A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline is nothing less than a concise revisionist history of man, skillfully presented by Dr. Hoppe. He addresses the rise of family structures, the development of private property, social evolution prior to the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the state — all without regard for cherished myths. Dr. Hoppe will make you rethink your assumptions regarding man’s development in this engaging book.
On Man, Nature, Truth, and Justice | Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Prof.Hoppe’s speech at The Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, sponsored by James Walker. Recorded at the Austrian Economics Research Conference at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 14 March 2015. Includes an introduction by Joseph T. Salerno.
Professor Hoppe’s introduction to Murray Rothbard’s The Logic of Action (One, Two) (1997) is available here: PDF. For other incisive explorations of Rothbard’s thought, see Professor Hoppe’s Introduction to The Ethics of Liberty and his obituary in this collection.
N.b.: The Logic of Action is no longer available online, but Economic Controversies, a later version containing virtually all of the material of The Logic of Action plus additional material, is available online.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a master of theoretical history. He tells us that
it is not my purpose here to engage in standard history, i.e., history as it is written by historians, but to offer a logical or sociological reconstruction of history, informed by actual historical events, but motivated more fundamentally by theoretical — philosophical and economic — concerns.
The work of Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises on the commodity origin of money is a prime example of what Hoppe has in mind.
In carrying out his illuminating project, Hoppe finds himself in opposition to the dominant way of looking at the evolution of government. According to this perspective, government has over the centuries become ever more democratic. Rule by the people is the final form of government; once it has been reached, history, at least as far as government is concerned, has ended. This historical movement, further, is a “good thing.” It is the triumph of freedom. History is the story of progress. [continue reading…]
IN AN AGE OF intellectual hyperspecialization, Murray N. Rothbard was a grand system builder. An economist by profession, Rothbard was the creator of a system of social and political philosophy based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones. For centuries, economics and ethics (political philosophy) had diverged from their common origin into seemingly unrelated intellectual enterprises. Economics was a value-free “positive” science, and ethics (if it was a science at all) was a “normative” science. As a result of this separation, the concept of property had increasingly disappeared from both disciplines. For economists, property sounded too normative, and for political philosophers property smacked of mundane economics. Rothbard’s unique contribution is the rediscovery of and philosophy, and the systematic reconstruction and conceptual integration of modern, marginalist economics and natural-law political philosophy into a unified moral science: libertarianism. [continue reading…]
Note: The copyright to this work is held by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who hereby releases and licenses this work with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, despite any notice to the contrary on the published version.
In this tour de force essay, Hans-Hermann Hoppe turns the standard account of historical governmental progress on its head. While the state is an evil in all its forms, monarchy is, in many ways, far less pernicious than democracy. Hoppe shows the evolution of government away from aristocracy, through monarchy, and toward the corruption and irresponsibility of democracy to have been identical with the growth of the leviathan state. There is hope for liberty, as Hoppe explains, but it lies not in reversing these steps, but rather through secession and decentralization. This pocket-sized, eye-opening monograph is ideal for sharing with friends. It can revolutionize the way a reader sees society and the state.
The following is a video of Prof. Hoppe speaking at the Rafael del Pino Foundation’s Master Lecture Series in Madrid, Spain, on June 20, 2013: “From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy: A Tale of Moral and Economic Folly and Decay.”
Several Polish translations of Hoppe articles are available at the Polish Ludwig von Mises Institute (www.mises.pl), which are compiled here. The listings include also other materials such as the video noted below. A Polish translation of Professor Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism is also forthcoming in Dec. 2014-Jan 2015 from the Polish Mises Institute, under the title „Teoria Socjalizmu i Kapitalizmu.”
An online version of Professor Hoppe’s paper “L’Europe De L’Apres-Communisme: Émigration, Integration Et Balkanisation,” traduit par Jakob Arfwedson, with a Foreword by Henri Lepage (Paris: Institut Euro 92, 1993) is now available in HTML here; also in pdf; doc.
Professor Hoppe’s essay, “The Economic and Political Rationale for European Secessionism,” in David Gordon, ed., Secession, State & Liberty (Transaction, 1998), is available online.
