F. A. Hayekʼs The Road to Serfdom:

Acceptance and Diffusion in the United States

Abstract

In this paper, we consider F. A. Hayekʼs The Road to Serfdom and the diffusion of the bookʼs ideas in the United States. The contributions of Fritz Machlup in the bookʼs development and acceptance are given special attention. 　 Although The Road to Serfdom is Hayekʼs best-selling book, many Hayekian scholars choose to focus on his other work. Here, we ana-lyze the ideas of The Road to Serfdom in detail, so that we can find new aspects of Hayekʼs early thought and determine why the book has be-come so influential. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom for the intelligentsia of England, but its impact was felt most strongly by the general populous of the United States. Hayek maintained the core ideas of the book, the rule of law and meaning of com-petition, in his later work, such as The Constitu-tion of Liberty and Law, Legislation, and Liber-ty. Hayek and Machlup were in contact with each other their entire lives. The Hoover Institu-tion, a think tank at Stanford University, houses large amounts of correspondence that illustrate the friendship between the two men. Some mate-rial shows Machlup putting great efforts toward publishing The Road to Serfdom in the United States. Eventually, Aaron Director and Frank Knight helped Hayek publish the book with The University of Chicago Press. The condensed, il-lustrated version of The Road to Serfdom played an important role in diffusing its ideas to a gen-eral readership in the United States. The publication of The Road to Serfdom was the beginning of a long relationship with the University of Chicago for Hayek, and the suc-cess of the book enabled him to immigrate to the United States. Indeed, we argue that The Road to Serfdom was the prototype for his later books, The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legisla-tion, and Liberty. However, we believe there is a disparity between how Hayek viewed his ideas and the way people interpreted his work. One of the primary reasons for this was the difference in the usage of the word “liberal” in England and the United States. JEL classification numbers: B 25, B 31.