Socialism Will Inevitably Lead to Dictatorship and Will Inevitably Fall under the Control of the Worst Individuals

The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, is a masterly performance of the job it undertakes. That job is to show by general and historical reasoning, the latter primarily with reference to the course of events in Germany, two things: first, that any such policy as socialism, or planned economy, will inevitably lead to totalitarianism and dictatorship; and second that such a social order will inevitably fall under the control of “the worst” individuals. The argument is naturally political rather than economic, except in the indirect sense that the problems solved, the functions performed, by the open-market system of organization are economic and they cannot be solved, or performed by government under a free political order, nor the open-market system itself maintained under a democratic political regime. There is little or no economic theory in the book. The fifteen short chapters ably describe the old liberalism and contrast it with current tendencies which are virtually antithetical and discuss such problems as individualism, democracy, the rule of law, security and freedom, the place of truth in political and social life, the relation between material conditions and ideal ends, and the problem of international order.

—Frank Knight, appendix to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 2, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, definitive ed., by F. A. Hayek, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 249.