1. The Role of Intellectuals and Anti-intellectual Intellectuals

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. —Frédéric Bastiat

2. The Ethics and Economics of Private Property

I. The Problem of Social Order

Alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe can do whatever he pleases. For him, the question concerning rules of orderly human conduct—social cooperation—simply does not arise. Naturally, this question can only arise once a second person, Friday, arrives on the island. Yet even then, the question remains largely irrelevant so long as no scarcity exists. Suppose the island is the Garden of Eden; all external goods are available in superabundance. They are “free goods,” just as the air that we breathe is normally a “free” good.

Preface

While the need for and value of inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research is often emphasized as a welcome antidote to hyper-specialization, such commitment is typically little more than lip service. In general, in today’s academia inter- and trans-disciplinary work is frowned on and discouraged. It hampers your professional career or even dooms it.

Foreword by Jeff Deist

Congratulations! You hold in your hands one of the best collections of essays from one of the most vital and challenging thinkers on the planet.This book is a compendium of sorts, a cross section of Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s best work across several decades arranged in one accessible volume. It originally was published by Laissez Faire Books in 2012, but languished without the audience it deserved.

The Great Fiction, Second Expanded Edition

How I Discovered Murray Rothbard

It was 1995, and I was a young scholar, an assistant professor of history of political thought at Roma Tre University. My professor encouraged me to study the American feminist movement of the nineteenth century. As young scholars usually do, I wrote a research project and submitted it for a fellowship at the Italian Center for Research (CNR). Thanks to my professor I was invited as a visiting scholar to the Department of History at Princeton University by Professor Nell Irving Painter, who taught women’s and blacks’ history.

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