The Road from Serfdom

Janusz Korwin-Mikke's followers—whom he describes as an assortment of "conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, and Ayn-Randists"—are eagerly awaiting his new Polish journal Capitalism, scheduled for publication this spring. Korwin-Mikke, who was arrested and detained several times during the '60s for promoting freedom and free markets too loudly at the University of Warsaw, was a fixture in the Polish underground literary scene for years. Now that communism has gone the way of movable type, hundreds of publishers like Korwin-Mikke in the former communist countries are working hard to keep up with public demand for the writings of Western free-market economists.

Compared to Korwin-Mikke, Moscow economist Boris Pinsker is a relative newcomer to publishing. His business, Catalaxia Publishers, came out with its first book in December: The 50,000 copies of The Economic Way of Thinking, by Paul Heyne, sold out within weeks, and a second printing is under way. Backed by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, Pinsker plans to publish The Fatal Conceit, by F. A. Hayek; The Calculus of Consent, by James Buchanan; The Firm, The Market, and the Law, by Ronald Coase; Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises; and, eventually, the entire corpus of Hayek's writings.

Policy journals and scholarly publishing houses aren't alone in spreading the word about capitalism. Novy Mir, the most respected Russian literary-political magazine, serialized Hayek's The Road to Serfdom last fall. With a circulation near 3 million, Novy Mir may have the greatest success in teaching people about limited government, property rights, and unrestricted markets.