Let’s just take it for granted that there needs to be a division of labor: some people covering fundamentals and others working on difficult inside problems and controversies. Let’s just grant that; this post is not urging anyone to change emphasis.
But lately I’ve been thinking about how best to use the most prominent space on Mises.org and how best to spend my own energies in writing. Looking back through time, we can see that libertarians and Austrians in previous times spent a surprising amount of time doing internal development of theoretical ideas, and the further back we look, the more detailed and internal the debates become. If you consider, for example, the debates that went on in the pages of Liberty, the 19th century anarchist periodical, you get the strong impression that the writers were publishing to be read by only a handful of people. They were probably correct about that. For technological reasons, they didn’t really have access to a general audience.
Hulsmann makes the case that Mises was generally safe in academia so long as he was writing technical books for economists; it was when he turned to writing about liberal theory for a general audience that he found himself in hot water.
By the 1970s, Murray Rothbard had formed two general lines of audience: a general audience for books like For a New Liberty, and a specialized audience for books like Ethics of Liberty. He was well aware that writing for a general audience brings forth the criticism that doing so is unscholarly and beneath academic dignity. Rothbard dismissed that on grounds that no intellectual movement can afford not have new recruits from among the young, and no social movement ever went anywhere by speaking to academics alone. As for the specialized writing, the usual criticism is that doing this amounts to “preaching to the choir.” Rothbard said that, actually, the choir needs to be preached to so that it can improve and refine. It is dull to keep repeating general principles when the paradigm is applicable in specialized issues. There must be internal development and debate or an intellectual movement stagnates and dies. Therefore, Rothbard favored both and did both.
But he was a bit unusual in this respect, and to say the least. He was about ten brilliant minds rolled into one. What about the rest of us? Well, I must say that as time has gone on, and in light of the remarkable global platform that digital media has provided, I’m ever more impressed by the need to deal with fundamental and general issues in the most prominent places on Mises.org and generally avoid too much “inside baseball,” and this is because: 1) it is surprising to anyone who has been an austrolibertarian for a while to discover that most readers are not privy to the details of internal debates, 2) the fundamentals are the issues that are actually driving forward both academic and public debate, and 3) it turns out that dealing with fundamentals might in fact be the best way to developed the internal paradigm as well.
This third point is the real surprise to me, and the best example I can think of is the issue of private property. One would think that libertarians had a pretty good grasp of that fundamental, after centuries of writing on the topic. Suddenly the issue of intellectual property came up and it turned out that even most libertarians could not provide coherent answers to the difficult questions of what can be owned and why as regards new creations and even what constitutes a new creation. In order to get a grip on this, I found myself back in Locke, Mises, Rothbard, Dietze, and Hoppe, trying to understand (yet again) the essence of property theory and to make sense of the claims of Kinsella that there is no such thing as intellectual property as analogous to real property.
So this is another case for dealing with fundamentals. There is one final point here. Sometimes too much internal development can lead one to overlook hugely important developments in the real world. In our times, the advance of the police state, the regulatory state, and the inflationary state demand the application of austrolibertarian fundamentals to crucial issues of public policy. In some cases, internal debates held for generations (fractional reserves vs. 100% reserves) have massive implications for the world economy, as Bagus has pointed out with regard to the Euro, for example. It is precisely because of the decades of wrangling over small details of theory that the apparatus itself is prepared to take on real-world issues with such razor-sharp insight and keen understanding. This is what makes the best case for Mises.org prominent place for popular/general/fundamental writing on the front page and its scholarly/detail/internal offerings deep within the literature section of the site.
We have more opportunities than ever for both forms of writing and both kinds of focus.
