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Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 23:17:30 -0500
Reply-To: Hayek Related Research
Hayek on the Web <<
C-SPAN 'Booknotes' Interview with Milton Friedman on Friedrich Hayek and his _The Road to Serfdom_. On the Web at: http://www.c-span.org/mmedia/booknote/lambbook/transcripts/50060.htm Excerpt: "Booknotes Transcript Author: Milton Friedman Title: Introduction to F. A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" Air date: November 20, 1994 BRIAN LAMB: Dr. Milton Friedman, why did you choose or why did they ask you to write the introduction to the F. A. Hayek "Road to Freedom" 50th anniversary ... MILTON FRIEDMAN: ""Road to Serfdom"." LAMB: Yes, that's your title on your book. Why did you do it? FRIEDMAN: The reason they asked me was very clear, because Hayek and I had been associated for a very long time, in particular in an organization called the Montbelleron Society that he founded. The charter meeting was in 1947 in Switzerland. Hans Morgenthau, who was a professor at the University of Chicago when I was there, a political scientist, when I came back from the meeting, he asked me where I had been, and I told him that I had been to a meeting that had been called by Hayek to try to bring together the believers in a free, open society and enable them to have some interchange, one with another. He said, "Oh, a meeting of the veterans of the wars of the 19th century!" I thought that was a wonderful description of the Montpelleron Society. Well, Hayek and I worked together in the Montpelleron Society and we were fostering essentially the same set of ideas. His "Road to Serfdom" book, the one you have there, which was published 50 years ago, was really an amazing event when it came out. It's very hard to remember now what the attitude was in 1944-45. Throughout the Western world, the movement was toward centralization, planning, government control. That movement had started already before World War II. It started really with the Fabian Society back in the late 19th century -- George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs and so on. But the war itself and the fact that in war you do have to have an enormous amount of government control greatly strengthened the idea that after the war what you needed was to have a rational, planned, organized, centralized society and that you had to get rid of the wastes of competition. That was the atmosphere. Those of us who didn't agree believed in what we would call a liberal society, a free society -- 19th century liberalism. There were quite a number of us in the United States and in Britain, but in the rest of the world they were very isolated, indeed. Hayek's idea was to bring them together and enable them to get comfort and encouragement from one another without having to look around to see who was trying to stab them in the back, which was the situation in their home countries. LAMB: The New York Times put on the Op-Ed page your introduction to this edition. Do you know why they did that? What got their attention? FRIEDMAN: I can't answer that. You'd have to ask the people at the New York Times. On the whole, they have in the past not been very favorable to these ideas -- quite the contrary -- but they've been changing. About two or three years ago, they published -- they've turned down many an Op-Ed piece from me, which I subsequently published in the Wall Street Journal or somewhere else. But a couple of years ago, they did publish an Op-Ed piece from me about the situation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which my thesis was a very simple one. Everybody agrees, as a result of the experience in the West, that socialism has been a failure. Everybody agrees that capitalism has been a success, that wherever you have had an improvement in the conditions of the ordinary people over any lengthy time, it's been in a capitalist society, and yet everybody is extending socialism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were no summits in Washington about how we cut down government. The lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall was that we have too extensive a government and we ought to cut it down. Everybody agrees, but yet wherever you go, we have to extend socialism. The summit in Washington was about how you enable government to get more revenue in order for government to be more important, which is exactly the opposite. So socialism guides our behavior in strict contrast to what we believe to be the facts of the world. LAMB: Let me ask you a little bit more about Friedrich Hayek. Who was he? FRIEDMAN: Fritz Hayek was an economist. He was born in Vienna. He started his professional career in Vienna. In the late 1920s, some people in Britain at the London School of Economics were very greatly impressed with the book he had written and with the work he had done, and they invited him to come to the London School. At a relatively young age, he became a professor at the London School of Economics. He spent the 30s and most of the 40s there. Early in the 1950s, he left London and came to the University of Chicago where he was a professor for about 10 years, and then he went back to Germany. He essentially retired to the University of Freiberg in Germany. LAMB: How long has he been dead? FRIEDMAN: He's been dead about two years now, I think. He lived to be 90, and he has an enormous list of books and articles and so on he has published. The "Road to Serfdom," the one we're showing here, was a sort of manifesto and a call to arms to prevent the accumulation of a totalitarian state. One of the interesting things about that book is whom it's dedicated to. It's dedicated "to the socialists of all parties," because the thesis of the book is that socialism is paving the way toward totalitarianism and that Socialist Russia, at the time, is not different from Nazi Germany. Indeed, it was National Socialism -- that's where "nazi" comes from. This was a kind of manifesto and had a very unexpected effect. It was turned down by several publishers in the United States before the University of Chicago published it, and both in Britain and the United States, it created something of a sensation. It was a best-seller. The Reader's Digest published a condensation of it and distributed 600,000 copies. You had a big argument raising about people who were damning it as reactionary against all the good things of the world and people who were praising it and showing what the real status was. It's a book well worth reading by anybody because there's a very subtle analysis of why it is that well-meaning people who intend only to improve the lot of their fellows tend to favor courses of action which have exactly the opposite effect. I think from my point of view the most interesting chapter in that book is one labeled "Why the Worst Get on Top." It's, in a way, another example of the famous statement of Lord Acton that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."" Hayek on the Web is a regular feature of the Hayek-L list. --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: http://www.fc98.ai/