requires toughness when it comes to dealing with recalcitrants, or demurrers, or congenital anti-planners, the most callous and brutal elements of society tend to work their way to the top.

When The Road to Serfdom first appeared, the corroboration of Hayek’s insights should have been apparent from the histories of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, to say nothing of Soviet Russia. But the western peoples were in the grip of a war psychosis then, and they were thinking of Hitler and Mussolini in terms of such things as racism, congenital evil, and original sin unmitigated by access to Divine Grace. Few there were to see that Nazism, fascism, and communism were all reflexes of an attempt to order society according to collectivist principles. It is only recently, what with the Russians misbehaving and the British Socialists in a mood of tired retreat, that Hayek has come to seem right in his basic premise that top-down planning must inevitably kill republican processes. But Hayek himself is guilty of creating some confusion as to his precise definition of what constitutes true liberalism in economic matters.

The confusion first crops up when Hayek indicates that he lacks patience with a “dogmatic laissez faire attitude.” If his opposition to “dogmatism” is merely a matter of objecting to the type of conservative or classical liberal who wants to fight every fight simultaneously, regardless of available reserves of energy, I have some sympathy for his position. It just isn’t possible to abolish every incrustation of privilege by next Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, for institutions, once they become established, develop tough and tenacious life cycles of their own. The protective tariff won’t disappear with the wave of a wand; and as for tax-supported primary education, it is entwined with our social institutions like a tough wisteria vine growing over and around the porch of an ancient house. The effective classical liberal must have his hierarchy of possibilities when he is fighting a trend, if only to save himself from dispersing his energies all over the lot. But I am not at all sure that Hayek is thinking merely of a proper husbanding and direction of reforming energies when he says he is against a “dogmatic laissez faire attitude.”

Quite rightly Hayek argues that competition must take place within a “rational permanent framework,” an established system of custom and legality which will give people a sense of moral certainty when it comes to making their own individual plans. But when Hayek goes on to say that “the successful use of competition” admits “certain types of coercive interference with economic life” by government, just what has he in mind? He is against price control and quotas, which is all to the good. But then he jumps off into the area of Welfare by Compulsion when he says that “the preservation of competition” is not, repeat not, “incompatible with an extensive system of social services so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.”

This sort of statement always raises the question of whether there is ever a recognizable stopping place in the progressive extension or proliferation of social services once the principle of compulsory Welfarism is granted. Just how is one to know when a multiplication of tax-supported services will threaten to make competition “ineffective”? In the eyes of politicians each proposed extension of social security, or federal aid to education, or the leasing of soil to be placed in a “soil bank,” is fully compatible with the continued functioning of “private enterprise.” Yet the sum total of a number of innocent-seeming extensions may make for an insensible slide into a disastrous inflation once a business cycle starts to turn down. And every additional increment to the tax-supported social services we now have makes it more and more impossible to return to the idea of proportional, as against progressive, taxation of income. In his willingness to make an intellectual compromise with the idea of the Social Service State, isn’t Hayek encouraging (to use his own words against him) the very people who “believe in measures which, though not designed completely to remodel the economy, in their aggregate effect may well unintentionally produce this result?”

It is perfectly true, as Adam Smith said long ago, that any system will stand a lot of “ruin.” In the history of complex economic life there has never been any such thing as a “pure” system. But it is one thing to recognize the ragged realities of history and quite another to make a virtue of them. Hayek says the test of interference with a laissez faire pattern of activity is “whether in the particular instance the advantages gained are greater than the social costs which they impose.” But, on his own recognition, the “hodgepodge of ill-assembled and often inconsistent ideals which under the name of the Welfare State has largely replaced socialism as the goal of reformers needs very careful sorting-out if the results are not to be very similar to those of full-fledged socialism.”

If Hayek himself could be empowered to do the “sorting out,” no doubt we could avoid many a pitfall. But the “sorting out” process inevitably becomes involved with the trades and compromises and back-scratchings of the politicians. There is no end to the business once it has been accepted in the political mores of a people.

In stressing the point of Hayek’s philosophical vagueness on a single issue, I will be accused, no doubt, of doing a vast disservice to the rest of a generally magnificent book. But Hayek’s virtues have been praised by me in other places. The Road to Serfdom is one of the great books of a generation. Since I was one of the first in this country to say so, I may be forgiven for narrowing my vision for just this one time.