Mill played a crucial, but inflated, role in liberalism. Rothbard did not like Mill much. Mill was a disaster on economic freedom and international issues. Mill rejected that workers and capitalists shared interests. Mill was anti-capitalist.
Utopian socialism was a term created by Marx and Lenin to denigrate the enemies of Marx and Lenin. Henri de Saint-Simon’s ideology of the industrial class, opposed to the idling class, inspired and influenced utopian socialism.
Ralph Raico covers classical liberalism’s growth, development and possible future. Liberalism arose in Europe entwined with Christianity. Why Europe? The East lacked the idea of freedom from the state and never established the legal system that could protect wealth. Europe had multiple, decentralized competing powers, not a universal empire.
In the face of overwhelming evidence of the prosperity of capitalism, Marxists were forced to rephrase their arguments from material provisions to quality of life. Robert Nozick, a brilliant philosopher of liberty, became a libertarian. Anarchy, State, and Utopia, his main book, dominates debate in political philosophy.
The next element in human development is that of money and the growth of cities and trade. Why is there division of labor and why is there money? Hoppe covers why people do not remain in self-sufficient isolation even when they could and even if everybody hated everybody else. As long as every person wants to have more rather than less, division of labor occurs.
Gustave de Molinari became the grand old man of classical liberalism, crediting Pareto. Molinari understood that the main issue in the Civil War was the tariff, not slavery. In Italy economists founded free market economics, crediting Bastiat.
Intellectuals are pro-power and anti-market. Great presidents are war presidents who glorify power. The Costs of War and Reassessing the Presidency are recommended books on this topic. The First World War was a turning point which vastly extended state power, and vastly destroyed social power.
What condition does mankind find itself in? Language, property and production are elements unique to mankind. Humans are social animals. Cooperation is normal. Language permits direct communication. Animals can’t abstract in the way humans can. They can form sounds but not words. Animals cannot make inferences explicitly. Animals do not have what we call self-consciousness (reflection).
Mises’ book, Liberalism, states that liberalism sufficed to change the face of the earth. The term liberal has since been hijacked by social democrats, so they don’t have to use the tainted word socialism. Raico defines liberalism to be civil society, minus the state, running itself within the bounds of private property.
There was a natural law tradition from antiquity and the middle ages. Natural law is the oldest and most frequently used concept of political theory. Natural law is the principles that are to be established if justice were to prevail. Or, it is the scientific laws of man and his environment.
Roderick Long leads The Mises Circle: An Informal Discussion of Anarchy at Mises University 2004.
Presented as part of the Mises Institute’s Austrian Workshop series in Auburn, Alabama, on 29 July 2004.
Mark Thornton discusses the irrational fear of deflation at this Austrian Workshop seminar.
Presented as part of the Mises Institute’s Austrian Workshop seminar series on 22 June 2004 in Auburn, Alabama.
Presented as part of the Mises Institute’s Summer Seminar Series in Auburn, Alabama, on 31 May 2004.
Sponsored by the Mises Institute and held in Houston, Texas; September 22-23, 1995.
Presented as part of the Mises Institute’s Summer Seminar Series in Auburn, Alabama, on 31 May 2004.
