Hans-Hermann Hoppe - The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline

The Great Fiction

The Great Fiction

Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline

HANS-HERMANN HOPPE

Copyright 2012 by Laissez Faire Books

Baltimore, Maryland

All rights reserved.

lfb.org

ISBN: 978-162129-031-5

Cover art: Andrew Ascosi

Published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0.
http://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by/3.0/

by Jeffrey Tucker

If you are unfamiliar with the working of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, prepare for The Great Fiction to cause a fundamental shift in the way you view the world. No living writer today is more effective at stripping away the illusions almost everyone has about economics and public life. More fundamentally, Professor Hoppe causes the scales to fall from ones eyes on the most critical issue facing humanity today: the choice between liberty and statism.

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 nightwatchman role to become confiscatory. Bastiat is characterizing the core nature of the state itself.

The whole of Hoppes 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.

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, Hoppes 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. I suspect that this is because he came to 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.

This particular work goes beyond politics, however, to show the full range of Hoppes thought on issues of economics, history, scientific methodology, and the history of thought. 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 pathsin more ways than he makes overt in his writings. We are really dealing here with a universal genius, which is precisely why Hoppes name comes up so often in any discussion of todays great living intellectuals.

It so happens that Hoppe is also an extremely controversial figure. I dont think he would have it any other way. Regardless, this is always the case for truly creative minds that do not shrink from the conclusions of their own premises. 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. Just when you think you have figured out his mode of thinking, he takes it in a direction that you didnt expect, which is why in writing this editorial preface Im being careful not to give away too many of the ideas herein. It is not only his conclusions that are significant but the masterful way that he arrives at them.

It is my great honor as executive editor of Laissez Faire Books to be the publisher of a work of this significance. This is more than a collection in the libertarian tradition; it is a testimony to the fact that progress in ideas is still possible in our time. So long as that remains true, so long as the tradition Hoppe represents is living and improving, we have reason to believe that human liberty has not and will not finally succumb to the great fiction.

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 todays 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 disciplines 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 interpretativephilological or hermeneuticalendeavors, 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 themand 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 politicswherever my intellectual curiosity led me.