Otherwise, he estimated, it might sell nine hundred. Brandt hoped to get the well-known New York Herald Tribune journalist and author Walter Lippmann to write the foreword, noting in an internal memo that if he did, it might sell between two and three thousand copies. The book was written for a British audience, so the director of the Press, Joseph Brandt, did not expect it to be a big seller in the States. Though Hayek had no problem getting Routledge to publish the book in England, three American publishing houses rejected the manuscript before the University of Chicago Press finally accepted it. The memo grew into a magazine article, and parts of it were supposed to be incorporated into a much larger book, but during World War II he decided to bring it out separately. It began as a memo to the director of the London School of Economics, Sir William Beveridge, written by Hayek in the early 1930s and disputing the then-popular claim that fascism represented the dying gasp of a failed capitalist system. Hayek's most well-known book, but its origins were decidedly inauspicious. Of The Road to Serfdom Excerpted from Bruce Caldwell’s introduction to The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents-The Definitive Edition by F. A. Hayek It cannot be said too often-at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough-that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.&rdquo -George Orwell “In the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. … Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.&rdquo -John Maynard Keynes … It is an arresting call to all well-intentioned planners and socialists, to all those who are sincere democrats and liberals at heart to stop, look and listen.&rdquo -Henry Hazlitt, New York Times Book Review … It restates for our time the issue between liberty and authority with the power and rigor of reasoning with which John Stuart Mill stated the issue for his own generation in his great essay On Liberty. “One of the most important books of our generation.

The road to serfdom 1944