Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a name to reckon with. He has for over forty years made outstanding contributions to Austrian economics, philosophy, history, and sociology, all from a Rothbardian perspective. Murray Rothbard was his great mentor and friend, and no one among his Rothbardian contemporaries has had so wide a public impact.
For this reason, the appearance of a second expanded edition of Hoppe’s indispensable collection The Great Fiction will be welcomed by all readers interested in the theoretical foundations of a free society. This edition has seven newly added chapters. Originally published in 2012, it has never had the audience it truly deserved and it comes at a time now when ideas are more important than ever.
The title of course comes from Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, the great nineteenth-century French economic journalist and liberal. Bastiat gave us “The Great Fiction” to describe the government mechanisms by which people attempt to live at the expense of others. The state is always present in Hoppe’s work, whether front and center or lurking in the background. Hoppe’s subtitle, Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline gives an unsubtle clue as to what readers should expect: a damning indictment of the political world and its twenty-first-century managerial superstates.
In Hoppe’s world, the state is a wholly decivilizing institution: a predator rather than protector, a threat to property and peace. Markets and entrepreneurs produce goods, governments produce “bads”: taxation (theft), regulation (semi-ownership, thus semi-socialism), devalued money (central banks), war (defense), injustice (state courts and police), and the ruinous effects of high time preference (democracy).
Like Bastiat, Hoppe has no patience for obscuring or soft-pedaling the realities of our political world.
This book is for anyone interested in the foundations of a free society.