Best of
Politics

1944

The Road to Serfdom


Friedrich A. Hayek - 1944
    Originally published in England in the spring of 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 inevitably 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 attention from the public, politicians, and scholars alike. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 were sold. In April of 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this condensation to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best-seller, the book has sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States, not including the British edition or the nearly twenty translations into such languages as German, French, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese, and not to mention the many underground editions produced in Eastern Europe before the fall of the iron curtain.After thirty-two printings in the United States, The Road to Serfdom has established itself alongside the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and George Orwell for its timeless meditation on the relation between individual liberty and government authority. This fiftieth anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Milton Friedman, commemorates the enduring influence of The Road to Serfdom on the ever-changing political and social climates of the twentieth century, from the rise of socialism after World War II to the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions" in the 1980s and the transitions in Eastern Europe from communism to capitalism in the 1990s.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 the principal proponent of libertarianism in the twentieth century.On the first American edition of The Road to Serfdom:"One of the most important books of our generation. . . . It restates for our time the issue between liberty and authority with the power and rigor of reasoning with which John Stuart Mill stated the issue for his own generation in his great essay On Liberty. . . . It is an arresting call to all well-intentioned planners and socialists, to all those who are sincere democrats and liberals at heart to stop, look and listen."—Henry Hazlitt, New York Times Book Review, September 1944"In the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often—at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of."—George Orwell, Collected Essays

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time


Karl Polanyi - 1944
    His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi's seminal analysis in an era of globalization and free trade.

Bureaucracy


Ludwig von Mises - 1944
    He does not condemn bureaucracy, which is the appropriate technique for the conduct of government agencies such as courts of law, police departments, and the Internal Revenue Service; however, in economic production and distribution, the bureaucratic method is shown to be an abomination that spells universal ruin and disaster.

Capitalism & Slavery


Eric Williams - 1944
    Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide.Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development.Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies.In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

Omnipotent Government


Ludwig von Mises - 1944
    We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

The Life and Selected Writings


Thomas Jefferson - 1944
    "Jefferson aspired beyond the ambition of a nationality, and embraced in his view the whole future of man." --Henry Adams

Behemoth: The Structure & Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944


Franz Leopold Neumann - 1944
    Neumann was one of the only early Frankfurt School thinkers to examine seriously the problem of political institutions. After the rise of the Nazis to power, his emphasis shifted to an analysis of economic power, and then after the war to political psychology. But his contributions in Behemoth were groundbreaking: that the Nazi organization of society involved the collapse of traditional ideas of the state, of ideology, of law, and even of any underlying rationality. The book must be studied, not simply read, Raul Hilberg wrote. The most experienced researchers will tell us that the scarcest commodity in academic life is an original idea. If someone has two or three, he is rich. Franz Neumann was a rich man. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

As We Go Marching: A Biting Indictment of the Coming of Domestic Fascism in America


John T. Flynn - 1944
    Flynn's classic work from 1944 on how wartime planning brought fascism to America. Flynn was a prominent journalist and rare case of an American public intellectual who resisted the onslaught of both the warfare and welfare states during the period in which FDR ruled America. This study links the domestic policy of the New Deal with the drive for war and wartime central planning. He draws attention to the bitter irony that America was becoming precisely what we were fighting. His analysis of fascism is incisive and devastating. 296 pages, 6" x 9", paperback

An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy Vol. 1


Gunnar Myrdal - 1944
    The title of the book, 'An American Dilemma', refers to the moral contradiction of a nation torn between allegiance to its highest ideals and awareness of the base realities of racial discrimination. The touchstone of this classic is the jarring discrepancy between the American creed of respect for the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity for all and the pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks. The appendices are a gold mine of information, theory, and methodology. Indeed, two of the appendices were issued as a separate work given their importance for systematic theory in social research. The new introduction by Sissela Bok offers a remarkably intimate yet rigorously objective appraisal of Myrdal-a social scientist who wanted to see himself as an analytic intellectual, yet had an unbending desire to bring about change. 'An American Dilemma' is testimonial to the man as well as the ideas he espoused. When it first appeared 'An American Dilemma' was called "the most penetrating and important book on contemporary American civilization" by Robert S. Lynd; "One of the best political commentaries on American life that has ever been written" in The American Political Science Review; and a book with "a novelty and a courage seldom found in American discussions either of our total society or of the part which the Negro plays in it" in 'The American Sociological Review'. It is a foundation work for all those concerned with the history and current status of race relations in the United States.

Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress


Raphaël Lemkin - 1944
    Introduction to the Second Edition by William A. Schabas. Introduction to the First Edition by Samantha Power. Originally published: Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944. xxiii (vii-xxiii new introductions), xxxviii, 674 pp. In this path-breaking study Polish emigre Raphael Lemkin [1900 - 1959] coined the term "genocide" and defined it as a subject of international law. While the term has come to mean the extermination of a people, Lemkin used it to describe all programs that sought to increase the "Aryan" birthrate while working to exterminate the social, cultural and economic independence of non-Germanic peoples. This study was an elaboration of ideas he first proposed in 1933 in his address to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law (1933), which argued that attacks on racial, religious and ethnic groups should be considered international crimes. Important for the prosecution of the Nazis, this pioneering work helped to establish the framework for all subsequent efforts to punish crimes against humanity."In 1933 a government arose in Germany whose policy was directed not towards the murder of individuals only but of a whole civilization. The decrees of this government together with those of Fascist Italy and those of the puppet regimes of the Axis Powers, in relation to the various countries which they occupied, have been collected with great care by Dr. Lemkin and are on record for all time. The work has been splendidly done. (...) This book is one which will be of enduring value to jurists, historians, students of politics, and practical men." --British Yearbook of International Law 22 (1945) 313-314.

The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background


Hans Kohn - 1944
    At its publication, Saturday Review called it "an enduring and definitive treatise.... [Kohn] has written a book which is less a history of nationalism than it is a history of Western civilization from the standpoint of the national idea." This edition includes an extensive new introduction by Craig Calhoun, which in itself is a substantial contribution to the history of ideas.The Idea of Nationalism comprehensively analyzes the rise of nationalism, the idea's content, and its worldwide implications from the days of Hebrew and Greek antiquity to the eve of the French Revolution. As Calhoun explains, Kohn was particularly qualified to undertake this study. He grew up in Prague, the vigorous heart of Czech nationalism, participated in the Zionist student movement, studied the question of nationality in multinational cultures, spent the World War One years in Asian Russia, and later traveled extensively in the Near East studying the nationalist movements of western and southern Asia. The work itself is the product of Kohn's later years at Harvard University. In The Idea of Nationalism, Kohn presents the single most influential articulation of the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. This has shaped nearly all ensuing research and public discussion and deeply informed parallel oppositions of early and late, Western and Eastern varieties of nationalism. Kohn also argues that the age of nationalism represents the first period of universal history. Civilizations and continents are brought into ever closer contact; popular participation in politics is enormously increased; and the secular state is ever more significant.The Idea of Nationalism is important both in itself and because it so deeply shaped all the work that followed it. After sixty years his interpretations and analyses remain acute and instructive.

Red Prelude: The Life of the Russian Terrorist Zhelyabov


David Footman - 1944
    

Why Not Trust The Tories?


Aneurin Bevan - 1944
    

Homicide Investigation: Practical Information for Coroners, Police Officers, and Other Investigators


LeMoyne Snyder - 1944
    

History of Socialism: A Comparative Survey Of Socialism, Communism, Trade Unionism, Cooperation, Utopianism, and Other Systems of Reform and Reconstruction


Harry W. Laidler - 1944
    One of the most comprehensive outlines ever published, this volume covers the main developments, the key issues, and the basic ideas for which socialists have struggled in society and over which they have struggled among themselves. Beginning with Platonic forms of Utopianism, it describes the Marxian or "scientific" school, coupled with a fascinating account of Karl Marx, its founder. Other descriptions include Fabianism, the German Revisionist school led by Eduard Bernstein, the newer Marxism of Karl Kautsky. A number of chapters are devoted to the Russian revolutionary movement and culminate with an account of the doctrines of communism as elaborated by Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Stalin, and Zinoviev. The social-economic movements in other countries, recent Socialist thought, consumer cooperation and miscellaneous Socialist philosophies are all viewed in broad, historical perspective, including contemporary developments.