Economy, Society, and History

One of the more depressing claims made by some libertarians during the past fifty years is that the battle for liberty is to be won or lost by arguing about economics. As with all but the grosser falsehoods, there is a degree of truth in the claim. Production and trade are important activities in any community. In those communities where debate over these things is possible and thought important, there tends to exist a power of coercion willing and able to act on the outcomes of such debate. For this reason, anyone worried about the establishment of state socialism and its great and terrible consequences needs a set of arguments that stand by themselves and that demonstrate both the evils of state control and the benefits of voluntary exchange.

But the claim that this is all we need remains depressing. Any movement that accepts it opens itself to entry and control by men of undoubtedly high intelligence, but whose preferred mode of reasoning is a wooden economism. Since most people cannot or do not choose to understand the less obvious truths of economics, this mode of reasoning will win no arguments outside those areas regarded as economic. Within those areas, it may become dominant. It may remain dominant there even after some variety of statism has become dominant in every other subject. But, as we have seen since the end of the Cold War, a grim and searching despotism is possible that has no interest in controlling the price of bread or in who owns the railways. A libertarian movement defined by the quality of its economic reasoning, and by nothing else, then becomes a waste of space.

This large and permanent truth—that libertarianism is more than an argument about economics—is what makes the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe so important. If more than competent in economics, he is ultimately a philosopher with historical tastes. He stands in the same line as Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer. He is unusually qualified to appreciate and build on the work of his immediate masters, Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. We should particularly welcome this present book, which is a publication for the first time of lectures given almost a generation ago—lectures that were seen at the time as a profound contribution to the libertarian debate, lectures that the passage of time has shown to be not merely profound but also predictive. The approach taken by Hoppe is not that liberty is good because it lets us have cheaper electric toasters. His argument instead is that any defence of liberty is and must be identical to the defence of civilisation itself.

Though common till a few generations ago, talk nowadays of higher or lower states of development is out of fashion. Even so, human beings appear to be different from every other species on our planet because of our comparatively immense rational faculties and because of our physical mediocrity. No bodies as slow and weak and undefended as ours could have evolved without the compensations of intelligence—or, having evolved, could have survived. Equally important for our survival was the anatomy of our throats. Why this is as it is cannot be explained. But it allowed the development of language. This is what completed our separation from the other animals. Without language, we could have used our brains to keep ourselves and our children alive in small groups. With language, our physical need for cooperation set us on a path of capital accumulation that begins with teaching a child how to shape bones into fishhooks and may end with our self-transformation into what our ancestors would have regarded as demi-gods.

From language and cooperation, moreover, comes a stronger sense of property. This sense, as Hoppe shows (pp. 16–18), is not a consequence of our intelligence or any specific path of cultural development. It is natural to at least all the higher mammals. It is natural to very young children, even before they learn to speak or reason. The sense of property, though, is greatly enlarged and elaborated by the fact of our development. From this comes a tendency toward specialisation and a corresponding need to trade. Alongside this, the science of law has grown, as a means of ensuring property and enabling its peaceful transfer.

In any survey of our development, the obvious limitation is that we have no standard of comparison outside ourselves. Let us imagine that we are under observation by the sociologists and economists of some alien race. Is watching us a bored ticking of boxes? “Yes, they’ve finally discovered the plough. After a few millennia of wrong turns, they have alphabetic writing. They’re making use of the electromagnetic spectrum, and have a crude nuclear technology. Next stop, either self-annihilation or meaningful life extension….” Is that us? Or should these hypothetical observers be sending frantic messages home, reporting some galactic miracle and asking for greater funding? It would be nice to know where we stand—assuming, that is, we are not alone and that talk of comparative development has any meaning. There is no doubt, however, that we existed in something like our present shape as a race of illiterate hunter-gatherers for several hundred thousand years until the end of the last ice age, just ten thousand years ago. Since then, we have grown from a few million to seven billion, and the majority of this growth has happened since the birth of many people who are still alive. Since it could not have happened by itself, we can take this expansion of numbers as a measurement of our overall progress.

Yet, though impressive—whether we imagine some group of excited alien observers, or just look how we did until the end of the last ice age—there is a worm in the bud of our progress. The generality of our achievement in the past ten thousand years has come about from private interest and free exchange. This is not to say that force has been absent or even unnecessary. All civilisation needs defensive force. Individuals need to defend themselves and their dependants from thieves and other low parasites. Communities need to defend themselves from organised bands of those who get their living from consuming what they have not produced. Between these two extremes, there is a need for courts to rule on the nature and fulfilment of contracts, and for their decisions to be enforced against non-consenting losers in the judicial game. In short, every community must have a place for defensive force, and much of this defensive force will be collective. But if force has not been, and could not be, absent from our progress, how much of this force needed to be coercive?

The answer for Hoppe, and for every other principled libertarian, is none. Private interest and free exchange are all that is needed to take us from the mud to the stars. So far as it is needed, defensive force can be as easily provided from within a voluntary system, as good bread and clean water can be provided. There is no utility in allowing the emergence of “one agency, and only one agency, the state … [having] the right to tax and to ultimate decision-making (p. 179). Our greatest error as a species has been, time after time, to allow the emergence of these agencies of armed coercion. Until the twentieth century, states were limited in the harm they might do by the poverty of their host communities. They might rob and murder on a scale that still appals. At the same time, the number of direct parasites was hardly ever out of four figures, and the number of their exclusive clients always hard to keep near the top of five figures. Also, if they could rob and murder, their powers of more detailed inspection and control were limited in ways we often no longer understand.

Our misfortune in the past hundred years is that greater wealth has meant greater taxable capacity, and therefore an almost unlimited growth in the size of states and in the numbers of the parasites they support. There is probably no point in describing the malicious freakishness of the modern state in America or Britain. On the one hand, I live in England and earn some of my bread from an institution funded by the British state. It would be unwise to say all that I think. On the other hand, this is not only a malicious but a metastatic freakishness. Whatever sounds bizarre today will border on normality compared with whatever is in fashion a year from today.

Hoppe has no easy comfort to dispense here. Indeed, part of his analysis is as bleak as that of any English Tory after 1945. If an individual makes a mistake, he will tend eventually to be aware that he has made a mistake and either to correct it or to wish he had corrected it in time. At the worst, his example will stand as a warning to others. In the natural sciences, mistakes tend to be self-limiting—they will lead to falsified predictions, and these will be followed by a re-examination of the alleged facts. But, when the wrong turn is made into statism,

not everyone holding this error must pay for it equally. Rather, some people will have to pay for the error, while others, maybe the agents of the state, actually benefit from the same error. Because of this, in this case, it would be mistaken to assume that there exists a universal desire to learn and to correct one’s error. Quite to the contrary, in this case, it will have to be assumed that some people instead of learning and promoting the truth, actually have a constant motive to lie, that is, to maintain and promote falsehoods, even if they themselves recognize them as such. (p. 180)

Of course, the politicians themselves are among the main villains here. Perhaps more to blame, though, are the intellectuals. These have a compelling and permanent interest in spreading the falsehood of state necessity.

The market demand for intellectual services, in particular in the area of the humanities and the social sciences, is not exactly high and also not exactly stable and secure. Intellectuals would be at the mercy of the values and choices of the masses and the masses are generally uninterested in intellectual and philosophical concerns. The state, on the other hand, as Rothbard has noted, accommodates their typically overinflated egos and is willing to offer the intellectuals a warm, secure, and permanent berth in its apparatus, a secure income and the panoply of prestige. And indeed, the modern democratic state in particular has created a massive oversupply of intellectuals. (pp. 182–83)

On the other hand, there is hope. What this is I leave you to find out for yourself by reading Hoppe’s lectures. They say more than I can in this foreword. If I must give a teaser, though, all statism is malevolence and rests ultimately on the consent of the oppressed. Let the eyes of the oppressed be opened, and there will be no more statism. Eyes will not be opened by the wooden economising of my second paragraph. They will be opened by a study of history and anthropology to which these essays can be taken as an introduction.

Sean Gabb
Deal, England
June 2021