Front Matter

Economy, Society, and History

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and History

HANS-HERMANN HOPPE

MI S E SIN S T I T U T E

AUBURN, ALABAMAPublished 2021 by the Mises InstituteTh is work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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ISBN: 978-1-61016-733-8

Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viiPreface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiiiLecture 1: Th e Nature of Man and the Human Condition:Language, Property, and Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Lecture 2 : Th e Spread of Humans around the World:Th e Extension and Intensifi cation of the Division of Labor . . 17

Lecture 3 : Money and Monetary Integration:Th e Growth of Cities and the Globalization of Trade . . . . . . . 35

Lecture 4 : Time Preference, Capital, Technology, andEconomic Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Lecture 5 : Th e Wealth of Nations: Ideology, Religion,Biology, and Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Lecture 6: Th e Production of Law and Order, Natural Order,Feudalism, and Federalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Lecture 7: Parasitism and the Origin of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Lecture 8 : From Monarchy to Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Lecture 9 : State, War, and Imperialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Lecture 10 : Strategy, Secession, Privatization, and the Prospectsof Liberty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183v

Foreword

One of the more depressing claims made by some libertarians dur-ing the past fi fty years is that the battle for liberty is to be won or lost by arguing about economics. As with all but the grosser falsehoods, there is a degree of truth in the claim. Production and trade are important activities in any community. In those communities where debate over these things is possible and thought important, there tends to exist a power of coercion willing and able to act on the outcomes of such de-bate. For this reason, anyone worried about the establishment of state socialism and its great and terrible consequences needs a set of arguments that stand by themselves and that demonstrate both the evils of state control and the benefi ts of voluntary exchange.

But the claim that this is all we need remains depressing. Any movement that accepts it opens itself to entry and control by men of undoubtedly high intelligence, but whose preferred mode of reasoning is a wooden economism. Since most people cannot or do not choose to understand the less obvious truths of economics, this mode of reasoning will win no arguments outside those areas regarded as economic. Within those areas, it may become dominant. It may remain dominant there even after some variety of statism has become dominant in every other subject. But, as we have seen since the end of the Cold War, a grim and searching despotism is possible that has no interest in controlling the price of bread or in who owns the railways. A libertarian movement defi ned by the quality of its economic reasoning, and by nothing else, then becomes a waste of space.

i