The road from serfdom: F.A. Hayek spent years in the wilderness for arguing that socialism was the road, not to prosperity and justice, but to tyranny

I came to know Hayek best during the 12 years that he taught at the University of Chicago. He was a brilliant conversationalist, and his powerful mind, moral courage, and lucid and always principled exposition helped to broaden and deepen my understanding of the meaning and requisites of a free society. He soon attracted a group of gifted students, whose dissertations he supervised and some of whom he encouraged to found the New Individualist Review, a journal that had a considerable influence during its brief career. It served as a training ground for some of the currently most articulate defenders of a free society.

Hayek's contributions continued in one important publication after another, all on a high intellectual plane, devoted to abstract and sometimes abstruse ideas, yet all inspiring active participants in the attempt to reshape society and persuade the "socialists of all parties" to whom Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom of the error of their ways. We are the poorer for his death, but his ideas will live on and influence the course of events long after the rest of us are gone.

Mr. Friedman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

AS WE look back on the excitement caused by the publication of Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, we wonder how it could have happened. It is a tribute to him, and to his small book, that we should be able to say this. The principal theses of the book are by now so very well known, even if they are not by any means universally accepted, that they appear almost self-evident. Hayek had always taken scrupulous care to give credit, if it were faintly plausible to do so, to others who articulated ideas before he did, and indeed sometimes, on reading the footnotes to The Constitution of Liberty, one almost has the feeling that the book is a collection of after-dinner toasts by Hayek to great philosophers, political thinkers, and economists, from Thales to Ludwig von Mises. But he could not shrug off the credit for having brought much of it together: the integrated perception of the relation between law and justice and liberty. And, in an age swooning with passion for a centralized direction of social happiness and economic plenitude, he gave that squirt of ice water, presaged by the quotation he selected as epigraph to his book, the wary observation of David Hume that "it is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."

Rather, Hayek explained, it is lost gradually; and it is lost by assigning vague, extra-lawful mandates to men of political authority who take on tasks they cannot be expected to perform without absorbing all the knowledge, values, preferences, and passions of all their fellow men; and this no political authority--indeed, no animate or inanimate body--can do. Accordingly, the political authority has no alternative but to usurp. The necessary result of that usurpation is the corresponding loss in freedom of the body in which the authority previously reposed. Over time, that kind of movement must lead us down the road to serfdom, into that amnestic void toward which, Orwell intuited, evil men were for evil purposes bent on taking us; which void Michael Oakeshott saw us headed toward under the impulse of our own indisposition to bear the heavy responsibilities of freedom.