At this moment, let me simply take stock. Here we are at the end of the 20th century, closer than ever to the end-state of a one-world State, at least closer than ever before in history. The United States is the sole superpower and the world’s top cop. At the same time, democracy has become almost universal, and the world’s leading power, the United States, is the world’s leading champion of democracy.

How can the State and the statist disease be stopped? Now I will come to my strategic considerations. First off, three fundamental insights or guiding principles must be recognized. First: that the protection of private property and of law, justice, and law enforcement, is essential to any human society. But there is no reason whatsoever why this task must be taken on by one single agency, by a monopolist.

The problem up to 1914 was comparatively small and the possible solution was comparatively easy then; and today as we will see, matters are more difficult and the solution is far more complicated. By mid-19th century, in Europe as well as in the United States, not only was the degree of political centralization far less pronounced than it is now; the Southern War of Independence had not yet taken place, and neither Germany nor Italy existed as unified States.

Today, after less than one century of mass democracy, there exists no such natural elites and social hierarchies to which one could immediately turn for protection. Natural elites and hierarchical social orders and organizations, that is people and institutions commanding an authority and respect independent of the State, are even more intolerable and unacceptable to a democrat and more incompatible with the democratic spirit of egalitarianism than they were a threat to any king or to any prince.

Before explaining this answer as another step in the direction of this goal, a second sociological fact has to be recognized: the change of the role of intellectuals, of education, and of ideology. As soon as the protection agency becomes a territorial monopolist—that is, a State—it is turned from a genuine protector into a protection racket. And in light of resistance on the part of the victims of this protection racket, a State is in need of legitimacy, of intellectual justification for what it does.

At last to the detailed explanation of the meaning of this bottom-up revolutionary strategy. For this, let me turn to my earlier remarks about the defensive use of democracy, that is, the use of democratic means for non-democratic, libertarian pro-private property ends. Two preliminary insights I have already reached here.

Just as the two basic and mutually exclusive interrelations between men are peaceful cooperation or coercive exploitation, production or predation, so the history of mankind, particularly its economic history, may be considered as a contest between these two principles. On the one hand, there is creative productivity, peaceful exchange and cooperation; on the other, coercive dictation and predation over those social relations.

As Bertrand de Jouvenel has sagely pointed out, through the centuries men have formed concepts designed to check and limit the exercise of State rule; and, one after another, the State, using its intellectual allies, has been able to transform these concepts into intellectual rubber stamps of legitimacy and virtue to attach to its decrees and actions.