The Socialists’ Hypotheses and The Road to Serfdom
Published in under review - working paper, 2024
Abstract: This paper examines the writings of socialist scholars who played a pivotal role in shaping Hayek’s perspective in TRTS, including William Beveridge, Stuart Chase, Henry Dickinson, Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin, Oskar Lange, Harold Laski, Abba Lerner, Barbara Wootton, and the contributing authors in Findlay Mackenzie’s Planned Society (1937). Many socialist thinkers held two main hypotheses. First, industrial concentration was inevitable under capitalism. Second, they argued that government ownership or control of key economic sectors was necessary to protect democracy from industrial consolidation in the capitalist system and to reduce political opposition to complete state ownership or control over the means of production. Despite sharing Hayek’s concern for socialism’s potential erosion of democratic freedoms, these socialist hypotheses have received much less scholarly attention than Hayek’s TRTS. We conclude that Hayek formalized socialist scholars’ fears and developed a well-defined hypothesis that central planning could threaten democratic freedoms.
Recommended citation: Benzecry, Gabriel and Jensen, Nicholas and Smith, Daniel J., The Socialists’ Hypotheses and The Road to Serfdom (March 21, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4767976 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4767976 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4767976