You can’t find a list of the best Conservative books ever written without finding a copy of F A Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.”
Spanning the gamut of politics and philosophy, it is in many ways a book about economics and one that has inspired the thinking and works of men like Milton Friedman.
While Friedman took a more positive approach to the benefits of capitalism, Hayek’s work is a dark foreboding about the dangers of collectivist philosophies. Published in 1944, Hayek argued that giving government control over the means of production won’t lead to a peaceful and prosperous society, but to the terrors of Nazi Germany. A critique of National Socialism, it’s a critique of all socialist and Marxist ideals. By handling over control of the market to the government, it is necessary, “that the will of a small minority be imposed upon the people.” In that sense, socialism and democracy are mutually exclusive.
More than an impact on the individual as a worker, Hayek argues that centralized goals such as social welfare run contrary to individual freedoms, property rights and the Rule of Law.
Hayek is known as one of the founders of he Austrian School of economics and in 1974 shared the Nobel Prize in Economics with Gunnar Myrdal. He was also warded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom from president George H. W. Bush. His economic policy was also a guiding principle of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who once famously interrupted a Conservative Party meeting, slamming Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty” on the table and declaring “This is what we believe.”
Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle – 1929
Prices and Production (1931)
Economy and Knowledge (1936)
Monetary Nationalism and International Stability (1937)
Profits, Interest & Investment (1939)
The Pure Theory of Capital (1941)
The Road to Serfdom (1944)
The Use of Knowledge in Society
Individualism and Economic Order (1948)
The Transmission of the Ideals of Economic Freedom (1951)
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage (1951)
The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (1952)
The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (1952)
Capitalism and the Historians (1954)
The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law (1955)
The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition (2011)
Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967)
Freiburger Studien: Gesammelte Aufsatze (1969)
A Tiger by the Tail : The Keynesian Legacy of Inflation (1972, revised edition 1978).
Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy: Volume I. Rules and Order (1973), Volume II. The Mirage of Social Justice (1976), Volume III. The Political Order of a Free People (1979)
The Denationalisation of Money: An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent Currencies (1976)
New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (1978)
Unemployment and the Unions (1980)
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