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Property rights as they are circumscribed by laws and protected by courts and the police are the outgrowth of an age-long evolution. The history of these ages is the record of struggles aiming at the abolition of private property. Again and again despots and popular movements have tried to restrict the rights of private property or to abolish it

The changes in the data whose reiterated emergence prevents the economic system from turning into an evenly rotating economy and produces again and again entrepreneurial profit and loss are favorable to some members of society and unfavorable to others. Hence, people concluded, the gain of one man is the damage of another; no man profits but by

From time immemorial men have prattled about the blissful conditions their ancestors enjoyed in the original “state of nature.” From old myths, fables, and poems the image of this primitive happiness passed into many popular philosophies of the 17th and 18th centuries. In their language, the term natural denoted what was good and beneficial in

Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy. Ownership means full control of the services that can be derived from a good. This catallactic notion

[Excerpted from chapter 9 of Theory and History .] In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuals and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind. At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, German philologists began to study German medieval

[Excerpted from chapter 10 of Theory and History .] As historicism sees it, the essential error of economics consists in its assumption that man is invariably egoistic and aims exclusively at material well-being. According to Gunnar Myrdal, economics asserts that human actions are “solely motivated by economic interests” and considers as economic

[Excerpted from chapter 10 of Theory and History .] The ideas of historicism can be understood only if one takes into account that they sought exclusively one end: to negate everything that rationalist social philosophy and economics had established. In this pursuit many historicists did not shrink from any absurdity. Thus to the statement of the

[Excerpted from chapter 11 of Theory and History .] Modern collectivist philosophy is a coarse offshoot of the old doctrine of conceptual realism. It has severed itself from the general philosophical antagonism between realism and nominalism and hardly pays any attention to the continued conflict of the two schools. It is a political doctrine and

[Excerpted from chapter 12 of Theory and History .] History tries to describe past events as they really happened. It aims at faithful representation. Its concept of truth is correspondence with what was once reality. Epic and dramatic fiction depict what is to be considered true from the point of view of thymological insight, no matter whether

Environmentalism is the doctrine that explains historical changes as produced by the environment in which people are living. There are two varieties of this doctrine: the doctrine of physical or geographical environmentalism and the doctrine of social or cultural environmentalism. The former doctrine asserts that the essential features of a