In the last third of The Road to Serfdom, written during World War II, Hayek tackles a large number of points showing the "progress" from socialist ideals to the totalitarian states that emerge and how they end up that way. There is a lengthy discussion combining socialist and totalitarian authors and showing the generation of this thought in Germany and England, though I'll be largely skipping over those parts here other than to note: the idea rehashed over and over again in the interwar period was not that English military might defeated Germany, but English ideas of individualism had defeated Prussian ideas of organization, and these must be resurgent. He also has a magnificent discussion of what morality is that will get its own post later. My favorite quotes above the fold, much of the rest of the arguments below. Chapters 10-16. The rest of the book is here and here.
What concerns us here is not [collectivism's] moral basis but its moral results. ... There is ... no reason why any system should necessarily enhance those attitudes which serve the purpose for which it was designed. The ruling moral views will depend partly on the qualities that will lead individuals to success.... Socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove...
That socialism so long as it remains theoretical is internationalist, while as soon as it is put into practice, whether in Russia or in Germany, it becomes violently nationalist, is one of the reasons why "liberal socialism" as most people in the Western world imagine it is purely theoretical, while the practice of socialism is everywhere totalitarian.
Frank H. Knight: "The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation."
The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason ... while only the individualist approach ... makes us recognize the superindividual forces which guide the growth of reason. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility ... and of tolorance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of the social process.
Spengler: The structure of the English nation is based on the distinction between rich and poor, that on the Prussian on that between command and obedience. The meaning of class distinction is accordingly fundamentally different in the two countries.
Probably it is true that the very magnitude of the outrages committed by the totalitarian governments, instead of increasing the fear that such a system might one day arise in more enlightened countries, has rather strengthened the assurance that it cannot happen here. ... But let us not forget that fifteen years ago the possibility of such a thing's happening in Germany would have appeared just as fantastic....
[As an example of English writings in favor of socialism, he points to Professor Carr:] A realist, he explains, is one "who makes morality a function of politics" and who "cannot logically accept any standard of value save that of fact." ... After all this one is hardly surprised to find a characteristic section headed "The Moral Functions of War" in which [he] condescendingly pities "the well-meaning people (especially in English-speaking countries) who, steeped in the nineteenth-century tradition, persist in regarding war as senseless and devoid of purpose," and rejoices in the "sense of meaning and purpose" which war, "the most powerful instrument of social solidarity" creates.
The role which the intellectuals played in the totalitarian transformation of society was prophetically foreseen in another country by Julien Benda ... [who] speaks of the "superstition of science held to be competent in all domains, including that of morality...." ... Freedom, [Dr. Waddington] explains "is a very troublesome concept for the scientist to discuss, partly because he is not convinced that, in the last analysis, there is such a thing." Nevertheless, we are told that "science recognizes" this and that kind of freedom, but "the freedom to be odd and unlike one's neighbors is not ... a scientific value."
[We] should not, by shortsighted attempts to cure poverty by a redistribution instead of by an increase in our income, so depress large classes as to turn them into determined enemies of the existing political order. It should never be forgotten that the one decisive factor in the rise of totalitarianism on the Continent, which is yet absent in England and America, is the existence of a large recently dispossessed middle class. ... Our only chance of building a decent world is that we can continue to improve the general level of wealth.
Let a uniform minimum [income] be secured to everybody by all means....
If it comes to be regarded as the duty of the international authority to bring about distributive justice ... class strife would become a struggle between the working classes of the different countries. ... But if the raising of their standard of living is to be effected according to a unitary plan, somebody must delibaretly balance the merits of all these claims and decide between them. ... Whatever the decision imposed, there will be many, probably a majority, to whom the particular order chosen will appear supreme injustice.... While they may agree on the rules of the game, they will never agree on the order of preference in which the rank of their own needs and the rate at which they are allowed to advance is fixed by majority vote.
We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may also prevent its use for desirable purposes.
The measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself. If we can reduce the risk of friction likely to lead to war, this is probably all we can reasonably hope to achieve.
Why the Worst Get on Top
Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism. ...
The chance of imposing a totalitarian regime on a whole people depends on the leader's first collecting round him a group which is prepared voluntarily to submit to that totalitarian discipline which they are to impose by force on the rest. ...
In a planned society the question can no longer be what do a majority of the people agree but what the largest single group is whose members agree sufficiently to make unified direction of all affairs possible. ... It is probably true that, in general, the higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their views and tastes are differentiated... . If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity ... we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards ... . [The second group of supporters will be] the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently. ...
It is easier ... to agree on a negative program -- on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off -- than on any positive task. ... It is the old story of the alien race's being admitted only to the less respected trades and then being hated still more for practicing them.
If the English proletarian, for instance, is entitled to an equal share of the income now derived from his country's capital resources, and of the control of their use, because they are the result of exploitation, so on the same principle all the Indians would be entitled not only to the income from but also to the use of a proportional share of the British capital. ... What socialists proclaim as a duty toward the fellow-members of the existing states they are not prepared to grant to the foreigner. ... [George Bernard Shaw wrote] "the world is to the big and powerful states by necessity; and the little ones must come within their border or be crushed out of existence.]
There is ... as [Niebuhr] says elsewhere, "an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups." To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group.
[To individualists] power itself has always appeared the archevil, to the strict collectivist, it is a goal in itself. It is not only ... that the desire to organize social life ... springs largely from a desire for power. It is even more the outcome of the fact that, in order to achieve their end, collectivists must create power -- power over men wielded by other men -- of a magnitude never before known, and that their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power. ... What [they] overlook is that, by concentrating power ... it is not merely transferred but infinitely heightened. ... There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess, and if nobody can consciously use the power, it is just an abuse of words to assert that it rests with all the capitalists put together. ... The competitive system is the only system designed to minimize by decentralization the power exercised by man over man. ... But centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.
The principle that the end justifices the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule....
Individualist virtues are at the same time eminently social virtues -- virtues which smooth social contacts and which make control from above less necessary and at the same time more difficult. ...
German philosophers again and again represent the striving for personal happiness as itself immoral and only the fulfilment of an imposed duty as praiseworthy... . Since it is the supreme leader who alone determins the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own. They must, above all, be unreservedly committed to the person of the leader; but next to this the most important thing is that they should be completely unprincipled and literally capable of everything. They must have no ideals of their own which they want to realize; no ideas about right or wrong which might interfere with the intentions of the leader. ... [Thus] it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essneital that they people should come to regard them as their own ends.
The End Of Truth
Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed on them, they must become their beliefs... and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information. ...
The most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. ... Wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people. ... The "collective freedom" he offers us is not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases ... "the right of the majority against the individual."...
"While the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt, or even fear that the plan will not be successful, is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effects on the will and on the efforts of the rest of the staff."...
[Totalitarianism] condemns any human activity done for its own sake and without ulterior purpose. ... The knowledge and beliefs of the people are an instrument to be used for a single purpose. ...
The word "truth" itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the ... organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it. ...
The Socialist Roots of Naziism
The "German idea of the state" ... is that the state is neither founded nor formed by individuals, nor an aggregate of individuals, nor is its purpose to serve any interest of individuals. [Individuals have] no rights but only duties.
Spengler: There could be, strictly speaking, no private persons. Everybody ... was in some way a link in [the system].
The "Prussian idea" requires that everybody should become a state official. ... "The decisive question not only for Germany, but for the world, which must be solved by Germany for the world is: Is in the future trade to govern the state, or the state to govern trade?"
Fight against liberalism in all its forms, liberalism that had defeated Germany, was the common idea which united socialists and conservatives in one common front.
The Totalitarians in Our Midst
Keynes describing in 1915 the "nightmare" which he found expounded in a typical German work of that period... : Individualism must come to an end absolutely. A system of regulations must be set up, the object of which is not the greater happiness of the individual ... but the strengthening of the organized unity of the state for the object of attaining the maximum degree of efficiency [DW - efficiency OF WHAT??] the influence of which on individual advantage is only indirect. ...
Although few people, if any, in England would probably be ready to swallow totalitarianism whole, there are few single features which have not yet been advised by somebody or other. Indeed, there is scarcely a leaf out of Hitler's book which somebody or other in England or America has not recommended....
The impetus of the movement toward totalitarianism comes mainly from the two great vested interests: organized capital and organized labor. Probably the greatest menace of all is the fact that the policies of these two most powerful groups point in the same direction. They do this through their common, and often concerted, support of the monopolistic organization of industry. ... But they are as shortsighted as were their German colleagues .... The decisions which the managers of such an organized industry would constantly have to make are not decisions which any society will long leave to private individuals. A state which allows such enormous aggregation of power to grwo up cannot afford to let this power rest entirely in private control. ...
Very frequently even measures aimed against the monopolists in fact serve only to strengthen the power of monopoly. Every raid on the gains of monopoly ... tends to create new vested interests which will help to bolster up monopoly. ...
[Even if there are many "natural" monopolies, they should not be controlled by the state because] the consumer is unquestionably in a much stronger position so long as they remain separate monopolies. ... Where the power which ought to check and control monopoly becomes interested in sheltering and defending its appointees, where for government to remedy an abuse is to admit responsibility for it, and where criticism of the actions of monopoly means criticism of the government, there is little hope of monopoly becoming the servant of the community.
That the advances of the past should be threatened by the traditionalist forces of the Right is a phenomenon of all ages which need not alarm us. But if the place of the opposition, in public discussion as well as in Parliament, should become lastingly the monopoly of a second reactionary party, there would, indeed, be no hope left.
Material Conditions and Ideal Ends
Economophobia would be a more correct description of this attitude than the doubly misleading "End of Economic Man," which suggests a change from a state of affairs which has never existed in a direction in which we are not moving. Man has comes to hate, and to revolt against, the impersonal forces to which in the past he submitted ....
Refusal to submit to anything we cannot understand must lead to the destruction of our civilization. ... Infinitely more intelligence on the part of everybody would be needed than anybody now possesses, if we were even merely to maintain our present complex civilization without anyone's having to do things of which he does not comprehend the necessity. The refusal to yield to forces which we neither understand nor can recognize as the conscious decisions of an intelligent being is the product of an incomplete and therefore erroneous rationalism. ... The only alternative ... is submission to an equally uncontrollable and therefore arbitrary power of other men.
Every generation ... puts some values higher and some lower than its predecessors. Which ... are the aims which take a lower place now...? It is certainly not material comfort.... Is there a popular writer or speaker who dares to suggest to the masses wthat they might have to make sacrifices of their material prospects for the enhancement of an ideal end [DW - we finally have that now in environmentalism, but only sometimes]? Is it not, in fact, entirely the way around? Are not the things which we are more and more frequently taught to regard as "nineteenth-century illusions" all moral values -- liberty and independence, truth and intellectual honesty, peace and democracy...? [to be replaced with] the protected standards of this or that group, their "right" to exclude others from providing their fellowmen what they need. Discrimination....
The first prerequisite for success in propaganda directed to other people is the proud acknowledgement of the characteristic values and distinguishing traits for which the country attempting it is known to the other peoples. [DW - This has some wonderful applications as a missionary, by the by.] ... "We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held."
The Prospects of International Order
Lord Acton: Of all checks on democracy, federation has been the most efficacious and the most congenial. ... It is the only method of curbing not only the majority but the power of the whole people.
There is little hope of international order or lasting peace so long as every country is free to employ whatever measures it thinks desirable in its own immediate interest, however damaging they may be to others. ... It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living, that membership of a national group should entitle one to a share in a cake altogether different from that in which members of other groups share. ...
There need be little difficulty in planning the economic life of a family, comparatively little in a small community. But, as the scale increases, the amount of agreement on the order of ends decreases and the necessity to rely on force and compulsion grows. ... If most people are not willing to see the difficulty, this is mainly because, consciously or unconsciously, they assume that it will be they who will settle these questions for the others, and because they are convinced of their own capacity to do this justly and equitably. ... But how small is the likelihood that it will be unselfish, and how great are the temptations! ... The alarming thing ... is not that [these suggestions] are made but that they are made in all innocence....
[It is a] fallacy that economic planning is merely a technical task, which can be solved in a strictly objective manner by experts. ...
There must be a power which can restrain the different nations from action harmful to their neighbors, a set of rules which defines what a state may do, and an authority capable of enforcing these rules. ...
Local self-government [provides] a school of political training for the people at large as much as for their future leaders. It is only where responsibility can be learned and practiced in affairs with which most people are familiar, where it is the awareness of one's neighbor rather than some theoretical knowledge of the needs of other people which guides action.... We shall all be the gainers if we can create a world fit for small states to live in. ... A community of nations of free men must be our goal ... [where we] accept the same restrictions on our freedom of action which in the common interest we think it necessary to impose on others. ...
The weakness of the League of Nations: in the (unsuccessful) attempt to make it world-wide it had to be made weak and that a smaller and at the same time more powerful League might have been a better instrument to preserve the peace. ...
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