Reading · Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)
“Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produce. Looking back, we can assess the significance of past occurrences and trace the consequences they have brought in their train. But while history runs its course, it is not history to us. It leads us into an unknown land and but rarely can we get a glimpse of what lies ahead. It would be different if it were given to us to live a second time through the same events with all the knowledge of what we have seen before. How differ ent would things appear to us, how important and often alarm ing would changes seem that we now scarcely notice! It is probably fortunate that man can never have this experience and knows of no laws which history must obey.”
The Road to Serfdom opens with a line from Lord Acton about the pedigree of ideas, and then Hayek begins with a limit, not an argument. We know the past because we know how it turned out. We live the present forward, without its results, and so we cannot tell which of today’s changes will matter.
Hayek then imagines a way past that limit. Suppose a person could live a second time through the same events with all the knowledge of the first. Changes that now pass without notice would look important and often alarming. He calls it fortunate that no one can have that experience, and that no one knows laws that history must obey.
The thought experiment is less abstract than it looks, because Hayek believed he was that person. He was born in Vienna in 1899, came to the London School of Economics in 1931 and wrote the book in England during the war. A few pages on he says the ideas he now heard in England were the ideas he had heard in Germany and Austria twenty years and more before. The book appeared in London in March 1944, dedicated to the socialists of all parties, and its claim to see what others missed rests on that second passage through the same events.
The last clause of the paragraph has a target. Marx and Engels wrote that all history is the history of class struggles, and they believed history moved by laws a reader could learn. Hayek’s sentence denies that anyone has such laws. His friend Karl Popper made the same case at length in The Poverty of Historicism, which first appeared in 1944 and 1945 in Economica, the London School of Economics journal.
The strongest objection is that Hayek breaks his own rule. If no one knows the laws history must obey, no one can know that economic planning leads to serfdom, and yet the title says it does. Keynes read the book on his way to Bretton Woods in June 1944 and wrote to Hayek that he agreed with most of it, but that moderate planning would be safe in a country whose people held the right values. Britain built the National Health Service and took coal and the railways into public hands after 1945, and it did not become a tyranny. Hayek later said he had meant a danger and not a certainty, but a warning that cannot be proved wrong is also hard to test.
What I take from the page is Hayek’s method more than his answer. We cannot live the present twice, but we can read the past closely enough to know a pattern when it starts again, and name it while it is still small. That is what Hayek believed he was doing, and it is what anyone does who says the present economy fails most people. The method cuts both ways.
So the passage turns my own question back on me. When I ask what an economy and a state would have to become for everyone to live a decent life, Hayek asks in return how I would know, before the results are in, that the change I want leads there and not somewhere worse.