자료: [구글도서] his Collected Works, vol.2 (Univ. of Chicago Press 2009) ; [구글도서] Routledge(1944 [2001]) ; Some HTML (& its contents) ; Some PDF ; ... 차례/독서노트 ;
※ This is a reading note with excerpts taken and some personal annotations or remarks added in trying to partially read the above text. So visit the links above or elsewhere to see the original work.
※ OF WHICH
[1] 발췌 (excerpts):
Although this book might in some respects have been different if I had written it in the first instance with American reader primarily in mind, it has by now made for itself too definite if unexpected a place in this country to make any rewriting advisable. Its republication in a new form, however, more than ten years after its first appearance, is perhaps an appropriate occasion for explaining its original aim and for a few comments on the altogether unforeseen and in many ways curious success it has had in this country.
The book was written in England during the war years and was designed almost exclusively for English readers. Indeed, it was addressed mainly to a very special class of readers in England. It was in no spirit of mockery that I dedicated it "To the Socialists of All Parties." It had its origin in many discussions which, during the preceding ten years, I had with friends and colleagues whose sympathies had been inclined toward the left, and it was in continuation of those arguments that I wrote The Road to Serfdom.
When Hitler came into power in Germany, I had already been teaching at the University of London for several years, but I kept in close touch with affairs on the Continent and was able to do so until the outbreak of war.[1] What I had thus seen of the origins and evolutions of the various totalitarian movements made me feel that English public opinion, particularly among my friends who held "advanced" views on social matters, completely misconceived the nature of those movement. Even before the war I was led by this to state in a brief essay what became the central argument of this book.[2] But after war broke out I felt that this widespread misunderstanding of the political system of our enemies, and soon also of our new ally, Russian, constituted a serious danger which had to be met by a more systematic effort. Also, it was already fairly obvious that England herself was likely to experiment after the war with the same kind of policies which I was convinced had contributed so much to destroy liberty elsewhere.
Thus this book gradually took shape as a warning to the socialist intelligentsia of England; with the inevitable delays of wartime production, it finally appeared there early in the spring of 1944. This date will, incidentally, also explain why I felt that in order to get a hearing I had somewhat to restrain myself in my comments on the regime of our wartime ally [3] and to choose my illustrations mainly from developments in Germany.
It seems that the book appeared at a propitious moment, and I can feel only gratification at the success it had in England, which, though very different in kind, was quantitatively no smaller than it was to be in the United States. On the whole, the book was taken in the spirit in which it was written, and its argument was seriously examined by those to whom it was mainly addressed. Excepting only certain of the leading politicians of the Labour partyㅡwho, as if to provide an illustration of my remarks on the nationalist tendencies of socialism, attacked the book on the ground that it was written by a foreigner [4]ㅡthe thoughtful and receptive manner in which it was generally examined by persons who must have found its conclusions running counter to their strongest convictions was deeply impressive.[5] The same applies also to the other European countries where the book eventually appeared; and its particularly cordial reception by the post-Nazi generation of Germany, when copies of a translation published in Switzerland at last reached that country, was one of the unforeseen pleasures I derived from its publication.
Contrary to my experience in England, in America the kind of people to whom this book was mainly addressed seem to have rejected it out of hand as a malicious and disingenuous attack on their finest ideals; they appear never to have paused to examine its argument. The language used and the emotion shown in some of the more adverse criticism the book received were indeed rather extraordinary.[9] But scarcely less surprising to me was the enthusiastic welcome accorded to the book by many whom I never expected to read a volume of this typeㅡand from many more of whom I still doubt whether in fact they ever read it. And I must add that occasionally the manner in which it was used vividly brought home to me the truth of Lord Acton's observation that "at all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous."[10]
It seems hardly likely that this extraordinary difference in the reception of the book on the two sides of the Atlantic is due entirely to a difference in national temperament. I have since become increasingly convinced that the explanation must lie in a difference of intellectual situation at the time when it arrived. In England, and in Europe generally, the problems with which I dealt had long ceased to be abstract questions. The ideals which I examined had long before come down to earth, and even their most enthusiastic adherents had already seen concretely some of the difficulties and unlooked-for results which their application produced. I was thus writing about phenomena of which almost all my European readers had some more or less close experience, and I was merely arguing systematically and consistently what many had already intuitively felt. There was already disillusionment about these ideals under way, which their critical examination merely made more vocal or explicit.
In the United States, on the other hand, these ideals were still fresh and more virulent. It was only ten or fifteen years earlierㅡnot forty or fifty, as in Englandㅡthat a large part of the intelligentsia had caught the infection. And, in spite of the experimentation of the New Deal, their enthusiasm for the new kind of rationally constructed society was still largely unsoiled by practical experience. What to most Europeans had in some measure become vieux jeux was to the American radicals still the glittering hope of a better world which they had embraced and nourished during the recent years of the Great Depression.
Opinions moves fast in the United States, and even now it is difficult to remember how comparatively short a time it was before ^The Road to Serfdom^ appeared that the most extreme kind of economic planning had been seriously advocated and the model of Russia held up for imitation by men who were soon to play an important role in public affairs. It would be easy enough to give chapter and verse for this, but it would be invidious now to single out individuals. Be it enough to mention that in 1934 the newly established National Planning Board[11] devoted to a good deal of attention to the example of planning provided y these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan. Ten years later we had of course learned to refer to these same countries as 'totalitarian," had fought a long war with three of them, and were soon to start a "cold war" with the fourth. Yet the contention of this book that the political development in those countries had something to do with their economic policies was then still indignantly rejected by the advocates of planning in this country. It suddenly became the fashion to deny that the inspiration of planning had come from Russian and to contend, as one of my eminent critics put it, that it was "a plain fact that Italy, Russia, Japan, and Germany all reached totalitarianism by very different roads." [12]
For this sobered mood the lessons of events and more popular discussions of the problem[13] are certainly more responsible than this book. Nor was my general thesis as such original when it was published. Although similar but earlier warnings may have been largely forgotten, the danger inherent in the polices which I criticized had been pointed out again and again. Whatever merits this book possesses consist not in the reiteration of this thesis but in the patient and detailed examination of the reasons why economic planning will produce such unlooked-for results and of the process by which they come about.
Yet though hot socialism is probably a thing of the past, some of its conceptions have penetrated far too deeply into the whole structure of current thought to justify complacency. If few people in the Western world now want to remake society from the bottom according to some ideal blueprint, 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. And, even more than at the time when I wrote this book, the advocacy of policies which in the long run cannot be reconciled with the preservation of a free society is no longer a party matter. That hodgepodge of ill-assembled and often inconsistent ideals which under the name of the Welfare State has largely replaced socialism as the goal of the reformers needs very careful sorting out if its results are not to be very similar to those of full-fledged socialism. This is not to say that some of its aims are not both practicable and laudable. But there are many ways in which we can work toward the same goal, and in the present state of opinion there is some danger that our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society. The increasing tendency to rely on administrative coercion and discrimination where a modification of the general rules of law might, perhaps more slowly, achieve the same object, and to resort to direct state controls or to the creation of monopolistic institutions where judicious use of financial inducements might evoke spontaneous efforts, is still a powerful legacy of the socialist period which is likely to influence policy for a long time to come.
Just because in the years ahead of us political ideology is not likely to aim at a clearly defined goal but toward piecemeal change, a full understanding of the process through which certain kind of measures can destroy the bases of an economy based on the market and gradually smother the creative powers of a free civilization seems now of greatest importance. Only if we understand why and how certain kinds of economic controls tend to paralyze the driving forces of a free society, and which kinds of measures are particularly dangerous in this respect, can we hope that social experimentation will not lead us into situations none of us want.
It is as a contribution to this task that this book is intended. I hope that at least in the quieter atmosphere of the present it will be received as what it was meant to be, not as an exhortation to resistance against any improvement or experimentation, but as a warning that we should insist that any modification in our arrangements should pass certain tests (described in the central chapter on the Rule of Law) before we commit ourselves to courses from which withdrawal may be difficult.
The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affect its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, 19th-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftist movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.
It is true, of course, that in the struggle against the believers in the all-powerful state the true liberal must sometimes make common cause with the conservative, and in some circumstances, as in contemporary Britain, he has hardly any other way of actively working for his ideals. But true liberalism is still distinct from conservatism, and there is danger in the two being confused.[14]
There is one particular topic, however, on which the reader will with justice expect me to comment on this occasion, yet which I could even less treat adequatley without writing a new book. Little more than a year after ^The Road to Serfdom^ first appeared, Great Britain had a socialist government which remained in power for six years. And the question of how far this experience has confirmed or refuted my apprehensions is one which I must try to answer at least briefly. If anything, this experience has strengthened my concern and, I believe I may add, has taught the reality of the difficulties I pointed out to many for whom an abstract argument would never have carried conviction. Indeed, it was not long after the Labour government came into power that some of the issues which my critics in America dismissed as bogeys became in Great Britain main topics of political discussion. Soon even official documents were gravely discussing the danger of totalitarianism raised by the policy of economic planning. There is no better illustration of the manner in which the inherent logic of their policies drove an unwilling socialist government into the kind of coercion it disliked than the following passage in the ^Economic Survey for 1947^ (which the Prime Minister presented to Parliament in February of that year) and its sequel:
There is an essential difference between totalitarian and democratic planning. The former subordinates all individual desires and preferences to the demand of the State. For this purpose, it uses various methods of compulsion upon individual which deprive him of his freedom of choice. Such methods may be necessary even in a democratic country during the extreme emergency of a great war. Thus the British people gave their war time Government the power to direct labour. But in normal times the people of a democratic country will not give up their freedom of choice to their Government. A democratic Government must therefore conduct its economic planning in a manner which preserves the maximum possible freedom of choice to the individual citizen.[18]
The interesting point about this profession of laudable intentions is that six months later the same government found itself in peacetime forced to put the conscription of labor back on the statute book.[19] It hardly diminishes the significance of this when it is pointed out that the power was in fact never used because, if it is known that the authorities have power to coerce, few will wait for actual coercion. But it is rather difficult to see how the government could have persisted in its illusions when in the same document it claims that it was now for "the Government to say that is the best use for the resources in the national interest" and to "lay down the economic task for the nation: it must say which things are the most important and what the objective of policy ought to be."[20]
Of course, six years of socialist government in England have not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state. But those who argue that this has disproved the thesis of ^The Road to Serfdom^ have really missed one of its main points: that the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people. This is necessarily a slow affair; a process which extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations. The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means, among other thing, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit. The consequences can of course be averted if that spirit reasserts itself in time and the people not only throw out the party which has been leading them further and further in the dangerous direction but also recognize the nature of danger and resolutely change their course. There is not yet much ground to believe that the latter has happened in England.
( ... ... )
[2] 발췌 (excerpts):
[1] 발췌 (excerpts):
Foreword to the 1956 American Paperback Edition
Although this book might in some respects have been different if I had written it in the first instance with American reader primarily in mind, it has by now made for itself too definite if unexpected a place in this country to make any rewriting advisable. Its republication in a new form, however, more than ten years after its first appearance, is perhaps an appropriate occasion for explaining its original aim and for a few comments on the altogether unforeseen and in many ways curious success it has had in this country.
The book was written in England during the war years and was designed almost exclusively for English readers. Indeed, it was addressed mainly to a very special class of readers in England. It was in no spirit of mockery that I dedicated it "To the Socialists of All Parties." It had its origin in many discussions which, during the preceding ten years, I had with friends and colleagues whose sympathies had been inclined toward the left, and it was in continuation of those arguments that I wrote The Road to Serfdom.
When Hitler came into power in Germany, I had already been teaching at the University of London for several years, but I kept in close touch with affairs on the Continent and was able to do so until the outbreak of war.[1] What I had thus seen of the origins and evolutions of the various totalitarian movements made me feel that English public opinion, particularly among my friends who held "advanced" views on social matters, completely misconceived the nature of those movement. Even before the war I was led by this to state in a brief essay what became the central argument of this book.[2] But after war broke out I felt that this widespread misunderstanding of the political system of our enemies, and soon also of our new ally, Russian, constituted a serious danger which had to be met by a more systematic effort. Also, it was already fairly obvious that England herself was likely to experiment after the war with the same kind of policies which I was convinced had contributed so much to destroy liberty elsewhere.
Thus this book gradually took shape as a warning to the socialist intelligentsia of England; with the inevitable delays of wartime production, it finally appeared there early in the spring of 1944. This date will, incidentally, also explain why I felt that in order to get a hearing I had somewhat to restrain myself in my comments on the regime of our wartime ally [3] and to choose my illustrations mainly from developments in Germany.
It seems that the book appeared at a propitious moment, and I can feel only gratification at the success it had in England, which, though very different in kind, was quantitatively no smaller than it was to be in the United States. On the whole, the book was taken in the spirit in which it was written, and its argument was seriously examined by those to whom it was mainly addressed. Excepting only certain of the leading politicians of the Labour partyㅡwho, as if to provide an illustration of my remarks on the nationalist tendencies of socialism, attacked the book on the ground that it was written by a foreigner [4]ㅡthe thoughtful and receptive manner in which it was generally examined by persons who must have found its conclusions running counter to their strongest convictions was deeply impressive.[5] The same applies also to the other European countries where the book eventually appeared; and its particularly cordial reception by the post-Nazi generation of Germany, when copies of a translation published in Switzerland at last reached that country, was one of the unforeseen pleasures I derived from its publication.
[5] The most representative example of British criticism of the book from a left-wing point of view is probably Mrs. Barbara Wootton's courteous and frank study, Freedom under Planning, op. cit. It is often quoted in the United States as an effective refutation of my argument, though I cannot help feeling that more than one reader must have gained the impression that, as one American reviewer expressed it, "it seems substantially to confirm Hayek's thesis." See Chester I. Barnard, "Review of Freedom under Planning," Southern Economic Journal, vol. 12, January 1946, p. 290.
Rather different was the reception the book had in the United States when it was published here a few months after it appearance in England. I had given little thought to its possible appeal to American readers when writing it. It was then twenty years since I had last been in America as a research student, and during that time I had somewhat lost touch with the development of American ideas.[6] I could not be sure how far my argument had direct relevance to the American scene, and I was not in the least surprised when the book was in fact rejected by the first three publishing houses approached.[7] It was certainly most unexpected when, after the book was brought out by its present publishers, it soon began to sell at a rate almost unprecedented for a book of this kind, not intended for popular consumption.[8] And I was even more surprised by the violence of the reaction from both political wings, by the lavish praise the book received from some quarters no less than by the passionate hatred it appeared to arouse in others.
Contrary to my experience in England, in America the kind of people to whom this book was mainly addressed seem to have rejected it out of hand as a malicious and disingenuous attack on their finest ideals; they appear never to have paused to examine its argument. The language used and the emotion shown in some of the more adverse criticism the book received were indeed rather extraordinary.[9] But scarcely less surprising to me was the enthusiastic welcome accorded to the book by many whom I never expected to read a volume of this typeㅡand from many more of whom I still doubt whether in fact they ever read it. And I must add that occasionally the manner in which it was used vividly brought home to me the truth of Lord Acton's observation that "at all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous."[10]
It seems hardly likely that this extraordinary difference in the reception of the book on the two sides of the Atlantic is due entirely to a difference in national temperament. I have since become increasingly convinced that the explanation must lie in a difference of intellectual situation at the time when it arrived. In England, and in Europe generally, the problems with which I dealt had long ceased to be abstract questions. The ideals which I examined had long before come down to earth, and even their most enthusiastic adherents had already seen concretely some of the difficulties and unlooked-for results which their application produced. I was thus writing about phenomena of which almost all my European readers had some more or less close experience, and I was merely arguing systematically and consistently what many had already intuitively felt. There was already disillusionment about these ideals under way, which their critical examination merely made more vocal or explicit.
In the United States, on the other hand, these ideals were still fresh and more virulent. It was only ten or fifteen years earlierㅡnot forty or fifty, as in Englandㅡthat a large part of the intelligentsia had caught the infection. And, in spite of the experimentation of the New Deal, their enthusiasm for the new kind of rationally constructed society was still largely unsoiled by practical experience. What to most Europeans had in some measure become vieux jeux was to the American radicals still the glittering hope of a better world which they had embraced and nourished during the recent years of the Great Depression.
Opinions moves fast in the United States, and even now it is difficult to remember how comparatively short a time it was before ^The Road to Serfdom^ appeared that the most extreme kind of economic planning had been seriously advocated and the model of Russia held up for imitation by men who were soon to play an important role in public affairs. It would be easy enough to give chapter and verse for this, but it would be invidious now to single out individuals. Be it enough to mention that in 1934 the newly established National Planning Board[11] devoted to a good deal of attention to the example of planning provided y these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan. Ten years later we had of course learned to refer to these same countries as 'totalitarian," had fought a long war with three of them, and were soon to start a "cold war" with the fourth. Yet the contention of this book that the political development in those countries had something to do with their economic policies was then still indignantly rejected by the advocates of planning in this country. It suddenly became the fashion to deny that the inspiration of planning had come from Russian and to contend, as one of my eminent critics put it, that it was "a plain fact that Italy, Russia, Japan, and Germany all reached totalitarianism by very different roads." [12]
[12] [The "eminent critic" was the economist Alvin Hansen(1887-1975), a leading American expositor of Keynesian economics, who as a policy advisor also played a role in the development of the social security system and the creation of the Full Employment Act of 1946. The passage Hayek cites is taken from Hansen's review of The Road to Serfdom, "The New Crusade against Planning," op. cit. p. 12.ㅡED.]The whole intellectual climate in the United States at the time The Road to Serfdom appeared was thus one in which it was bound either profoundly to shock or greatly to delight the members of sharply divided groups. In consequence, in spite of its apparent success, the book has not had here the kind of effect I should have wished or which it has had elsewhere. It is true that its main conclusions are today widely accepted. If twelve years ago it seemed to many almost sacrilege to suggest that fascism and communism are merely variants of the same totalitarianism which central control of all economic activity tends to produce, this has become almost a commonplace. It is now even widely recognized that democratic socialism is a very precarious and unstable affair, riven with internal contradictions and everywhere producing results most distasteful to many of its advocates.
For this sobered mood the lessons of events and more popular discussions of the problem[13] are certainly more responsible than this book. Nor was my general thesis as such original when it was published. Although similar but earlier warnings may have been largely forgotten, the danger inherent in the polices which I criticized had been pointed out again and again. Whatever merits this book possesses consist not in the reiteration of this thesis but in the patient and detailed examination of the reasons why economic planning will produce such unlooked-for results and of the process by which they come about.
[13] The most effective of these was undoubtedly George Orwell's 1984: A Novel (New York: New American Library, 1949). The author had earlier kindly reviewed this book. [George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), was an English novelist and essayist; he also wrote Animal Farm. Orwell's brief review appeared in the Observer, April 9, 1944, together with a review of a book by Konni Zilliacus, The Mirror of the Past, Lest It Reflect the Future (London: V. Gollancz, 1944).─Ed.]It is for this reason that I rather hope that the time may now be more favorable in America for a serious consideration of the true argument of the book than it was when it first appeared. I believe that what is important in it still has to render its service, although I recognize that the hot socialism against which it was mainly directedㅡthat organized movement toward a deliberate organization of economic life by the state as the chief owner of the means of productionㅡis nearly deat in the Western world. The century of socialism in this sense probably came to an end around 1948. Many of its illusions have been discarded even by its leaders, and elsewhere as well as in the United States the very name has lost much of its attraction. Attempts will no doubt be made to rescue the name for movements which are less dogmatic, less doctrinaire, and less systematic. But an argument applicable solely against those clear-cut conceptions of social reform which characterized the socialist movements of the past might today well appear as a tilting against windmills.
Yet though hot socialism is probably a thing of the past, some of its conceptions have penetrated far too deeply into the whole structure of current thought to justify complacency. If few people in the Western world now want to remake society from the bottom according to some ideal blueprint, 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. And, even more than at the time when I wrote this book, the advocacy of policies which in the long run cannot be reconciled with the preservation of a free society is no longer a party matter. That hodgepodge of ill-assembled and often inconsistent ideals which under the name of the Welfare State has largely replaced socialism as the goal of the reformers needs very careful sorting out if its results are not to be very similar to those of full-fledged socialism. This is not to say that some of its aims are not both practicable and laudable. But there are many ways in which we can work toward the same goal, and in the present state of opinion there is some danger that our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society. The increasing tendency to rely on administrative coercion and discrimination where a modification of the general rules of law might, perhaps more slowly, achieve the same object, and to resort to direct state controls or to the creation of monopolistic institutions where judicious use of financial inducements might evoke spontaneous efforts, is still a powerful legacy of the socialist period which is likely to influence policy for a long time to come.
Just because in the years ahead of us political ideology is not likely to aim at a clearly defined goal but toward piecemeal change, a full understanding of the process through which certain kind of measures can destroy the bases of an economy based on the market and gradually smother the creative powers of a free civilization seems now of greatest importance. Only if we understand why and how certain kinds of economic controls tend to paralyze the driving forces of a free society, and which kinds of measures are particularly dangerous in this respect, can we hope that social experimentation will not lead us into situations none of us want.
It is as a contribution to this task that this book is intended. I hope that at least in the quieter atmosphere of the present it will be received as what it was meant to be, not as an exhortation to resistance against any improvement or experimentation, but as a warning that we should insist that any modification in our arrangements should pass certain tests (described in the central chapter on the Rule of Law) before we commit ourselves to courses from which withdrawal may be difficult.
The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affect its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, 19th-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftist movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.
It is true, of course, that in the struggle against the believers in the all-powerful state the true liberal must sometimes make common cause with the conservative, and in some circumstances, as in contemporary Britain, he has hardly any other way of actively working for his ideals. But true liberalism is still distinct from conservatism, and there is danger in the two being confused.[14]
- Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place.
- A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.
[14] [For more on the distinction between conservatism and liberalism, see F.A. Hayek, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," postscript to ^The Constitution of Liberty^, pp. 397-411.─Ed.]Perhaps a further word of apology is required for my allowing this book to reappear in entirely unchanged form after the lapse of almost twelve years. (...)
There is one particular topic, however, on which the reader will with justice expect me to comment on this occasion, yet which I could even less treat adequatley without writing a new book. Little more than a year after ^The Road to Serfdom^ first appeared, Great Britain had a socialist government which remained in power for six years. And the question of how far this experience has confirmed or refuted my apprehensions is one which I must try to answer at least briefly. If anything, this experience has strengthened my concern and, I believe I may add, has taught the reality of the difficulties I pointed out to many for whom an abstract argument would never have carried conviction. Indeed, it was not long after the Labour government came into power that some of the issues which my critics in America dismissed as bogeys became in Great Britain main topics of political discussion. Soon even official documents were gravely discussing the danger of totalitarianism raised by the policy of economic planning. There is no better illustration of the manner in which the inherent logic of their policies drove an unwilling socialist government into the kind of coercion it disliked than the following passage in the ^Economic Survey for 1947^ (which the Prime Minister presented to Parliament in February of that year) and its sequel:
There is an essential difference between totalitarian and democratic planning. The former subordinates all individual desires and preferences to the demand of the State. For this purpose, it uses various methods of compulsion upon individual which deprive him of his freedom of choice. Such methods may be necessary even in a democratic country during the extreme emergency of a great war. Thus the British people gave their war time Government the power to direct labour. But in normal times the people of a democratic country will not give up their freedom of choice to their Government. A democratic Government must therefore conduct its economic planning in a manner which preserves the maximum possible freedom of choice to the individual citizen.[18]
The interesting point about this profession of laudable intentions is that six months later the same government found itself in peacetime forced to put the conscription of labor back on the statute book.[19] It hardly diminishes the significance of this when it is pointed out that the power was in fact never used because, if it is known that the authorities have power to coerce, few will wait for actual coercion. But it is rather difficult to see how the government could have persisted in its illusions when in the same document it claims that it was now for "the Government to say that is the best use for the resources in the national interest" and to "lay down the economic task for the nation: it must say which things are the most important and what the objective of policy ought to be."[20]
Of course, six years of socialist government in England have not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state. But those who argue that this has disproved the thesis of ^The Road to Serfdom^ have really missed one of its main points: that the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people. This is necessarily a slow affair; a process which extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations. The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means, among other thing, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit. The consequences can of course be averted if that spirit reasserts itself in time and the people not only throw out the party which has been leading them further and further in the dangerous direction but also recognize the nature of danger and resolutely change their course. There is not yet much ground to believe that the latter has happened in England.
( ... ... )
* * * * *
[2] 발췌 (excerpts):
Preface to the 1976 Edition
This book, written in my spare time from 1940 to 1943, while my mind was still mainly occupied with problems of pure economic theory, has unexpectedly become for me the starting point of more than thirty years' work in a new field. This first attempt in the new direction was caused by my annoyance with the complete misinterpretation in English "progressive" circles of the character of the Nazi movement, an annoyance which led me from a memorandum to the then director of the London School of Economics, Sir William Beveridge, through an article in the ^Contemporary Review^ for 1938, which at the request of Professor Harry G. Gideonse of the University of Chicago I enlarged for publication in his Public Policy Pamphlets,[1] and which, finally and reluctantly, when I found that all my more competent British colleagues were preoccupied with more urgent problems of the conduct of the war, I expanded into this tract for the times. In spite of the wholly unexpected success of the bookㅡin the case of the initially not-contemplated American edition even greater than in that of the British oneㅡI felt for a long time not altogether happy about it. Though I had frankly declared at the outset of the book that it was a political one, I was made to feel by most of my fellow social scientists that I had used my abilities on the wrong side, and I was myself uncomfortable about the possibility that in going beyond technical economics I might have exceeded my competence. I will not speak here about the fury which the book caused in certain circles, or of the curious difference between its reception in Great Britain and that in the United Statesㅡabout that I did say something twenty years ago in the Preface to the first American paperback edition. Just to indicate the character of a widespread reaction, I will mention merely that one well-known philosopher, who shall be nameless, wrote to another to reproach him for having lauded this scandalous book, which "of course [he] had not read"! [2]
But though I tried hard to get back to economics proper, I could not free myself of the feeling that the problems on which I had so undesignedly embarked were more challenging and important that those of economic theory, and that much that I had said in my first sketch needed clarification and elaboration. When I wrote the book, I had by no means sufficiently freed myself from all the prejudices and superstitions dominating general opinion, and even less had I learned to avoid all the prevalent confusions of terms and concepts of which I have since become very conscious. And the discussion of the consequences of socialist policies which the book attempts is of course not complete without an adequate account of what an appropriately run market order requires and can achieve. It was to the latter problem that the further work I have since done in the field was mainly devoted. The first result of these efforts of explaining the nature of an order of freedom was a substantial book called The Constitution of Liberty (1960) in which I essentially attempted to restate and make more coherent the doctrines of classical 19th-century liberalism. The awareness that such a restatement left certain important questions unanswered led me then to a further effort to provide my own answers in a work of three volumes entitled Law, Legislation, and Liberty, of which the first volume appeared in 1973.[3]
In the last twenty years, I have, I believe, learned much about the problems discussed in this book, though I don't think I ever reread the book during this time. Having done so now for the purpose of this Preface, I feel no longer apologetic, but for the first time am rather proud of itㅡand not least of the insight which made me dedicate it "To the Socialists of All Parties." Indeed, though I have in the interval learned much that I did not know when I wrote it, I was now often surprised by how much that I did already see at the beginning of my efforts that later work has confirmed; and though my later efforts will, I hope, be more rewarding to the expert, I am now prepared unhesitatingly to recommend this early book to the general reader who wants a simple and nontechnical introduction to what I believe is still one of the most ominous questions which we have to solve.
The reader will probably ask whether this means that I am still prepared to defend all the main conclusions of this book, and the answer to this is on the whole affirmative. The most important qualification I must add is that during the interval of time terminology has changed and for this reason what I say in the book may be misunderstood. At the time I wrote, socialism meant unambiguously the nationalization of the means of production and the central economic planning which this made possible and necessary. In this sense Sweden, for instance is today very much less socialistically organized than Great Britain or Austria, though Sweden is commonly regarded as much more socialistic. This is due to the fact that socialism has come to mean chiefly the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state. In the latter kinds of socialism the effects I discuss in this book are brought abut more slowly, indirectly, and imperfectly. I believe that the ultimate outcome tends to be very the same, although the process by which it is brought about is not quite the same as that described in this book.
It has frequently been alleged that I have contended that any movement in the direction of socialism is bound to lead to totalitarianism. Even though this danger exists, this is not what the book says. What it contains is a warning that unless we mend the principles of our policy, some very unpleasant consequences will follow which most of those who advocate these policies do not want.
Where I now feel I was wrong in this book is chiefly in that I rather understressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russiaㅡa fault which is perhaps pardonable when it is remembered that when I wrote, Russia was our wartime allyㅡand that I had not wholly freed myself from all the current interventionist superstitions, and in consequence still made various concessions which I now think unwarranted. And I certainly was not yet fully aware how bad things already were in some respects. I still regarded it, for example, as a rhetorical question when I asked, If Hitler had obtained his unlimited powers in a strictly constitutional manner, "who would suggest that the Rule of Law still prevailed in Germany?" only to discover later that professors Hans Kelsen and Harold J. Laski, and probably many other socialist lawyers and political scientist following these influential authors, had maintained precisely this. [4] (... ...)
It has frequently been alleged that I have contended that any movement in the direction of socialism is bound to lead to totalitarianism. Even though this danger exists, this is not what the book says. What it contains is a warning that unless we mend the principles of our policy, some very unpleasant consequences will follow which most of those who advocate these policies do not want.
Where I now feel I was wrong in this book is chiefly in that I rather understressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russiaㅡa fault which is perhaps pardonable when it is remembered that when I wrote, Russia was our wartime allyㅡand that I had not wholly freed myself from all the current interventionist superstitions, and in consequence still made various concessions which I now think unwarranted. And I certainly was not yet fully aware how bad things already were in some respects. I still regarded it, for example, as a rhetorical question when I asked, If Hitler had obtained his unlimited powers in a strictly constitutional manner, "who would suggest that the Rule of Law still prevailed in Germany?" only to discover later that professors Hans Kelsen and Harold J. Laski, and probably many other socialist lawyers and political scientist following these influential authors, had maintained precisely this. [4] (... ...)
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