This review is from: Democracy--The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (Hardcover)
Jack Rain, a reviewer on another site, used the phrase above to describe this book, and I unhesitatingly appropriate it for my review because it is so dead-on accurate. This is a very, very good, and very, very important, book. It's also a strong argument for the author's elevation to the pantheon of pro-freedom writers and philosophers, alongside Mises, Rothbard, Spooner, de Jasay, and a select few others.I have to admit that I found the first two chapters, especially, to be tough reading, and had to work through them several times. The economic analysis in the sections on time preference, for example -- while the outline of the argument becomes clear soon enough -- need extra time for all the shadings and implications to fall into place.After that, though, the truly important work begins, as Hoppe is engaged in nothing less than (to use his own words from a slightly different context) "an ideological campaign of delegitimizing the idea and institution of democratic government." In so doing, he undertakes a two-pronged approach of both demonstrating the failures of democracy (failures that are part of the very nature of democracy, and therefore irreparable) and the superiority of "natural order" -- a condition known by many other names too, including anarcho-capitalism and individualist or free-market anarchism.
Personally, I responded most strongly to Hoppe's argument that "conservatives today must be antistatist libertarians and, equally important, [that] libertarians must be conservatives" [p. 189]. In so arguing, Hoppe gives us a thorough and revealing deconstruction of modern "conservatism" (so-called), showing how many self-styled conservatives are in fact merely the right wing of social democracy. He convincingly links the Buchananites, on the other hand, to "social nationalism or national socialism" (p. 192). In either case, the neo-cons, the Buchanan brigades, and also the so-called Christian Right have, in Hoppe's eyes, "not a trace of principled antistatism."
Libertarians shouldn't start feeling too smug, however. Hoppe also calls for principled antistatists to retake libertarianism from the "lifestyle libertarians," who see antistatism as just one part of a comprehensive revolt against all social order and bourgeois culture (these folks were devastatingly described by Rothbard as "modal libertarians" or MLs -- a description Hoppe reprints in a footnote). He also targets "left libertarians" like the Cato Institute and Reason magazine, whose leading lights throw in the towel on the key question of State legitimacy, revel in the glamour and importance of life Inside the Beltway, and are reduced to arguing for reductions on the margin of an ever-expanding Leviathan.
Hoppe's final chapter, "On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for Revolution," expands on the philosophical basis for his earlier-defined strategy of personal secession. (It's important to note that Hoppe's "revolution" explicitly and firmly rejects violence: "[I]t is not necessary to take [government] over, to engage in violent battle against it, or even to lay hands on one's rulers. In fact, to do so would only reaffirm the principle of compulsion and aggressive violence underlying the current system and inevitably lead to the replacement of one government or tyrant by another. To the contrary, it is only necessary that one decide to withdraw from the compulsory union and reassume one's right to self protection. Indeed, it is essential that one proceed in no other way than by peaceful secession and noncooperation" [p. 91].)
This book now occupies a place of honor on my freedom bookshelf. But more than that, it's a reference I will return to (and already have returned to) often. To borrow from yet another review (Schumann's of Chopin, this time): "Hats off, gentlemen -- a genius!"
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