Broad histories of the recent past tend to start out focused, and then gradually degenerate into news-media like ADHD, leading us up to the “chaotic” present.  So with T. E. Vadney’s The World Since 1945, which, having been published in three editions since 1987, has an unusually long such news-like section.  And then this happened, and then this happened, and today it’s just all a big mess!

The early parts of the book, about the Cold War and the end of colonization, have their biases too.  Vadney prefers to explain the actions of states by what is in their strategic interest, (“it was in their interest to” is used so often as to become a cliché), and less by their beliefs.  I suspect he goes too far.  But it’s all interesting and perceptive, clearly the result of this material having been pre-digested by several generations of historians before being summed up by Vadney.

As we reach the present (80’s and later), the digested analysis gives way to poorly written news cavalcades that wouldn’t be out of place in a Wikipedia entry.  The bias becomes more clearly leftist – the election of Ronald Reagan is ascribed ominously to the rise of the “militant right”, and economic inequality of any sort is sternly admonished.  What’s most annoying are the lazy, empty formulations, like summing up the Koreas in the 1990’s by saying that they both had “problems”.

But then, nobody gets recent history right.  And I like the early part enough to forgive Vadney not achieving the impossible.

Hayek was, of course, wrong.  Despite the disingenuous introduction by Bruce Caldwell, which tries to absolve Hayek from having made any predictions, Hayek did argue in The Road to Serfdom that when you take small steps of socialism, you’re walking on the road to totalitarianism.  70 years later, perhaps no country, or at most very few, have completed that journey.  There are many roads to serfdom, but democratic socialism appears to be a difficult one.

But then, all predictions are worthless, except as statements about the present, and Hayek’s description of the deadening effect of socialist ideas on an otherwise free society in the present has aged much better.  This, now, is both history and contemporary: The inefficiency of nationalized industries, the moral hazards of the welfare state, the creeping power of benevolent central planners.  Socialist ideas create stumped humans, who think not in terms of choices and consequences, but of power and entitlement.

The tragedy that haunts Hayek in this book is the deteriorating effect socialist movements have had on the liberal foundations they often believe they improve on.  This is not much less relevant now than in the mid-40’s.

But his decision to project this trend into the future, by comparing it to Germany’s own road to serfdom, makes it unfortunate that The Road to Serfdom is most people’s introduction to Hayek.  After all, anyone but an apologist can see that he got this embarassingly wrong.  Serfdom is a good  pamphlet otherwise, but the Hayek everyone should be reading instead is The Constitution of Liberty.

“That in this sphere of individual conduct the effect of collectivism has been almost entirely destructive is both inevitable and undeniable. A movement whose main promise is the relief from responsibility cannot but be antimoral in its effect, however lofty the ideals to which it owes its birth. Can there be much doubt that the feeling of personal obligation to remedy inequities, where our individual power permits, has been weakened rather than strengthened, that both the willingness to bear responsibility and the consciousness that it is our own individual duty to know how to choose have been perceptibly impaired? There is all the difference between demanding that a desirable state of affairs should be brought about by the authorities, or even being willing to submit provided everyone else is made to do the same, and the readiness to do what one thinks right one’s self at the sacrifice of one’s own desires and perhaps in the face of hostile public opinion. There is much to suggest that we have in fact become more tolerant toward particular abuses and much more indifferent to inequities in individual cases, since we have fixed our eyes on an entirely different system in which the state will set everything right. It may even be, as has been suggested, that the passion for collective action is a way in which we now without compunction collectively indulge in that selfishness which as individuals we had learned a little to restrain.”

- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom