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.