26. Democracy and Faits Accomplis

26 Democracy and Faits Accomplis

Robert Higgs

No institution of modern life commands as much veneration as democracy. It comes closer than anything else to being the supreme object of adoration in a global religion. Anyone who denies its righteousness and desirability soon finds himself a pariah. One may get away with denouncing motherhood and apple pie, but not with speaking ill of democracy, which is now the principal icon of political and social life throughout the world. Many people are atheists, but few are anti-democrats.

Worship of this particular political arrangement has emerged relatively recently, however, and in earlier ages political philosophers were more apt to condemn democracy than to praise it. Aristotle, whose views received great weight for millennia, did not recommend democracy highly. Along with many other criticisms of this type of government, he wrote in his Politics:

1313b: 32-41: The final form of democracy has characteristics of tyranny: women dominate in the household so that they can denounce their husbands, slaves lack discipline, and flatterers—demagogues—are held in honor. The people wish to be a monarch.

1295b: 39-1296a5: It is best for citizens in a city-state to possess a moderate amount of wealth because where some have a lot and some have none the result is the ultimate democracy or unmixed oligarchy. Tyranny can result from both these extremes. It is much less likely to spring from moderate systems of government.

1276a: 12-14: Some democracies, like tyrannies, rest on force and are not directed toward the common advantage.

1312b: 35-38: Ultimate democracy, like unmixed and final oligarchy, is really a tyranny divided [among a multitude of persons].1

The founders of the United States of America had mixed views about democracy. Nearly all of them seem to have feared it more than they respected it. They recognized that concessions to fairly wide participation in politics might have to be made to placate the masses—who, after all, had served as cannon fodder in the recently concluded war of secession from the British Empire—but they designed a system in which voting would be hobbled and circumscribed, so that the common people would be kept from giving direct vent to their passions by seizing control of the government and using it to plunder the rich. The founders conspicuously feared “mob rule” and associated it with untrammeled democracy. All of the newly independent states required property-holding and other qualifications for voting, and, in practice, the franchise was limited in most places to a small minority of the population—a subset of the adult, white males. The Constitution of the United States does not contain the word democracy, although it stipulates certain protocols for the election of officials, and it relies instead on federalism and the separation of powers to preserve liberty.

Although democracy made giant ideological strides in the nineteenth century, a few writers had the courage to condemn it even well into the twentieth century. Among the most astute of them was Joseph A. Schumpeter. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he posits as a point of departure for analysis the classical conception of democracy: “the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will.”2 He then proceeds to demolish the pretension that this conception makes sense. “If we are to argue that the will of the citizens per se is a political factor entitled to respect,” Schumpeter argues, “it must first exist. That is to say, it must be something more than an indeterminate bundle of vague impulses loosely playing about given slogans and mistaken impressions.”3 Schumpeter calls attention to “the ordinary citizen’s ignorance and lack of judgment in matters of domestic and foreign policy” and adds, anticipating the rational ignorance concept of public choice theory, that “without the initiative that comes from immediate responsibility, ignorance will persist in the face of masses of information however complete and correct.”4

Moreover, “even if there were no political groups trying to influence him, the typical citizen would in political matters tend to yield to extrarational or irrational prejudice and impulse.” Matters are even worse once we recognize the “opportunities for groups with an ax to grind,” who “are able to fashion and, within very wide limits, even to create the will of the people,” leaving political analysts to ponder “not a genuine but a manufactured will” that is “the product and not the motive power of the political process.”5

Schumpeter conceded that, in the long run, the general public may come to hold a more perceptive view of the world and to reward or punish officeholders in its light when they cast their ballots, but this eventual adjustment itself has a fatal flaw, because history “consists of a succession of short-run situations that may alter the course of events for good:”6

If all the people can in the short run be “fooled” step by step into something they do not really want, and if this is not an exceptional case which we could afford to neglect, then no amount of retrospective common sense will alter the fact that in reality they neither raise nor decide issues but that the issues that shape their fate are normally raised and decided for them.7

Because “electorates normally do not control their political leaders in any way except by refusing to reelect them or the parliamentary majorities that support them,”8 the distinct possibility—nay, the great likelihood—exists that the voters will find themselves time after time concerned about a horse that has already fled the barn, never to be retrieved.

This bleak view of the political process under representative democracy becomes even bleaker once we recognize that office-seekers typically either speak in vague, emotion-laden generalities or simply lie about their intentions. After taking office, they may act in complete disregard of their campaign promises, trusting that when they run for reelection, they will be able to concoct a plausible excuse for their infidelity and betrayal of trust. Thus, the voters remain permanently immersed in a fog of disinformation, emotional manipulation, and bald-faced mendacity. No matter what a candidate promises, the voters have no means of holding him to those promises or of punishing his misbehavior until it may be too late to matter. In many cases, unfortunately, the officeholders’ decisions give rise to irreversible consequences—outcomes that cannot possibly be undone ex post.

Garet Garrett had a similar vision of the uselessness of democracy as a means of making government accountable to the “will of the people” (or to anything else except the rulers’ own desires). Writing at mid-century, shortly after Schumpeter’s death, in an essay titled “Ex America,” Garrett posed the following hypothetical scenario:

Suppose a true image of the present world had been presented to them in 1900, the future as in a crystal ball, together with the question, “Do you want it?” No one can imagine that they would have said yes—that they could have been tempted by the comforts, the gadgets, the automobiles and all the fabulous satisfactions of midcentury existence, to accept the coils of octopean government, the dim-out of the individual, the atomic bomb, a life of sickening fear, the nightmare of extinction. Their answer would have been no, terrifically.9

Having set the scene, he asked: “Then how do you account for the fact that everything that has happened to change their world from what it was to what it is has taken place with their consent?” To which he added: “More accurately, first it happened and then they consented.”10

Garrett proceeded to list and to discuss briefly a series of cataclysmic, course-altering political events in the United States, including getting into World War I, launching the New Deal, getting into World War II, and joining the United Nations, noting that in each instance the people did not vote for the government’s action, yet “to all of this the people have consented, not beforehand but afterward.”11

One might object at this point by asking, “What difference does it make whether the people consent beforehand or afterward, so long as they consent?” Indeed, Bruce Ackerman has written an entire book to argue precisely that the most profound constitutional changes in U.S. history occurred not when the people formally amended the Constitution, but when the government acted outside its constitutional authority in a crisis and later received electoral and judicial validation of its actions, and that these de facto constitutional revolutions deserve our approbation; indeed, they ought to serve as models for future constitutional revolutions.12

Ackerman’s view may be challenged by noting the frequency with which constitutional revolutionaries engineer the alleged ex post validation of their actions. People in power have the greatest ability to gerrymander the voting districts, bias the electoral rules, buy votes with taxpayers’ money, stuff the ballot boxes, and otherwise ensure that those in power—regardless of how they got there—remain in power. Similarly, people in power have the greatest ability to appoint new judges, alter judicial jurisdictions, and change the size or number of courts of appeal to ensure that those in power—regardless of how they got there—gain judicial vindication of their (heretofore unconstitutional) actions.13

Despite the force of the preceding objections, Ackerman might refuse to consider them a knockout blow to his thesis. Sooner or later, he might insist, the people will be able to vote against policies they find offensive, and judges will be able to overturn the constitutionality of laws that transcend the government’s true constitutional authority. The political winners can’t rig the game forever, so if the people and the judges never avail themselves of opportunities to express their aversion to the constitutional revolutionaries and their policies, we may presume that they actually approve of what has been done—in Garrett’s words, “first it happened and then they consented.”

In a sense, this interpretation may be correct, but I doubt that the sense I have in mind is one that Ackerman would welcome. If the people never avail themselves of the opportunity to overturn what was done initially without their consent, they may thereby reveal only that people who have been fed thin gruel for a long time get used to eating it and even come to consider it nutritious.14 In less metaphorical terms, my claim is that ideological change is often path-dependent: where a dominant ideology stands and where it is most likely to go in the future depend significantly on where it has been in the past.15

Bearing in mind this aspect of political, social, and economic dynamics, we may come to understand better how, for example, in each decisive episode in the great transformation of America’s political economy between 1900 and 1950, “first it happened and then they consented,” and afterward the people looked back on these episodes not so much with regret as with pride and a sense that the nation had overcome great challenges. Moreover, the people subsequently elevated to the pantheon of “greatness” the presidents who had taken it upon themselves to plunge the nation into these cauldrons and endowed them with sainthood in the Church of Democracy—thus, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and earlier, in the same mold, Abraham Lincoln.16

After World War I erupted in Europe in August 1914, the overwhelming majority of Americans preferred that their government remain neutral and not become engaged in the fighting. “Aversion to joining in the carnage,” writes Walter Karp, “was virtually unanimous.”17 President Wilson represented himself as striving above all to end the fighting and to resist the temptation to enter the war in reaction to various provocations by both warring sides. We may well doubt the sincerity of his avowals of neutrality, however. Thomas Fleming writes that “in an unguarded moment, Wilson confessed to a friend that he hoped for an Allied victory in the war but was not permitted by his public neutrality to say so.”18 There is no doubt, however, that the president and his election managers perceived that the best way for him to gain reelection in 1916 was by continuing to represent himself as a man of peace; hence, the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war.”

Yet, less than a month after beginning his second term, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war, resting his request on the astonishing ground that Americans had an absolute right to travel unmolested on the high seas on ships carrying munitions to a warring power. “Even after Wilson broke off relations with Germany in February 1917,” Karp writes, “an overwhelming majority of Americans still opposed entering the war. Even when the United States had already been at war for some months, a majority of Americans remained a sullen, silenced opposition, more profoundly alienated from their own government than any American majority has ever been before or since.”19 Karp concludes: “Representative government had failed them at every turn.”20 Democracy in action?

Probably no single event of the past century has been such a prodigious source of evils as the U.S. entry into World War I and the Versailles Treaty that U.S. entry made possible. The conquests of Bolshevism, Nazism, and Fascism and the manifold catastrophes known collectively as World War II, not to mention endless troubles in the Middle East, arguably, may be traced directly to this source.21 In the United States, World War I prompted the government to embrace what contemporaries called “war socialism” (though it was, in more precise language, “war fascism” for the most part), which provided blueprints for an immense variety of government interventions in the economy and society, many of which continue to impoverish Americans and to crush their liberties ninety years later.22 The war could have such extreme and enduring consequences because it had also brought about abrupt ideological changes: many Americans became convinced by their perception of the wartime controls that the government was capable of successfully engaging in socio-economic engineering on a wide front. Thus, the war put the final nail into the coffin of nineteenth-century liberalism, at least in the eyes of the major political players. As Bernard Baruch, the wartime head of the War Industries Board, declared, “We helped inter the extreme dogmas of laissez-faire, which had for so long molded American economic and political thought.”23

Democracy’s next colossal failure in the United States occurred in 1932. By the time of the presidential election in November, the country had experienced more than three years of worsening economic performance: falling output, rising unemployment, increasing numbers of business failures, and growing numbers of homes and businesses lost to foreclosure or to seizure for failure to pay taxes. Not without plausible reasons, people blamed President Herbert Hoover for these dreadful developments and gave Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic challenger, the benefit of the doubt.

Roosevelt campaigned on a platform that the old Grover Cleveland-style Democrats of the nineteenth century might have endorsed comfortably. As Jesse Walker summarizes it:

The very first plank calls for “an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five per cent in the cost of the Federal Government.” (It also asks “the states to make a zealous effort to achieve a proportionate result.”) Subsequent planks demand a balanced budget, a low tariff, the repeal of Prohibition, “a sound currency to be preserved at all hazards,” “no interference in the internal affairs of other nations,” and “the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest.” The document concludes with a quote from Andrew Jackson: “equal rights to all; special privilege to none.”24

Having made these promises, Roosevelt swept to a lopsided victory at the polls.

Yet, the merest child knows that his New Deal, a huge hodgepodge of domestic interventions, controls, subsidies, taxes, threats, seizures, and other troublemaking amounted to nearly the exact opposite of what he had promised the voters during the campaign.

So what, we may hear Professor Ackerman asking offstage; didn’t the people endorse these actions by reelecting Roosevelt with an even greater margin of victory in 1936? Yes, of course, they did. But, by that time, the president and his party had turned the federal government into a vast vote-buying apparatus that covered the entire country and penetrated every county, town, and village. As John T. Flynn described the situation:

Roosevelt’s billions, adroitly used, had broken down every political machine in America. The patronage they once lived on and the local money they once had to disburse to help the poor was trivial compared to the vast floods of money Roosevelt controlled. And no political boss could compete with him in any county in America in the distribution of money and jobs.25

Nor was this garden-variety political corruption the worst of it. Far more significant in the long run was the loss of faith in the free market among the masses and the boost given to ideological support for economic fascism. Owing to the Great Depression and the New Deal, later generations would live in chronic fear of economic privation and rest their hopes for security in a fervent belief that if the economy turned down, the government could and would rescue them. The Employment Act of 1946 codified this public dependency. Rugged individualism, to the extent that it had ever really existed, died a cruel death at the hands of the New Deal—precisely the opposite of what Roosevelt had promised when he first campaigned for the presidency. Democracy in action?

Roosevelt was still in office when the next great travesty of democracy occurred, in 1940. War between the great powers had resumed in Europe, as everyone had expected it eventually would after the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919. Just as the great majority of Americans had wished to keep away from the fighting in 1914, so a great majority again wanted nothing to do with the European bloodletting. Roosevelt, as the leader of the small minority that favored going to war—to save the British and (dare we conjecture?) to permit him to achieve the “greatness” that only wartime leadership brings—had to play his cards carefully. For two years, mendacity would be his major political device, as he sought to maneuver Germany and Japan into an “incident” so inflammatory that it would shock the public into supporting U.S. entry into the war.26

Roosevelt’s vaulting ambition fed his quest for reelection to an unprecedented third term. Given the massive public opposition to war—opposition, that is, to the very objective whose attainment he sought above all others—the president, who had already begun to involve the country in the war in discreet ways, lifted his dishonesty to a higher level as the election approached. In a campaign speech at Boston on October 30, 1940, he declared bluntly: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” As David M. Kennedy notes, “Conspicuously, Roosevelt omitted the qualifying phrase that he had used on previous occasions: ‘except in case of attack.’“27 Relying on this seemingly frank promise, the electorate returned Roosevelt to office for another term.

In return, of course, they found themselves being pushed farther and farther toward open U.S. belligerency, until finally the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor gave the president what he, his chief subordinates, and his closest supporters had been seeking from the start: declared engagement in the greatest armed conflict of all time. Democracy in action?

By the time it ended, Americans had suffered more than a million casualties, including more than 400,000 servicemen’s deaths, and four years of economic fascism on the home front, with extensive controls and government takeovers that dwarfed those of any comparable episode in the United States before or since. Moreover, the entire world had been altered, as the Soviet Union, America’s wartime ally, now stood astride all of eastern Europe and much of central Europe, too, as far west as Czechoslovakia, so that when the violence ended in 1945, only a tense pseudo-peace took its place, and the world was condemned to live in fear of nuclear annihilation indefinitely.

For this dismal result, we may credit the democratic system that put Franklin D. Roosevelt and his party in power and allowed them to make the United States the decisive factor in the war’s outcome. Without America’s active involvement in the war, the British might have been forced to sue for peace, and the Germans and the Soviets might have bled one another to death—a grisly outcome, to be sure, but would it have been any worse than what actually happened? We cannot know, of course; history is not ours to rerun, like a controlled experiment with reset conditions. Yet, we can scarcely deny that the devastated world of 1945, with 50 million dead, tens of millions left sick, wounded, or homeless, and a murderous Communist dictator in control of half of Europe, was scarcely what most Americans sought to bring about when they cast their votes for Roosevelt in 1940.

Democracy has always had its critics. No one claims that it is a perfect system for choosing political leaders or for putting in place the policies and laws the public prefers. Obviously, when individual preferences differ, no one political outcome can please everybody, and the “tyranny of the majority” stands as a constant menace to the lives, liberties, and property of unpopular minorities. Yet, most people continue to insist that democracy, with all its faults, offers to best institutional arrangement for making rulers accountable to the people. So long as elections continue to be held, the possibility always remains of “throwing the rascals out.”

What has not been widely recognized, however, is the problem of faits accomplis. Once elected rulers have taken office, the democratic system provides little or no effective means for the people to bring them to heel short of the next election. The great problem is that, by that time, it may be impossible to reverse the outcomes the rulers have brought about. Wilson was not elected in 1916 to plunge the nation into the Great War. Roosevelt was not elected in 1932 to impose the New Deal on the country. Nor was he elected in 1940 to maneuver the United States into the greatest war of all time. Yet, in each case, the president did the opposite of what he had promised to do, and the people were left with no recourse. The world of 1919, the United States of 1936, and the world of 1945— each was so massively, so irrevocably altered from the preceding status quo that any genuine restoration of the previous conditions was unimaginable. Like it or not, people were to a great extent simply stuck with what the deceitful politicians had done.

Worse, owing to “ideological learning,” many people who initially had not desired these changes did approve of them in the circumstances in which they later found themselves—circumstances that they had in no way chosen, not even indirectly, but into which they had been forcibly shoved by the ruling decision-makers. Contemplating this situation, one readily recalls Goethe’s dictum that “none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Still worse, an altered ideological context then sets the stage from which a society may be propelled even further from the course it initially preferred during the next round of democratic choice, unconstrained decisions by elected officials, and the resulting faits accomplis. If people believe that democracy is a means by which ordinary people may ensure that they exercise some control over their own societal fate, they are fooling themselves. If the persons elected to office have a free hand to act as they please, then the sense that they are truly accountable to the electorate is an illusion. It comes closer to the truth to say that the people are completely at the mercy of the officials they have elected.

“Democracy,” wrote H.L. Mencken, “may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be. There are thumping paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack.”28 Whether it will prove suicidal for its adherents, only time will tell, but we might note that, so far, only the United States of America, whose leaders and people tout their country as the greatest of all democracies, has employed nuclear weapons in war. It is not inconceivable that Woodrow Wilson’s war to make the world safe for democracy, owing to the train of consequences it set in motion, may ultimately make the world safe for democracy, to be sure, but not safe for mankind.

Robert Higgs (RHiggs2377@aol.com) is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy.

29Thomas R. Martin, with Neel Smith and Jennifer F. Stuart, “Democracy in the Politics of Aristotle,” in Demos· Classical Athenian Democracy· a Stoa Publication (July 26, 2003). Available at: http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/article_aristotle_democracy?page=2&greekEncoding=.

30Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), p. 250.

31Ibid., p. 253.

32Ibid., pp. 261, 262.

33Ibid., p. 263. For a recent study that grapples with this problem, see Robert Higgs and Anthony Kilduff, “Public Opinion: A Powerful Predictor of U.S. Defense Spending,” in Robert Higgs, Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 195–207.

34Ibid., p. 264; emphasis added.

35Ibid.

36Ibid., p. 272.

37Garet Garrett, Ex America: The 50th Anniversary of The People’s Pottage, Introduction by Bruce Ramsey (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press, 2004), p. 70.

38 Ibid.

39Ibid., p. 72.

40Bruce Ackerman, We the People 2: Transformations (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).

41Robert Higgs, “On Ackerman’s Justification of Irregular Constitutional Change: Is Any Vice You Get Away With a Virtue?” Constitutional Political Economy 10 (November 1999): 375–83.

42For visual representation of this phenomenon, nothing can surpass the Spartan regimen depicted in early scenes of the splendid film Babbette’s Feast (1987).

43Robert Higgs, “The Complex Course of Ideological Change,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 67 (October 2008): 547–65.

44Robert Higgs, “Great Presidents?” in Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society (Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute, 2004), pp. 53–56.

45Walter Karp, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890–1920) (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 169.

46Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 75.

47Karp, The Politics of War, p. 169.

48Ibid., p. 324.

49Among recent sources, see, for example, Jim Powell, Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin & World War II (New York: Crown Forum, 2005); and Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (New York: Crown, 2008).

50Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

51Bernard M. Baruch, Baruch: The Public Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 74.

52Jesse Walker, “The New Franklin Roosevelts: Don’t Count on a Candidate’s Campaign Stances to Tell You How He’ll Behave in Office,” Reason Online, April 10, 2008, at http://www.reason.com/news/show/125921.html.

53John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Books, 1949), p. 65.

54Among the many sources relevant to this maneuvering, see the recent works by Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 2000); Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: F.D.R. and the War within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2007).

55David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 463.

56H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 157.

1Professors Hoppe’s publications, including links to translations and a detailed bibliography, are available at his website, www.hanshoppe.com.
2“Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Potret Intelektual Anti-Intelektual” [“Interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an Anti-Intellectual Intellectual”], interview by Sukasah Syahdan, Akal dan Kehendak (Indonesia) (Apr. 28, 2008) (English translation available at www.hanshoppe.com/publications).
3“Principles of the Property and Freedom Society,” available at www.propertyandfreedom.org (quoting the Opening Declaration from the Inaugural Meeting: Bodrum, Turkey, May 2006).
4Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), chs. 2 & 7; idem, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006 [1993]), chs. 11–13, 15, and “Appendix: Four Critical Replies.”
5Idem, Democracy.
6Idem, “Government and the Private Production of Defense,” in idem, ed., The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2003).
7On immigration, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 221–33; idem, “Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 16, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 75–97.
8Idem, “On Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization,” p. 24, n. 25.
9Cf. Hoppe’s discussion of Robert Nozick’s “disparate or loosely jointed arguments, conjectures, puzzles, counterexamples, experiments, paradoxes, surprising turns, startling twists, intellectual flashes, and philosophical razzle-dazzle,” in “Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty,” Introduction to Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, 2nd ed. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998), pp. xxiv.
10Stephan Kinsella & Jeffrey Tucker, “The Ordeal of Hoppe,” The Free Market 26, no. 4 (April 2005).
11Ibid., p. 71; and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Eigentum, Anarchie und Staat: Studien zur Theorie des Kapitalismus (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987).
12Hoppe, Democracy, p. 74; and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy (Boston: Kluwer, 1993).
13Hoppe, Democracy, p. 71.
14Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche il Ribelle Aristocratico: Biografia Intelettualle e Bilancio Critico (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002).
15Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Der Gott, der keiner ist, Robert Grözinger, trans. (Waltrop & Leipzig: Manuscriptum Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2003), pp. 7–8 (English translation from Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Demokratie. Der Gott, Der Keiner Ist,” LewRockwell.com (December 5, 2003)). See also similar comments in Hoppe, Democracy, pp. x–xi; and xxiii, noting that “both Mises and Rothbard had a soft spot for democracy and tended to view the transition from monarchy to democracy as progress.”
16Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, Charakterwäsche: Die Politik der amerikanischen Umerziehung in Deutschland (Graz: Ares Verlag, 2004); and Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen, seventeenth ed. (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007).
17Stephan Kinsella, “The Undeniable Morality of Capitalism [review essay of Hoppe’s The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993)],” St. Mary’s Law Journal 25 (1994), p. 1434.
18Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State,” LewRockwell.com (June 23, 2008).
19Alan Pendleton Grimes, American Political Thought (New York: Holt, 1960), p. 283.
20Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 64.
21Merle Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), p. 175.
22Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, October 29th–November 17th, 1862, in Karl Marx on America and the Civil War, Saul K. Padover, ed. (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 263.
23James A. Rawley, The Politics of Union: Northern Politics during the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 184.
24Abraham Lincoln to H.L. Pierce et al. (April 6th 1859), Collected Works, vol. II, p. 375.
25Just as an example, in the late Nineteenth century John W. Burgess offered a definition of sovereignty as an “original, absolute, unlimited, universal power over the individual subject and over all associations of subjects,” and of “the State . . . [as] the source of all titles to land and of all powers over it,” John W. Burgess, Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law (Boston-London: Ginn, 1891), vol. I, pp. 47, 52.
26Fries, “Staatstheorie and the New American Science of Politics,” p. 403.
27Benjamin Zipursky, “Pragmatic Conceptualism,” Legal Theory 6, no. 4 (December 2000): 462.
28Ibid., pp. 462–23.
29Eventually, Hoppe turned into a full-blown Austrian when, in the early 1980s, he went to the United States on a prestigious Heisenberg fellowship. This time his research project concerned political philosophy, but it was again squarely built on Austrian economics. In 1986, he became Rothbard’s colleague at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where he would teach for the next 21 years. After Rothbard’s untimely death in 1995, Professor Hoppe assumed a place of uncontested leadership among Austro-libertarian scholars, becoming the editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, a co-editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, and then a co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Professor Hoppe, now Professor Emeritus of Economics at UNLV and Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, also serves on on the editorial board of Libertarian Papers. In addition to authoring numerous scholarly articles, his important books include Handeln und Erkennen (1976), Kritik der Kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung (1983), Eigentum, Anarchie, und Staat (1987), A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989), The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993, enlarged 2nd edition 2006), Democracy—The God that Failed (2001), and The Myth of National Defense (editor, 2003). His works have been translated into at least 21 languages, not counting English.
30Among Professor Hoppe’s many achievements we should stress in particular his brilliant critique of positivist methodology as applied to the social sciences, a new praxeological approach to political philosophy, an encompassing comparative analysis of socialism and capitalism, and a theory of secession as a means of political reform. Most importantly, in his book Democracy—The God that Failed, Professor Hoppe has delivered a profound critique of democracy, as well as an original reinterpretation of Western history in the twentieth century, both of which have stirred international debate in academia and among the wider public. Other influential works from his pen have dealt with the role of migrations within a free society, and with the role of public intellectuals in political transformation processes. Moreover, he has excelled as an historian of thought and made path-breaking contributions to other areas such as monopoly theory; the theory of public goods; the sociology of taxation; the positive methodology of the social sciences; the theory of risk; the production of security; the transformation of formerly socialist countries; and the evolution of monetary institutions and their impact on international relations. And Professor Hoppe’s work is ongoing: he is currently working on a major book project that will restate and elaborate on his previous work in the fields of epistemology and ethics—more generally, the nature of human rationality. The goal of the book is to provide “a systematic and interdisciplinary reconstruction of human history (pre-history, hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies, industrial societies).”
31for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one’s personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of “outcome” or “opportunity,” and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians.
32Hoppe’s axiom of private property is also of crucial importance. If you debate about ethical issues, it means that you presuppose your own right, as well as the right of other people, to debate the issue. This acceptance implies that you do respect the rights of others people involved in the debate to control their own bodies. And the conclusion is crucial: if you even begin debating what is right and what is wrong, it means that you already have acknowledged that private property is necessary and inescapable for any moral judgment. This applies even to those who try to argue against private property. The ethical ground for private property has never been so strong and deep before.
33There are also many other fields where Hans Hoppe has pushed the limits of political and economic science. Monarchy is not as bad as democracy, he argues. This was and still is unacceptable to many intellectuals, and most people have followed the lead of the intellectuals because they have had no good arguments to the contrary. A simple reference to the “strong hand” of a dictator was not only politically incorrect and old fashioned, but also contrary to the goals and the image of society most people actually have. Hoppe provides a clear explanation to sort through this intellectual mess. The absence of democracy in public decision-making does not necessarily mean dictatorship and the most terrible exploitation of the people. On the contrary: democracy is the system which leads to dictatorship, exploitation of others, ignorance, and vulgarity.
34The private provision of security is another topic which has benefitted from Hoppe’s insights. Every decent person often feels that the police are actually not providing adequate protection. But what is the alternative? Better this than nothing, or so many of those unsatisfied with government tend to conclude. An army of intellectuals is ready to help them reach this conclusion. Hoppe provides sound arguments and explains the economics of the private production of defense. No serious scholar can ignore Hoppe’s important arguments. Those who claim that there will be no security without government are simply mistaken. Now, you can direct them to Hans Hoppe’s works.
35Immigration, democracy, regulation—so many bad ideas abound concerning all of these issues, and Hoppe addresses them so well in his writings and speeches.
36Hans knows how to present an argument in a way which is very understandable, even to a man of average intellectual capacities. His examples are sometimes so unexpected and direct that they really help or even force you to rethink what you have thought about the world before. It appears very natural for him, for example, to put a footnote in a book with a short explanation why public slavery is even worse than private slavery. It does not mean that Hans tries to be simple. He is just very straightforward. He does not hesitate to criticize even free-market advocates who are not consistent in their argumentation. If you say something absurd or make flawed arguments, he usually will not hide the fact from you. Perhaps for this reason, some people even seem to be intimidated by Hans Hoppe. Understandably, it is not always pleasant to have your arguments smashed in public.
37Hans does not present himself as a big scholar. On the contrary, his ambition is not very great when he speaks about the role of the scholar (including himself) in society. It is not his ambition to invent some completely new theory or find a terra incognito. On the contrary, Hoppe claims that the role of a decent scholar is, first of all, to preserve what is already found, explained, and discovered. Not to waste the knowledge of the mankind, but to preserve and explain it in modern language to new generations, is to him an already ambitious task. He does it perfectly. Contrary to many of those who are happy with their ambitious and often fallacious new theories, or with “philosophical razzle-dazzle,” he is always stressing the role of his teachers and predecessors, Rothbard and Mises.
38Courage is another thing which goes well with Hans Hoppe’s name. Political correctness is not a good principle to hold to when you are looking for the truth, and while many people pay lip service to the importance of truth, not everyone will defend it even when his own career and name are at stake. But when liberty and the truth are at the stake, Hans Hoppe will never give up. The well-known controversy surrounding an example given about the different time preferences among different groups of people perfectly illustrates this courage.
39Significantly, Hans does not hold back in criticizing monarchies for doing in a quite primitive way what democratic administrations have succeeded in accomplishing with less fallout, which is monopolizing power. Like democrats, kings tried to marginalize their opposition by declaring all political authority to be a prerogative of the centralized state. Monarchical sovereignty was a prelude to democratic sovereignty, and it was based the same “original sin,” “the monopolization of the function of judge and peacemaker.” The best form of authority for Hans is, in fact, “the natural order,” one that is “[t]he natural outcome of the voluntary transactions between various private property owners” and which is “decidedly nonegalitarian, hierarchical, and elitist.” Any effort to bring this about in our democratic, late modernity is hailed as a positive step: “Thus, in addition to advocating the abdication of democracy, it is now of central strategic importance that at the same time ideological support be given to all decentralizing or even secessionist social forces.”
40Significantly, Hans does not hold back in criticizing monarchies for doing in a quite primitive way what democratic administrations have succeeded in accomplishing with less fallout, which is monopolizing power. Like democrats, kings tried to marginalize their opposition by declaring all political authority to be a prerogative of the centralized state. Monarchical sovereignty was a prelude to democratic sovereignty, and it was based the same “original sin,” “the monopolization of the function of judge and peacemaker.” The best form of authority for Hans is, in fact, “the natural order,” one that is “[t]he natural outcome of the voluntary transactions between various private property owners” and which is “decidedly nonegalitarian, hierarchical, and elitist.” Any effort to bring this about in our democratic, late modernity is hailed as a positive step: “Thus, in addition to advocating the abdication of democracy, it is now of central strategic importance that at the same time ideological support be given to all decentralizing or even secessionist social forces.”
41A question that might be raised is whether the generality of humankind would endorse the tendencies that Hans is promoting. Would democratic populations (who have ceased to be citoyens (citizens) or Staatsbürger in any meaningful sense) really want to live in the decentralized, elitist society that Hans recommends, one in which a “natural elite” possess “natural authority,” and, because of “selective mating” and the “laws of civil and genetic inheritance,” these “positions of natural authority are more likely than not passed on within a few noble families.” Why would the majority want to acknowledge these “authority persons,” who presumably would arbitrate conflicts on the basis of the social deference that others extend to them? It is hard to see why most people would accept such arrangements, as opposed to a democracy, in which the promise is made and often fulfilled of redistributing goods to the voters. The question is not whether the democratic state robs from Peter to pay Paul (it obviously does that!) but whether Hans’s “natural order” offers most people what they want. The answer is an emphatic “no” and therefore this order (which looks a bit like Friedrich Hayek’s conception of “spontaneous order”) depends for its realization on the possibility of “decentralization and secession.” Absent such a possibility, this order is in no way feasible.
42Two other observations may be appropriate for understanding more fully the libertarianism of the Right that Hans exemplifies. One, this libertarianism is a recognizable subspecies of what the Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo calls “aristocratic radicalism,” which he explores in voluminous works on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1901). According to Losurdo, Nietzsche’s “critique of modernity” is based on his opposition to the leveling tendencies that he perceives in democracy and socialism. It was therefore perfectly consistent for Nietzsche to praise aristocratic societies, including the Indian caste system, and to advocate liberty in the Western world of his time. That is because the state, as Nietzsche understood it, was becoming an instrument of equalization; and its attack on property relations would belong to a larger effort to remove all social and gender distinctions. Nietzsche, as Losurdo points out, also disliked Christianity, because he thought the “slave morality” that pervaded this religion and the culture it nurtured rendered them ineffective against the Left. He therefore broke with classical conservatives, who had viewed established religions as bulwarks against revolution. From Nietzsche’s perspective, Christianity and the Left were related worldviews, and only a new aristocratic order, one that had shed its Christian past, could save civilization from the unfolding of the egalitarian ideal, going from democracy into socialism and feminism.
43“Politically incorrect” is what the rulers and in particular the victors among the rulers proclaim. The great victor of the 20th century, in particular as far as Germany is concerned, is the USA. Hence, the USA has determined the “correct” interpretation especially of recent history. Defeated Germany was not only occupied, but also reeducated. Germany’s schools and universities, under almost complete government control, and the governmentally licensed mass media, have proclaimed to this day the official American view of history and in particular of the 20th century as a triumph of good over evil.
44It is hard to ignore the likely connection between Hans’s detestation of the “State” in all of its modern manifestations and the use of postwar public administration in West Germany, perhaps even more than in the Communist East, to humiliate his nation. His sense of what was done to “reeducate” defeated Germans after the War, which is documented in detail in Caspar von Schrenk-Notzing’s Charakterwäsche: Die Politik der amerikanischen Umerziehung in Deutschland, has left Hans understandably skeptical about the modern democratic project. His relation as a student to Jürgen Habermas, the German thinker and publicist who more than anyone else in his country has called for a rejection of a German national identity and for the creation of a new “constitutional patriotism,” based on supposedly universal democratic values, may explain even more about Hans’s intellectual odyssey.
45His study at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University with Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel was time well spent, however, as it shaped Hoppe as a first class social scientist and helped him to put forth an “argumentation ethics” defense of individual rights, based in part on the discourse ethics theories of the Frankfurt School. His intellectual independence prevented him from accepting his mentors’ apology for socialism and their anti-capitalist mentality. As one reviewer noted, “Hoppe believes his former teacher Habermas’s discourse-ethics theories, while correct at core, are applied incorrectly by Habermas to yield a socialistic ethic; Hoppe feels that Habermas’s theories, if correctly applied (as Hoppe himself does), yield the libertarian non-aggression norm.”
46The first and foremost task of the intellectual anti-intellectuals, then, is to counter this dogmatic slumber of the masses by offering a precise definition of the state, as I have done at the outset, and then to ask if there is not something truly remarkable, odd, strange, awkward, ridiculous, indeed ludicrous about an institution such as this. I am confident that such simple, definitional work will produce some serious doubt regarding an institution that one previously had been taken for granted.
47Lieber’s doctrine is “a prophetic conception,” according to Vernon Parrington, based on “the principle of an evolving state that draws all lesser sovereignties into its orbit by the law of attraction.” Parrington was well aware of the importance of Francis Lieber, who “provided a philosophical background” to the legal theory of Joseph Story. “Under the combined legal and philosophical attack the compact theory found its philosophical breastworks leveled, its natural rights theory undermined, and its commanding position effectively turned.” Alan Grimes places Lieber at the transition between “the constitutional and legal approach to an understanding of the nature of the American Union, and the rise of the organic concept of the nation.” The importance of the German professor in shaping the ideas which Lincoln exploited fully has been noticed by other historians. Lieber “had indeed argued before the war that the original Constitution was insufficient to the needs of the nation . . . in the 1830s and 1840s, he had gained prominence, North and South, by attacking the idea of a fixed Constitution.” A staunch advocate of federal growth, he thought “that federal power should expand slowly and organically—and thus constitutionally—as the nation grew. . . . He believed that the war would solidify the Union and thus fulfill his dream, nurtured during his school years in Germany, of living in a modern nation-state.” Later on, during the war Lieber became very popular, wrote dozens of articles and pamphlets in order “to popularize his distinctive brand of nationalism.” In practice, “[h]is many public statements used the South’s insurrection to justify an expansion of federal power beyond what the Constitution expressly sanctioned.”
48Lieber’s doctrine is “a prophetic conception,” according to Vernon Parrington, based on “the principle of an evolving state that draws all lesser sovereignties into its orbit by the law of attraction.” Parrington was well aware of the importance of Francis Lieber, who “provided a philosophical background” to the legal theory of Joseph Story. “Under the combined legal and philosophical attack the compact theory found its philosophical breastworks leveled, its natural rights theory undermined, and its commanding position effectively turned.” Alan Grimes places Lieber at the transition between “the constitutional and legal approach to an understanding of the nature of the American Union, and the rise of the organic concept of the nation.” The importance of the German professor in shaping the ideas which Lincoln exploited fully has been noticed by other historians. Lieber “had indeed argued before the war that the original Constitution was insufficient to the needs of the nation . . . in the 1830s and 1840s, he had gained prominence, North and South, by attacking the idea of a fixed Constitution.” A staunch advocate of federal growth, he thought “that federal power should expand slowly and organically—and thus constitutionally—as the nation grew. . . . He believed that the war would solidify the Union and thus fulfill his dream, nurtured during his school years in Germany, of living in a modern nation-state.” Later on, during the war Lieber became very popular, wrote dozens of articles and pamphlets in order “to popularize his distinctive brand of nationalism.” In practice, “[h]is many public statements used the South’s insurrection to justify an expansion of federal power beyond what the Constitution expressly sanctioned.”
49During and after the Civil War, Northern intellectuals developed the incipient organic theory, which at first did not reach the rank and file even in the North. In the Old World the organic theory was likewise serving the integral type of nationalism that had largely replaced the older, humanitarian variety of the early nineteenth century.
50In the words of Karl Marx, the Civil War was a “world-transforming . . . revolutionary movement.” Dating from the year 1862, this must be considered as one of his few correct prophecies, albeit an easy one.
51The Supreme Court, under Chase . . . upheld the constitutionality of the Legal Tender Act. Before the end of Reconstruction, Greenbackers were clamoring for more paper money. Few citizens before the war had contributed directly to the treasury. By the war’s close everyone and everything was taxed.
52In the end, it was the presidency of Lincoln—the very statesman who said “the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society”—that wrote finis to those very same principles and ended the American experiment in limited government and self-government. One of the major consequences of the metaconstitutional theory of the Union as an end in itself (and of equating its dissolution with a “moral catastrophe”) embraced by Abraham Lincoln was that of making American political thought more receptive to European theories. America proceeded towards a “normalization” of sorts, growing ever more similar to Europe. And this process of “convergence” was to reach its peak during the last century. Lincoln “normalized” America, thus opening the door for the Americanization of the world.
53In the end, it was the presidency of Lincoln—the very statesman who said “the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society”—that wrote finis to those very same principles and ended the American experiment in limited government and self-government. One of the major consequences of the metaconstitutional theory of the Union as an end in itself (and of equating its dissolution with a “moral catastrophe”) embraced by Abraham Lincoln was that of making American political thought more receptive to European theories. America proceeded towards a “normalization” of sorts, growing ever more similar to Europe. And this process of “convergence” was to reach its peak during the last century. Lincoln “normalized” America, thus opening the door for the Americanization of the world.
54In conclusion, we must turn again to the American Staatstheorie professors. It is true that their dominance in the profession faded after World War I, and their ultimate failure might be linked to the fact that they were “unable to apply the German idea of the state to the American Political tradition.” But this is true only from a purely theoretical perspective. Abraham Lincoln was not engaging in such a complex pursuit. He did not have to render the two traditions compatible, but rather to burn the bridges with the old American notion of “liberty vs. government.” In addition, he did not have to win any sophisticated scholarly dispute, as he had better weapons than continental authorities on the subject of liberty and the State. It was his army that, in fact made every citizen, North and South of the Potomac, appreciate the notion that there was an identity of interest between the individual and the State (by now understood as the Nation).
55Austrians like Hoppe are not alone in this particular criticism of L&E. Benjamin Zipursky, a representative of so called “pragmatic conceptualism,” challenges the theory of economic analysis of tort law. According to him, tort law is, in essence, “backward-looking.” If we turn to the factory example, the right way of looking at the situation is to investigate the past, determine the structure of rights that was in place before the pollution, describe the actions of both plaintiff and defendant and, on this basis, decide who is to be held liable. On the other hand, the economic (Posnerian) approach is “forward looking;” the initial distribution of rights is of no importance—“where liability should lie ultimately depends on an answer to a question about the future, not about the past.” This, unfortunately, leads us to the conclusion that, for L&E what is right and what is wrong are merely contingent. A just legal system can hardly be based on the contingent notions of right and wrong.
56Austrians like Hoppe are not alone in this particular criticism of L&E. Benjamin Zipursky, a representative of so called “pragmatic conceptualism,” challenges the theory of economic analysis of tort law. According to him, tort law is, in essence, “backward-looking.” If we turn to the factory example, the right way of looking at the situation is to investigate the past, determine the structure of rights that was in place before the pollution, describe the actions of both plaintiff and defendant and, on this basis, decide who is to be held liable. On the other hand, the economic (Posnerian) approach is “forward looking;” the initial distribution of rights is of no importance—“where liability should lie ultimately depends on an answer to a question about the future, not about the past.” This, unfortunately, leads us to the conclusion that, for L&E what is right and what is wrong are merely contingent. A just legal system can hardly be based on the contingent notions of right and wrong.

Property, Freedom & Society