The Great Fiction, Second Expanded Edition

While the need for and value of inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research is often emphasized as a welcome antidote to hyper-specialization, such commitment is typically little more than lip service. In general, in today’s academia inter- and trans-disciplinary work is frowned on and discouraged. It hampers your professional career or even dooms it. Once you venture outside an increasingly narrowly defined field of academic specialization, your colleagues will dismiss and disparage you for no longer being a “real” economist, philosopher, or whatever; and likewise, the certified members and gate-keepers of those fields into which you venture will either ignore or dismiss you as an intellectual outsider and trespasser and not really “one of them.”

Indeed, even within a given academic field such as philosophy or economics, for instance, you are no longer expected to cover your discipline in its entirety. Instead, you are supposed to confine your work to one of your discipline’s numerous branches or sub-disciplines and publish exclusively in its “officially approved ‘refereed’ scholarly journals.” You are not supposed to be a philosopher or economist, period. Rather, you are supposed to be a philosopher of science, or of mathematics, or logic, language, religion, art and aesthetics, etc.; and you are supposed to be a micro-economist, a macro-economist, a game theorist, a labor or development economist, an econometrician, a mathematical economist, etc. Only as a historian of your discipline are you still somewhat exempt from these strictures and supposed to cover your entire field. However, the history of philosophy and even more so the history of economics and economic thought, for example, are increasingly eliminated from the academic curricula, because they are considered merely interpretative—philological or hermeneutical—endeavors, rather than real “science.”

Throughout my entire academic career I ignored these strictures. First, because I did not know any better, and then, when I knew, because I consciously rejected and resisted them—and learned to live with the consequences. I earned my living as an economist, but I did not confine my work to economics. I frequently ventured out into philosophy, my first intellectual love, and from there, into law, sociology, history, and politics—wherever my intellectual curiosity led me.

The present volume bears witness to this fact. It contains articles, speeches, and interviews written and presented over almost a quarter century. Most of them have previously appeared in disparate places: in various academic journals, magazines of opinion, or popular media outlets. Yet there are also some longer, previously unpublished pieces appearing here for the very first time.

While this book freely and frequently cuts across disciplinary lines, there is one dominant and unifying theme throughout the following: property, or more precisely private property, defined as the exclusive control of scarce resources, its origin, and its ethical and economic rationale and justification as the ultimate source of peace and prosperity. On the other hand: the State, defined as a territorial monopolist of ultimate decisionmaking and conflict arbitration including all cases of conflict involving the State and its agents themselves, its origin, and its role as the greatest danger to private property, as a permanent source of social conflict and the greatest enemy to peace and prosperity. And finally: the constitution of a private law society, defined as a society without a state or any monopoly or monopolist whatsoever (whether legal or otherwise) and its unique function as the only conceivable guarantor of eternal peace and prosperity.

But there is much more to be found in the following: there are reflections on social evolution and the causes of the so-called Neolithic and Industrial Revolution, on monarchy and on the decivilizing effect of democracy, on war, centralization and secession, on egalitarianism, inequality and natural aristocracy, on the inevitability and virtue of discrimination, and on migration and the perils of multiculturalism—much of which is extremely “politically incorrect” and has made me a persona non grata not only among mainstream intellectuals but in particular also among many so-called left-, big-government, or bleeding-heart libertarians.

There are some pieces assembled here dealing with purely theoretical (value-free)—philosophical or economic—problems, others dealing with normative issues, and still others concerned with matters of politics and political strategy. Some pieces are long and intellectually “demanding” and others short and “easy.” In any case, however, I hope the reader will find them always lucid, rigorously argued and, above all, intellectually stimulating.

While no one except me can be held personally responsible for any of the following, I owe a profound gratitude to Lew Rockwell and to the “gang” of radical—in politically correct lingo: “extremist”—thinkers he managed to assemble around the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama: to Walter Block, Thomas DiLorenzo, David Gordon, Jeffrey Herbener, Guido Hülsmann, Stephan Kinsella, Peter Klein, Ralph Raico, Joseph Salerno, and Mark Thornton.

My deepest gratitude is to my two principal intellectual masters, however. To Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), whom I unfortunately never met, but whose monumental work has been a constant source of inspiration to me, and to Mises’s greatest student, Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), who further radicalized, expanded and completed the Misesian edifice, and with whom I was fortunate enough to spend the last ten years of his life in intimate cooperation, first in New York City and then as colleagues, office neighbors and intellectual co-combatants at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Istanbul, June 2012