What Must Be Done

Lecture given at “The Bankruptcy of American Politics” conference, sponsored by the Mises Institute and held in Newport Beach, California; January 24-25, 1997. An audio version of this talk is available here.

A slightly more appropriate title1 would be “Society, State, and Liberty: The Austro-Libertarian Strategy of Social Revolution.” So I want to step up things a little bit after all these moderate talks that you have heard before. I want to end with some rather concrete strategic advice, but in order to give this first I have to diagnose what the problem is otherwise the cure might be worse than the disease. And this diagnosis involves some sort of systematic reconstruction or theoretical explanation of human history.

1Vladimir Lenin in 1902 titled a book What is to be Done? (or What Must Be Done) which describes his plans to bring Communism to Russia. Hoppe uses the same title to describe his plans to bring Libertarianism to American society.

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