The Road to Servitude: Tocqueville and Hayek on the Psychology of Freedom

This is an in-person only public event. Please RSVP here. 

F.A. Hayek first began his exploration of the idea of freedom in his 1944 polemic, The Road to Serfdom, a work whose political and philosophical underpinnings are to be found in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. Despite its reputation as a book whose primary purpose was to put the case against economic planning, The Road to Serfdom was conceived as an effort to draw attention to the loss of freedom Hayek feared was imminent in post-war Europe. That conception of freedom was not a purely economic one but rather an account that drew on Tocqueville’s understanding of the psychological dimension of its loss. For people to become unfree was for them to experience not merely the limiting of their opportunities to act but, more importantly, a psychological change: a transformation of consciousness. Hayek’s critique of planning, and more broadly of totalitarianism, rested on an analysis of this tendency in modern society. The purpose of this workshop is to draw out this insight both to illuminate the thinking of Hayek and Tocqueville and to open the way for a more substantial examination of their insights on the nature of freedom and unfreedom.

Location: Bush House Southeast Wing 1.05, King’s College London

About the speakers

Christine Henderson is associate Professor of Political Science at Singapore Management University. She is a political theorist and has written extensively on Tocqueville, French liberalism, on politics and literature and was the editor and translator of Tocqueville’s Memoirs on Pauperism and Other Writings (University of Notre Dame). Her most recent work has focused on Tocqueville and race, gender and on the literary structure of Democracy in America.

Chandran Kukathas is Lee Kong Chian Chair of Political Science at Singapore Management University and was until recently Dean of the School of Social Sciences. He is a political theorist who has written extensively on multiculturalism and the liberal tradition and on the understanding and assessment of Hayek’s political philosophy. He is the author of Hayek and Modern Liberalism (Oxford University Press), The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford University Press) and Immigration and Freedom (Princeton University Press).