Lecture 1

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Lecture 2

Lecture 3

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Lecture 5

Lecture 6

Lecture 7

Lecture 8

Lecture 9

Lecture 10

Lecture presented by Hans-Hermann Hoppe at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s “Freedom: The One Way Out” summit, held in San Francisco, California; February 9-10, 1996. http://mises.org

Lecture presented by Yuri N. Maltsev at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s “Freedom: The One Way Out” summit, held in San Francisco, California; February 9-10, 1996. http://mises.org

Description:

A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Create Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age is Jeffrey Tucker’s rhapsodic hymn to the digital age, and a call to use the tools it has granted us to enhance human freedom, and to reduce and end intellectual dependency on the state. It shows that every truly valuable aspect of our lives extends not from politics and the regime but from our own voluntary choices.

Choice has created the marvels of the digital age that bestows its benevolence on us every day. Its greatest contribution has been to link the people of the world in communication.

The critical fact about communication is its creative power. It is a form of exchange. The goods exchanged are not property but ideas, and this exchange results in new ideas, new intellectual wealth, the precondition for changing the world.

Unscripted, uncontrolled, uncensored communication illustrates the productive power of anarchy. The more this communicative anarchy has advanced, the more it has served to build civilization.

This is a triumph for human liberty, Tucker argues, and with liberty comes flourishing and the cultivation of civilized life. Philosophers of all ages have dreamed of a world without power, despots, and bullies — a world built by people and for people. The market in the digital age is delivering that to us.

And it’s not only about us. It’s about everyone. Wherever the state is not standing in the way, prosperity comes flooding in. We are in the midst of the longest and most-dramatic period of poverty reduction the world has ever known. In the last ten years, some 70 million people have been lifted from destitution. Fewer than half the people who were so 25 years ago still qualify today.

The reason is technology, communication, entrepreneurship, and that wonderful trajectory away from gatekeepers toward personal empowerment the world over. This is the gift of the digital age, the most spectacular and revolutionary period of change the world has ever known.

The aims of A Beautiful Anarchy are: 1) to draw attention to the reality that surrounds us but we hardly ever bother to notice, much less celebrate; 2) to urge a willingness to embrace this new world as a means of improving our lives regardless of what the anachronistic institutions of power wish us to do; 3) to elucidate the causes and effects that have created this new world; and 4) to urge more of the good institutions that have created this beautiful anarchy.

This books covers the uses of social media, the blessed end of the nation-state, the way the government is destroying the physical world, the role of commerce in saving humanity, the depredations of nation-state monetary policy, the evil of war and the lie of national security, and private societies as agents of liberation. And it offers a hopeful prognosis for a creative and productive world without central control. The book is topical, pithy, and anecdotal, yet points to the big ideas and the larger picture to help frame the great economic and political debates of our time.

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Description:

No living writer today is more effective at stripping away the illusions almost everyone has about economics and public life. More fundamentally, Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe causes the scales to fall from one’s eyes on the most critical issue facing humanity today: the choice between liberty and statism.

The Great Fiction, published by Laissez Faire Books, is an expansive collection of his writings centering on the theme of the rise of statism and its theoretical underpinning. Some essays have been published in mostly obscure or offbeat places, while others are new and have never appeared in print. Together they constitute a devastating indictment of the many forms of modern despotism and a sweeping reconstruction of the basis of state management itself.

The title comes from a quotation by Frederic Bastiat, the 19th-century economist and pamphleteer: “The state is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.” He does not say that this is one feature of the state, one possible aspect of public policy gone wrong, or one sign of a state gone bad in a shift from its night-watchman role to become confiscatory. Bastiat is characterizing the core nature of the state itself.

The whole of Hoppe’s writings on politics can be seen as an elucidation on this point. He sees the state as a gang of thieves that uses propaganda as a means of disguising its true nature. In fleshing this out, Hoppe has made tremendous contributions to the literature, showing how the state originates and how the intellectual class helps perpetuate this cover-up, whether in the name of science, or religion, or the provision of some service like health, security, education, or whatever. The excuses are forever changing; the functioning and goal of the state are always the same.

This particular work goes beyond politics, however, to show the full range of Hoppe’s thought on issues of economics, history, scientific methodology, and the history of thought. It is divided into five sections: Politics and Property, Money and the State, Economic Theory, The Intellectuals, and Biographical. The content ranges from highly structured academic pieces to prepared lectures to impromptu interviews. Together they present an example sampling of his perspective a range of issues.

In each field, he brings that same level of rigor, that drive for uncompromising adherence to logic, the fearlessness in the fact of radical conclusions. In light of all of this, it seems too limiting to describe Hoppe as a mere member of the Austrian or libertarian tradition, for he really has forged new paths — in more ways than he makes overt in his writings. We are really dealing here with a universal genius, which is precisely why Hoppe’s name comes up so often in any discussion of today’s great living intellectuals.

It is true, then, that Hoppe stands with a long line of anarchist thinkers who see the state as playing a purely destructive role in society. But unlike the main line of thinkers in this tradition, Hoppe’s thinking is not encumbered by utopian illusions about society without the state. He follows Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard in placing private property as a central element in social organization. In justifying this point of view, Hoppe goes far beyond traditional Lockean phrases. He sees private property as an inescapable institution in a world of scarcity, and draws on the work of contemporary European philosophy to make his claims more robust than any of his intellectual predecessors did.

The reader will be surprised at the approach Hoppe takes because it is far more systematic and logical than people expect of writers on these topics.He came to his views after a long intellectual struggle, having moved systematically from being a conventional left-socialist to become the founder of his own anarcho-capitalist school of thought. The dramatic change happened to him in graduate school, as he reveals in the biographical sections of this book. He takes nothing for granted in the course of his argumentation. He leads the reader carefully through each step in his chain of reasoning. This approach requires extraordinary discipline and a level of brilliance that is out of the reach of most writers and thinkers.

The perspective from which he writes stems from a passionate yet scientific attachment to radical freedom, and his work comes about in times when the state is on the march. Everything he writes cuts across the grain. It is paradigm breaking. It is not only his conclusions that are significant but the masterful way that he arrives at them. The Great Fiction provides, perhaps better than any previous work, a full immersion experience into the mind and worldview of Hans Hermann-Hoppe.

Audio version of the Mises Daily article for June 28, 2008. Written by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and read by Floy Lilley. http://mises.org

Link to the text version of this audio presentation, ‘On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution’: http://mises.org/daily/2874

Lecture presented by Robert A. Lawson to the Auburn University Libertarians; September 21, 2009. http://mises.org

Lecture presented by Walter Block at the Mises Circle in Houston: “Great Economic Myths,” Saturday 29 January 2008; Sponsored by Jeremy S. Davis. http://mises.org

Dr. Walter Block, an Austrian school economist and anarcho-libertarian philosopher, is Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Chair in Economics and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans and senior fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of the books Defending the Undefendable, Labor Economics From A Free Market Perspective, Economics and the Environment: A Reconciliation, and his latest, The Privatization of Roads and Highways.

Walter Block’s official website: http://www.walterblock.com

Presented at the 2012 Mises Institute Supporters Summit: “The Truth About War: A Revisionist Approach”. Recorded at Callaway Gardens, Georgia, on 26 October 2012. Includes an introduction by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., and the awarding of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Defense of Liberty.

Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Part of the Authors Forum, presented at the Austrian Economics Research Conference. Recorded 21 March 2013 at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

Music by Kevin MacLeod.