Economy, Society, and History

In June 2004, at the invitation of Lew Rockwell, I spent one week at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, to present a series of lectures: one in the morning and one in the afternoon, for five days, in an intimate setting, before a live audience of some fifty plus students and professionals.

The goal, as set by Lew Rockwell, was an ambitious one: to present my view of the world and its inner workings. Accordingly, the lectures were to be a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary intellectual endeavor, touching upon questions of philosophy, economics, anthropology, sociology, and history.

My lectures were not based on a written text, but on notes, supplemented by only a few handouts. Hence, the somewhat informal tone of the following text and its occasional personal and conversational asides. Based on personal experience I do not expect this fact to diminish but rather to actually enhance the appeal and accessibility of the present work, however, and thus felt no need now for any stylistic changes.

As well, I came to the same conclusion not just regarding style but substance as well. It is nearly twenty years ago now that I presented the following lectures. They were audio taped at the time and a CD was produced. But I never looked back nor listened to these recordings. Indeed, I hardly ever listen to recordings of my own speeches, and in general, insofar as intellectual rather than theatrical or artistic matters are concerned, I much prefer the written over the spoken word. Revisiting now, for the first time, in its written form what I had orally presented in 2004, then, I was quite pleasantly surprised and reached the conclusion that I should not fiddle around with anything but let everything stand as is. This is not to say, of course, that there is nothing more to say about the wide-ranging subject matters of the following work, but rather, if I may be so immodest to say so, that it is a remarkably solid stepping-stone for more and better things still hopefully to come.

As a matter of fact, I have not stopped reading, writing, and lecturing myself since 2004, and the curious reader may already find quite a few additional observations, considerations, and deliberations in my own subsequent works, replete with further references. Among others, there is the second, expanded edition of The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (2006), A Short History of Man (2015), Getting Libertarianism Right (2018) and, most recently, the second, greatly expanded edition of The Great Fiction (2021). As well, those preferring things live and in color may want to take a look at some of the many video recordings made of my speeches in recent years, most notably my regular presentations at the annual Property and Freedom Society (PFS) meetings, all of which are electronically available on my personal home page, www.HansHoppe.com.

Finally, the reader may find it of interest to learn a bit about the personal circumstances and the temporal-historical context, in which the present work should be placed. As briefly mentioned in lecture four, when I presented my lectures, in June of 2004, I was in the middle of some major trouble with UNLV, my university. A student had accused me of having violated some standard of “political correctness” and thus creating a “hostile learning environment” for him, and the university had thereupon initiated an official investigation into the matter that would drag on for almost another year. Afterward, in 2005, I told the whole sordid story in an article titled “My Battle with the Thought Police.” Yet while I ultimately emerged triumphant from the scandalous affair, it had some lasting impact on my life. Not only had one year of my life been stolen from me as a result, but I had lost much of my former enthusiasm as a teacher and my appreciation of academic life. I had seen ominous signs of the increasing spread of “political correctness” all throughout society before, of course, but I felt myself immune from this, in my eyes, mental disease. In my teaching, I had recognized and accepted no intellectual taboo whatsoever, and, whether because or despite of this, I had enjoyed great popularity among my students. All the while, in my position as a tenured, full professor, I had considered myself well protected by my university from any and all interference with academic freedom. This belief had been severely shattered, and in light of an increasing number of similar events at other universities around the country at the same time, I came to the realization that for me, with my wide-ranging, interdisciplinary intellectual interests, university teaching henceforth would always mean having to choose between self-censorship, on the one hand, or harassment on the other.

Luckily, I was to be quickly rescued from this dilemma by some fortunate turn in my personal life, however, that allowed me to resign from my university position and continue my scholarly work outside of official academia. Looking back now, I would say “just in time,” because matters only got worse, and rapidly so. During my student days, in Germany, universities constituted to a large extent still anarchic orders made up of dozens of little autonomous intellectual kingdoms and fiefdoms, freely competing or cooperating with each other, and university students made up no more than 7 or 8 percent of an age group. Since then, universities have been increasingly transformed into huge, highly centralized organizations, ruled by a central committee of bureaucrats and a steadily growing mass of administrative assistants, while students now, in the US, make up more than 50 percent of an age group. Under these circumstances, with a bureaucratic central committee in charge, and whether by commission or omission, universities, then, pressured by so-called anti-fascist student mobs and Black Lives Matter hoodlums and egged on therein by some professorial frauds, fakes and fools thus catapulted to public prominence, have been increasingly turned into indoctrination camps of “political correctness,” or “wokeness,” as defined by a few theoreticians of “cultural Marxism.” And not quite unlike Mao’s erstwhile cultural revolution with its Red Guards, then, this wokeness movement has made great strides toward its goal of subverting and ultimately destroying all traditional Western standards of human excellence, merit, achievement and, indeed, normality and all things normal, and silencing, ousting or beating into submission anyone daring to dissent from the one and only correct, woke political party line.

Today, in contemporary university, in the US, the UK, Germany, and many other Western countries, then, many things said or noted in the following can no longer be said or noted without fear of serious repercussions: without open calls for cancellation, censorship, apology, confession of guilt or even harassment, threat and loss of job and livelihood. The more reason, then, to thank Lew Rockwell, the Mises Institute, and in particular the many generous donors, who have made the present publication possible.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe
May 2021