A Free Man’s Library

October 1, 1956

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Friedrich A. Hayek made an analysis, profound and prophetic, of the drift toward a statist or totalitarian ideology even in the Western world. “Although,” he wrote, “we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by de Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism. . . . We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans. Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.”

SPREAD OF SOCIALISM

Since that book appeared the totalitarian regimes in Germany and Italy, and even in the Argentine, have been overthrown. But the totalitarian regime in Russia has enormously increased its dominion and power. The newly “liberated” countries of China, India (and generally in the Near East, Far East, and Africa) are ruled either by socialists or outright Communists. In Europe and in America the socialist ideology has on net balance gained. It is true that the Labour Party is out of power in Britain and that a Republican regime now rules in Washington. But the Conservatives in Britain have not dared to repeal most of Labour’s socialist and welfare-state planning, while here the Eisenhower Administration has not only retained but expanded most of the New Deal measures.

Now this drift of mass opinion is not the result, as it is the fashion to think, of new knowledge or great new discoveries in the realm of economics or politics. It is a revival of immemorial fallacies, a turning back of the clock to the mercantilistic theories refuted by Adam Smith, to the inflation and price-fixing of the France of 1789, or toward the totalitarian socialism of the Incas. This drift of opinion has come, in brief, because most of the so-called leaders of thought in the world today have not the remotest idea of the richness and range of the literature of freedom.

In an effort to bring this literature together, and to guide readers through this great treasury of thought and knowledge, I recently published a bibliography called The Free Man’s Library (Van Nostrand). I ended up with a collection of more than 550 books, devoting to each from half a dozen lines to a page of description, synopsis, or comment. But because the prospect of reading or even choosing among 550 books may be discouraging or bewildering, I gave in an introduction, and present in a modified form here, a list of the “ten best” classics on freedom, another list of the “ten best” contemporary works, and a suggested “introductory reading course.”

THE ANTIDOTE

In chronological order the list of “classics” is: Milton’s Areopagitica; Locke’s Second Treatise on Government; Hume’s Essays Moral, Political, and Literary; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; selections from Edmund Burke; Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms; de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; Mill’s essay “On Liberty”; Herbert Spencer’s The Man vs. the State; and Lord Acton’s Essays on Freedom and Power.

The “ten best” contemporary works in alphabetical order, are: B.M Anderson’s Economics and the Public Welfare; Max Eastman’s Reflections on the Failure of Socialism; Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and, in addition, a book edited by him, Capitalism and the Historians; John Jewkes’s Ordeal by Planning; Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism: An Analysis and his Human Action; George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; Lionel Robbins’s The Great Depression; and Wilhelm Röpke’s The Social Crisis of Our Time.

A good “introductory reading course” would be: Hayek’s Road to Serfdom; Mill’s essay “On Liberty”; Max Eastman’s Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, and, to cap it Mises’s Socialism: An Analysis.