The Road To Serfdom - Some Housekeeping

The copy of The Road to Serfdom that I ordered from Barnes and Noble came in last week, and on further review, I was unclear on some things.

The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek is a much larger project than just The Road to Serfdom, which is Volume 2 of a projected 19 volumes. At this point, nine of the 19 volumes have been published.

This particular edition of The Road to Serfdom has a Tralfamadorian quality to it, as it contains the prefaces Hayek wrote for the 1944 British edition, the 1956 American paperback edition, and the 1976 edition. The introduction written by Milton Friedman for the 50th anniversary edition is in the back of the book.

I will attempt to do some summarizing for this book, just as I am doing with the Bible and the Federalist Papers. Bruce Caldwell, editor for the Collected Works, mentioned in the Introduction that the 1956 American paperback edition became a cultural phenomenon because of the publication of a condensed version in the Reader's Digest. The Reader's Digest had a circulation of 8,750,000 at the time, and was read by many people who aspired to being literate or well-read. As I think of this, I recall the song "Marry the Man Today" from the musical "Guys and Dolls," written in 1950:

Marry the man today
Give him the girlish laughter
Give him your hand today
And save the fist for after.
Slowly introduce him to the better things
Respectable, conservative, and clean
Reader's Digest
Guy Lombardo
Rogers Peet
Golf!
Galoshes
Ovaltine!

I seem to be rambling a bit, but the point is that condensation and summarization helped Hayek's message to get to a much wider audience in a way that could be understood.