KOL154 | “The Social Theory of Hoppe: Lecture 2: Types of Socialism and the Origin of the State”

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 154. This is the second of 6 lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course “The Social Theory of Hoppe.” I’ll release the remaining lectures here in the podcast feed in upcoming days. The slides for this lecture are appended below; links for“suggested readings” for the course are included in the podcast post for the first lecture, episode 153. Transcript below. LECTURE 2: TYPES OF SOCIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF THE STATE Video Slides TRANSCRIPT The Social Theory of Hoppe, Lecture 2: Types of Socialism and the Origin of the State Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, July 18, 2011 00:00:00 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Can you guys hear me okay?  Video and slide showing?  Hello?  Test, test.  Okay, hey, good evening, everyone.  It’s 6 p.m. central time US, later for some of you I know.  So let’s get started.  If there’s any initial questions about last week’s lecture, which I’ll go over some of in a little bit, I’ll be happy to take them now.  But tonight, what I would like to concentrate on, I’ll catch up on some of the things I didn’t cover last time and talk about Hoppe’s views on types of socialism and the origin of the state.  And I don’t know if I’ll have time to get to de-socialization.  So, by the way, I posted last week a couple of funny things to the forums about “Drop It Like It’s Hoppe,” a sort of rap thing by a friend of mine.  And also, a Facts About Hoppe, which I thought were amusing, so hope people enjoyed that. 00:01:02 So let’s go on here.  So quick review, last class we talked about basically Hoppe’s place in the Austrian and liberal sort of literature and scheme, his influences, his style, his background, his basic orientation.  And we talked about basic fundamental property-based and human-action-based, praxeology-based foundational concepts and principles, which run through most of his work, various implications of the human action axiom like conflict and scarcity, choice and cost, and profit and loss, and ends and means and causality, and the sort of methodological dualistic approach of Mises, which basically is looking at the causal world with the scientific method approach and more empirical approach, that is paucity, physical laws, and then trying to test those laws to see if you can falsify your hypothesis, which is the sort of standard way most people think of science. 00:02:14 But the Austrian view is that’s one type of science.  Another type of science is the social sciences, which are focused on – can anyone hear me, or is it just Rick that’s having a problem?  Okay, so I’ll keep going.  Methodological dualism, which looks at the causal world in one sense and which, in the case of humans, would be human behavior, just analyzing what motions human bodies go through, or trying to understand the human ends and means and purposes – excuse me – which is the teleological realm.  And from that realm, we know certain things a priori.  We know that humans have ends or purposes.  They employ means.  There’s opportunity cost.  They have choice.  There’s a presupposition of causality. 00:03:09 If you didn’t presuppose causality, you couldn’t act because action employs means, which are scarce means in the world, which are causally efficacious at achieving your ends, which are believed to be.  So an operative presupposition of action would be causality as well.  So these are the a priori things that come from this side of dualism.  Then we talked about different property-related concepts like contract, aggression, capitalism, socialism, even the state, which are all defined in terms of this fundamental concept of property. 00:03:43 00:03:46 I’m going to go to slide three.  So today we’re going to continue the discussion of property, talk about how the state arises and what its definition is, and then talk about different types of socialism or statism.  And if we have time, we’ll get to de-socialization, which I doubt we will actually, but that’s okay.  We can cover that next time.  The readings would be chapters three, four, and five and, to some degree, six of TSC, Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, also Hoppe’s article “Banking, Nation States, and International Politics,” which is chapter three of his EEPP book, and finally, “De-socialization in a United Germany,” which we may not get to today. 00:04:33 Okay, so let me just make one note.  I don’t know if I made this clear enough last time about the concept of property.  Many of you may have noticed that this word is used a little bit carelessly by a lot of people, libertarians and others.  It’s used sometimes to refer to the scarce resource itself.  Like you’ll say my car is my property.  So they use the word property to refer to the thing that is owned.  But technically it’s more of a relationship or a denotation of the ownership right that’s a legally respected right. 00:05:14 Now, legally doesn’t mean state law.  It could mean private law, but basically some kind of institutionalized, legally recognized relationship, that is, a right to control a given resource.  So I think to be careful, we need to think most of the time of property as the ownership right in a resource, not the resource that is owned.  And this usage sort of goes back to the traditional usage of the word property, which has been used for hundreds of years in liberal thought, in classical liberal thought. 00:05:52 Richard Overton in 1646 put it this way, talking about self-ownership: “To every individual in nature, is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped; for everyone as he is himself, so he hath a self propriety, else he not be himself.”  So you see the propriety is sort of like a proprietorship or ownership over yourself.  It’s not yourself.  It’s the ownership over yourself. 00:06:20 And John Locke in 1690 in his Second Treatise of Government has this classic formulation.  Though the Earth, and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person, and nobody has any right to it but himself.  So we need to think of property as the relationship between an actor or an agent, that is, basically a human being, and some scarce resource, including his own body, which is also a scarce resource.  So property answers the question who has the right to control this resource.  It’s not who has the actual control of the resource.  Actual control can be thought of as mere possession or – so think of Crusoe on a desert island. 00:07:07 He would actually have control of resources that he employs as means in his actions, but he really wouldn’t have ownership because he wouldn’t have any legal right, because a legal right is something that other people can respect.  So the legal right is more of a social concept, which is compatible, by the with way, with Ayn Rand’s view of rights as social sort of devices. 00:07:32 Now, there’s a really good definition by A.N. Yiannopoulus.  He is one of the world’s leading civil law scholars.  He’s in Louisiana.  The civil law is one of the two great legal systems in the world, the common law, which is in England and many of the former commonwealth or former commonwealth countries like most of the US, most of Canada, etc.  And then the other great legal system is that in the continent, so it’s sometimes called the continental system in Europe and also in Louisiana in America for historical reasons and in Quebec in Canada and Scotland to a degree actually, in England.  That’s called the civil law or code-based systems. 00:08:20 00:08:24 And Yiannopoulos – now, he’s not a libertarian, but it’s striking how compatible his analysis is with the Austrian libertarian way of looking at property.  As he defines it, his treatise, which actually I’ll show you.  I love this.  This is [indiscernible_00:08:44].  It’s the civil law theories from Louisiana, property, fantastic, very expensive books, but they’re great.  So this is this book here, such great works of scholarship.  In any case, he defines it as I have it on the page here.  I won’t read the whole thing, but basically I’ll read part of it.  Property is the exclusive right to control an economic good. 00:09:04 It’s the concept that refers to the rights and obligations that have to do with the relations of man with respect to things of value, and he even goes into here about scarcity.  He says that some things are needed, and because of the demand on them, they become scarce, and then laws help govern the use of these things.  And then he says property rights are a direct and immediate authority over a thing. 00:09:28 Now, authority is sort of a loaded normative term, which means a legally recognized authority or right to control.  He has another nice, compact expression at the bottom of the page here, on page five slide five.  Ownership is the – I’m sorry.  Possession – ownership is the right to control, or you can think of the right to possess by it where a mere possession is the factual authority that someone has over a thing.  So even a thief would have temporary possession over a car he stole, for example, but he wouldn’t have the right to control it.  He would just have actual or the factual authority but not the legally recognized authority.  So that’s how we need to think of property, and this is how Hans Hoppe thinks about it throughout his work. 00:10:18 Now, let’s continue with what we were talking about last time about homesteading.  So homesteading, or sometimes called original appropriation, would be assigning ownership.  Hold on a second.  Ethan, would you get that for me?  It’s right there behind you.  Assigning ownership to something that was previously unowned, a scarce resource that was unowned.  Hold on a second.  Okay, based upon a certain link, an objective link between the owner and the resource,