(Including some relevant works not explicitly referred to in the text.)

For reprints or translations, square brackets show the year of original publication, but page references are to the later publication quoted in full.

[1]   Archibald Alison, History of Europe, vol. I, London, 1833.

[2]   Joseph Aschheim and Y. S. Park, Artificial Currency Units: The Formation of Functional Currency Areas, Essays in International Finance, No. 114, Princeton, 1976.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Economics, Politics, and Ethics

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The Ludwig von Mises Institute’s Studies in Austrian Economics

Department of Economics University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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Three institutions assisted me while I wrote this treatise. As a Heisenberg Scholar I enjoyed the most generous financial support from the German Science Foundation (DFG) from 1982 through 1986. The present study is the most recent work I completed during this period. Additional support came from the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center for Advanced International Studies, where I spent the academic year 1984-1985 as a Visiting Professor. The lectures delivered there provided the core of what is presented here.

Chapter 1

The following study on the economics, politics and morals of socialism and capitalism is a systematic treatise on political theory. Interdisciplinary in scope, it will discuss the central problems of political economy and political philosophy: how to organize society so as to promote the production of wealth and eradicate poverty, and how to arrange it so as to make it a just social order.

Chapter 2

Before advancing to the more exciting field of analyzing diverse policy schemes from the standpoint of economic theory and political philosophy, it is essential to introduce and explain the basic concepts used throughout the following study. Indeed, the concepts explained in this chapter—the concepts of property, contract, aggression, capitalism and socialism—are so basic, so fundamental, that one cannot even avoid making use of them, if at times only implicitly.

Chapter 3

We have defined socialism as an institutionalized policy of redistribution of property titles. More precisely, it is a transfer of property titles from people who have actually put scarce means to some use or who have acquired them contractually from persons who have done so previously onto persons who have neither done anything with the things in question nor acquired them contractually.

Chapter 4

In the last chapter I analyzed the orthodox Marxist version of socialism—socialism Russian-style, as it was called—and explained its effects on the process of production and the social moral structure.