Subtitle: Essays, Documents, Reviews (Collected Works of F. A. Hayek). Vol ed. Bruce Caldwell

Throughout the twentieth century socialism and war have been intimately connected. The unprecedented upheavals wrought by the two world wars and the Great Depression provided both opportunity and impetus for a variety of socialist experiments. This new volume in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek documents the evolution of Hayek’s thought on socialism and war during the dark decades of the 1930s and 1940s.

Opening with Hayek’s arguments against market socialism, the volume continues with his writings on the economics of war, many in response to the proposals made in John Maynard Keynes’s famous pamphlet, How to Pay for the War, The last section presents articles that anticipated The Road to Serfdom, Hayek’s classic meditation on the dangers of collectivism. An appendix contains a number of topical book reviews written by Hayek during this crucial period, and a masterful introduction by the volume editor, Bruce Caldwell, sets Hayek’s work in context.

Socialism and War will interest not just fans of The Road to Serfdom, but anyone concerned with the ongoing debates over the propriety of government intervention in the economy.

When he wrote The Road to Serfdom, Hayek’s] was a voice in the wilderness. Now the fight has] been taken up by people all over the world, by institutions and movements, and the ideas that seemed so strange to many in 1944 can be found from scholarly journals to television programs.–Thomas Sowell, Forbes

Intellectually Hayek] towers like a giant oak in a forest of saplings.–Chicago Tribune

Each new addition to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, the University of Chicago’s painstaking series of reissues and collections, is a gem.–Liberty on Volume IX of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek

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, taught at the University of London, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg. Bruce Caldwell is professor of economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

This 10th volume of his complete works documents economist Hayek’s (1899-1992) lonely battle against socialism during the 1930s and 1940s. The material includes his debates with the market socialists, chiefly in British academic journals of the 1930s; his responses to the onset of World War II, mostly as short articles in weeklies and in book reviews; and later academic papers examining the relationship between economic planning and freedom. An appendix presents many of the reviews of the literature on capitalism and the varieties of socialism he wrote during the period.