In this lecture, Lawrence H. White — Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Senior Fellow at the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center — offers a comprehensive reading of one of the most consequential books of the 20th century.

Published in 1944, Hayek's The Road to Serfdom marked a turning point in his career: from technical monetary economist to public intellectual. White traces the historical context that made the book necessary — the intellectual prestige of central planning in the 1930s, FDR's New Deal and its corporatist inspiration, and the chilling admiration some American progressives harbored for Mussolini's "efficient" state apparatus.

White walks through the book's core arguments: why central planning is not merely economically inefficient but inherently incompatible with the rule of law and individual liberty; why partial interventionism tends to escalate rather than stabilize (Mises's logic of interventionism); and why, in a centrally planned system, it is the least scrupulous who tend to rise to positions of power.

The lecture also examines how the book was received — from Churchill's rhetorical overreach in the 1945 British elections to Paul Samuelson's influential (and deeply flawed) misreading — and closes with Keynes's famous letter from the ship to Bretton Woods: enthusiastic agreement in principle, followed by the conviction that good planning by the right people would make Hayek's warnings moot.