A significant edition of Hayek’s classic polemic against centralisation and collectivism, being the first abridgement of the text, funded and unofficially prepared for publication by the Conservative Party using funds allocated to the party as part of the 1945 United Kingdom general election.
The title page bears a quotation from Winston S. Churchill, replacing the usual quotations from David Hume and Alexis de Tocqueville that appear in all other editions of The Road to Serfdom, but the book contains no actual reference to the involvement of the Conservative Party in the publication.
The actual work of abridging the text was not undertaken by Hayek himself, as suggested by Hayek’s short supplement to the preface dated ‘July, 1945’ in which he made a vague reference to ‘… a friend even offered to prepare for me the abridgement’. This friend was the Conservative politician Wing Commander Sir Archibald James (1893-1980), who served as Member of Parliament for Wellingborough from 1931 to 1945. Additional work on the publication was undertaken by a young Geoffrey Rippon (1924-1997), later to be a Conservative M.P. and Minister, who collated the corrections to the final proofs from within the Conservative Party headquarters (Shearmur, p. 311).
See: Jeremy Shearmur, ‘Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, and the British Conservatives’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought.
