Liberalism and The Road to Serfdom

I think it is useful to post about the books we have read, if anyone thinks there is a better way or if mine need to be shorter please let me know. I will say one thing about each of these two books

1. The Road to Serfdom- In this book Hayek points out the Socialist roots of Nazism, as many people at the time he wrote it thought that Nazism was the last gasp of a dying capitalist system. Economic planning was in vogue (it was 1943) and many were calling for the continuation of planning past the war. Hayek notes the necessity of a free market society for the continuation of social liberty, such as free speech and press. He also noted the need for laws that are predictable and relatively unchanging for society to be just, as people need to be able to plan their actions. He was fighting against an intellectual orthodoxy that called for "scientific" governance, and basically pointed out that this was not going to work, I recommend this book highly.

2. Liberalism, by L.T. Hobhouse- Sociologists should not write books on political theory. Period.

3. OK, seriously, the intellectual orthodoxy obsessed with planning seems to have a large portion of its roots in Hobhouse and his contemporaries, although his emphasis is on the "general will" which showed up in Rousseau and many enlightenment writers. Basically his is a liberalism that justifies itself more on the basis of democracy than on rights and is very fond of economic and social engineering. In fact, his refutation of rights is quite disingenuous, as he does not really focus on the theorists who described rights and more on the vague assertions of the French Revolution. The social engineering part is actually very creepy, as he talks about influencing (conditioning) people to be socially proper. I would not really recommend this book, parts of it, such as his section on the history of English Liberalism is useful, but other parts are a train wreck.

I'll post on Marcus Aurelius' Meditations tomorrow.