Hey guys! For a while now I’ve been hosting a podcast, called “The Argument,” with Jerusalem Demsas, the editor in chief of The Argument magazine. We realized that rather than sending everyone a separate podcast email each week, it would make more sense to incorporate the Thursday podcast releases into the morning’s article.
The podcast itself has a few different episode formats, but once a month or so we do a “book club” episode where we read a classic book. This week’s was Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom.” In our conversation, Jerusalem and I really dug into Hayek’s ideas. But as someone who’s interested in history, I also wanted to write in greater depth on the specific historical argument of the book.
For an 80-year-old book written by an Austrian guy in a language he didn’t speak natively, Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom” is incredibly engaging and accessible. It’s also crackling with insights on nearly every page — I kept furiously highlighting passages that reminded me of contemporary controversies and phenomena so I’ll have quotes and points for future articles on everything from antitrust policy to Waymo to health care.
What’s remarkable is that even though the book is really good and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the future of liberalism in these fraught times, its ostensible core thesis also seems totally wrong.
Hayek wrote it in the middle of World War II, when lots of people in America and especially Britain were looking at the semi-planned wartime economy and seeing it as a model for peacetime. He thinks this is a bad idea (this part holds up) that if implemented will lead to a totalitarian regime (this part does not) and also that German retention of planning concepts from World War I during the interwar period is causally responsible for the rise of Adolf Hitler, which I think is so clearly wrong that I can’t help but quote from the introduction, where Hayek writes that “few are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and Naziism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies.”
I want to emphasize that the book is not at all a detailed survey of German politics in the 1920s and 1930s; it’s a book about economics and political theory.
And that’s why it’s a good book and why on the podcast we mostly talked about the insights we think hold up. But I think this impulse to gild the lily and attribute the rise of Hitler to deep intellectual trends is an example of a pretty common fallacy of assuming that an incredibly important world event must have incredibly important roots.
One point I tried to make last week about 9/11 is that while Osama bin Laden was swimming in some big currents of violent Islamist political thought that have deep roots and semi-broad sociological appeal, the specific theory whereby blowing up office buildings in New York City would advance that cause was quite weird. It’s easy to imagine a world where the same basic ideological currents are in the mix but nobody ever says that and all of world history is different.
By the same token, Hitler was a fairly marginal figure on the eve of the Great Depression. It was poor short-term economic management plus the questionable short-term political calculations of the non-SPD German parties that brought the Nazis to power. It was a very big deal for world history, but not an inevitable consequence of the whole structure of German intellectual life.
The real story of Hitler’s rise is mostly a history of contingency — bad choices by specific influential politicians first wrecked the German economy and then handed power to Hitler.
Paying subscribers can find the rest of the article beneath the paywall, along with the transcript for this week’s episode of “The Argument” podcast. The embedded video below is also ad free for paid subscribers. The public version of the episode is available on YouTube here.