The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents - The Definitive Edition

Hayek, F.A.

ISBN 10: 0226320553 / ISBN 13: 9780226320557

Published by University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007

About this Item

8vo, 283 pp., The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Volume 2. Edited by Bruce Caldwell.

Seller Inventory # 072736

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents - The Definitive Edition
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226320553
• ISBN 13: 9780226320557
• Binding: softcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Fine copy
• Seller catalogs:
  • Economics

About this title

Synopsis

An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in 1944—when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program—The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate, widespread attention. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 books were sold. In April 1945, Reader’s Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this edition to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best seller, the book has sold 400,000 copies in the United States alone and has been translated into more than twenty languages, along the way becoming one of the most important and influential books of the century.

With this new edition, The Road to Serfdom takes its place in the series The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek.  The volume includes a foreword by series editor and leading Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell explaining the book's origins and publishing history and assessing common misinterpretations of Hayek's thought.  Caldwell has also standardized and corrected 

About the Author

F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and a leading proponent of classical liberalism in the twentieth century. He taught at the University of London, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg.