The Road to Serfdom - Fifty Years On

March 10th, 1994, saw the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which can lay claim to being the single most influential political book published in Britain during this century. Indeed, The Road to Serfdom exercised as profound an influence upon subsequent generations of intellectuals and politicians as did The Communist Manifesto, written almost a century before in 1848. Much as Marx and Engels succeeded in re-orientating European politics along class lines, so Hayek succeeded in establishing a new fault line in political discourse, between the freedom of the individual and the power of the state – the rhetoric that has informed all political debate in this country since the 1970s. Hayek's book was addressed to 'The Socialists of all Parties', and if Socialism as a living doctrine is now confined to the fringes of politics, this is largely due to the intellectual campaign waged against what Hayek would have preferred to call 'collectivism' from 1944 until his death in 1992.