The Road to Serfdom

London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd., April, 1944.. Second impression. 8vo. viii, 184 pp. Publisher's black cloth, gilt lettered to the spine, early gift inscription to the front free endpaper. Neatly rebacked preserving all but the head of the spine, very good. Friedrich August Hayek's most famous work setting out many tenets of his theory of Classical Liberalism. Written in Britain during the early years of the Second World War, Hayek argued that the fascist and socialist dictatorships of the 1920s and 30s had much in common, not least their insistence on the strict governmental control of state planning, especially of the economy. In his opinion such strict central control, regardless of stripe, could only lead to totalitarianism, i.e. de Tocqueville's "road to servitude", and that true liberty could only be gained by individualism and greater levels of self determination. Published in the same format as the first printing issued the previous month, neither edition is common due to the wartime economy and the publisher's underestimation of the book's impact. This led to Routledge reissuing it in Britain several times later in the year and many times thereafter. The US edition was published by the University of Chicago, where Hayek was a professor between 1950 and 1962.