| Title | : | A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 144 |
| Publication | : | First published March 18, 2015 |
As always, Dr. Hoppe addresses the fundamental questions as only he can. How do family and social bonds develop? Why is the concept of private property so vitally important to human flourishing? What made the leap from a Malthusian subsistence society to an industrial society possible? How did we devolve from aristocracy to monarchy to social democratic welfare states? And how did modern central governments become the all-powerful rulers over nearly every aspect of our lives?
Dr. Hoppe examines and answers all of these often thorny questions without resorting to platitudes or bowdlerized history. This is Hoppe at his best: calmly and methodically skewering sacred cows.
A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline Reviews
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فكرت في ترك هذا الكتاب بعد قراءة الربع الأول منه بسبب أفكاره التي وجدتها استفزازية، لكنني قررت المضي فيه من باب أن قراءة ما يتفق مع وجهة نظرك فقط هو نوع من الانغلاق والضعف، لا ضير في تحدي أفكارك الخاصة. يؤسس الكاتب لنظريته بسرد تاريخي لتطور المجتمعات البشرية، ويعزو التفاوت في التقدم الاقتصادي والاجتماعي في الأصل إلى فروقات بيولوجية تطورية وهي الفكرة التي وجدتها مستفزة ومجحفة وتشكل أساسًا مريحًا للعنصرية والظلم الاجتماعي. أقر بأن البيولوجيا لا تعترف بالمساواة، وليست صائبة سياسيًا (Politically incorrect)، وأن الفروقات الطبيعية موجودة، لكن حتى النظرية التي بنى الكاتب عليها فكرته عن أسباب هذه الفروقات الطبيعية في الذكاء والتقدم البشري تبقى نظرية قابلة للضحد والطعن، فكيف تبني عليها نظرية قد تعني تفضيل سكان منطقة جغرافية من الأرض على غيرهم؟ ثم إن تصوير التكوين البيولوجي كحكم حتمي ليس دقيقًا، والتفاوت الناتج عن أمور بيولوجية ليس تفاوتًا دائمًا وحاسمًا بالضرورة في ظل الظروف والعوامل الأخرى والوعي البشري. يتحدث بإسهاب أيضًا عن نظريات مالتوس حول نمو السكان وعلاقة ذلك بالنمو الاقتصادي. لا شك أن الزيادة الكبيرة في عدد السكان قد تكون لها تداعيات سلبية على الاقتصاد، لكن بالنظر إلى توزيع الثروة في العالم، وكيف يمكن لشخص واحد أن يملك ما يكفي آلاف الأشخاص، يصبح الكلام عن كون عدد السكان هو السبب في تردي الوضع الاقتصادي للأفراد والمجتمعات غير مقنع. ثم يصل الكاتب إلى بيت القصيد ورسالته الأهم في الكتاب وهي رفضه للدولة المركزية كنظام لحكم المجتمعات، وخاصة الدولة الديمقراطية. من باب الإنصاف، كانت هناك ممالك ناجحة أكثر عبر التاريخ مما كانت هناك دول ديمقراطية ناجحة، لكن الكاتب يرفض كل أشكال الدولة من ملكية وديمقراطية، وإن كان يرى الملكية أقل شرًا كون الملك يكون من "النخبة الطبيعية" على حد تعبيره، بينما المسؤولون المنتخبون ديمقراطيًا هم من الدهماء الذين يتمتعون بقدرات على التحريض والتأثير في الناس فقط وليست لهم أي ميزات أو إنجازات حقيقية. ما البديل؟ يرى الكاتب أن الإقطاع هو النظام الأمثل - على عيوبه- وأن تركز السلطة في يد جهة واحدة تتولى حماية الأفراد وفرض القانون سيؤدي حتمًا إلى الفساد واستغلال السلطة. من باب الإنصاف أيضًا، تبقى الديمقراطية وكل أشكال الحكم تجارب بشرية لا يمكن الجزم بأن أيًا منها هو الأمثل، لكن النظرية التي يطرحها الكاتب بحماس بتوزيع السلطة على أصحاب الملكيات الخاصة وإعطاء الأفراد حرية اختيار من يوفر لهم الحماية ومن يضع لهم القوانين الخاصة بهم لا يبدو الطريق الأمثل نحو حفظ الحقوق أو تحقيق العدالة الاجتماعية. الملخص، المشاهدات والأحداث على أرض الواقع تجعل نظرياته والمفاهيم التي بنى عليها هذه النظريات غير مقنعة إلا لمن يبحث عن سبب يبرر شعوره بالفوقية والأحقية ويسوغ أفكاره العنصرية.
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De um modo resumido, este livro conta a história do homem desde o começo do seu surgimento, a luta para sua sobrevivência com sua caça predatória onde tinham que sempre estar mudando de lugar pois o alimento ficava escasso com o aumento da população.
Para Hoppe a inteligência é genética e ela foi essencial no desenvolvimento da história humana.
Os grupos com maior QI puderam perceber que essa situação não poderia continuar assim, criando então a agricultura, onde procuravam repor os alimentos que consumiam.Depois criaram a família, a propriedade privada, onde cada um tinha a responsabilidade de cuidar do seu espaço, por fim culminando na revolução industrial onde realmente se dá início e se resolve de uma vez o problema da humanidade em termos de produção e consumo.
Hoppe também fala sobre a monarquia feudal,onde o rei tinha poderes limitados, da monarquia absolutista onde os reis tinham poderes ilimitados e da monarquia constitucional ,que ele considera a pior de todas por legalizar de uma vez o atos predatórios dos reis.
Mas o que Hoppe critica realmente é o surgimento da democracia,onde há o confisco das propriedades , você possui um bem mas é o estado que controla.
Na monarquia o rei , como teria que deixar o seu reino para seu sucessor, cuidava das finanças ,da propriedade , na democracia , como todos podem se candidatar , o estado não é de ninguém mas é explorado por todos. O governante não irá se preocupar com os bens, com a condição econômica do estado , porque sua passagem é transitória, ele procurará roubar o máximo que puder, pois não tem nenhum compromisso com seu sucessor.
Boa leitura, esse livro agregou muito conhecimento em uma área que era falho. -
Hans-Hermann Hoppe!, they cried. Hans-Hermann Hoppe! They told me that if I read his books, it would change my life. This is not the first time I have heard that promise; it has been made to me of many books, from Frédéric Bastiat’s "The Law" to Ayn Rand’s "Atlas Shrugged." The promise has always failed me, but each fresh tomorrow brings the possibility that next time, it will not. Thus, I read this book, which aspires to give the history of man in one hundred and fifty pages, as an introduction to Hoppe’s thought. It was interesting enough, but I have gone away sad, for that looked-for tomorrow is not today.
Oh, as far as I can tell, I largely agree politically with Hoppe, who is alive and still writing, though he seems to have written less than I would have thought, given how often he is mentioned among circles on the Right. A professor at UNLV, he has been intermittently persecuted for speaking his opinionated mind, among other things for making the unexceptional and obvious point (also made by Niall Ferguson) that homosexuals have less investment in society than, and different perspectives from, normal people. He is particularly known for attacking democracy as inferior to monarchy on economic (and therefore, to him, moral) grounds, a claim I first read of in George Hawley’s fantastic "Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism," and while he discusses that claim in this book, he has written another whole book on it, which I am planning to read. My main reservation about Hoppe, which could be overcome, is that a strong smell of ideologue rises from everything Hoppe writes in this short collection of three essays.
I have often noticed ideology is a besetting sin of the hardcore libertarians. And hardcore libertarian is what Hoppe is. The Mises Institute published this book, and Lew Rockwell wrote the Foreword. Just in case we’re unclear, the subtitle is “An Austro-Libertarian Reconstruction.” Very frequently, Hoppe acknowledges his tremendous debt to Ludwig von Mises or to Murray Rothbard (or both), and when he departs from their orthodoxy, he bows his head to them first, as heroes leaving the Last Redoubt of Men in William Hope Hodgson’s classic "The Night Land" submitted themselves to the Monstruwacans, to be cleansed before leaving their protection and confronting the horrors beyond. All this is, in case we miss it, outlined with crystalline, lime-lit specificity up front in the Introduction, where Hoppe summarizes, “What distinguishes my studies is the fact that they explain and interpret the history of man from the conceptual vantage point of Austro-Libertarianism: with the background knowledge of praxeology (economics) and of libertarianism (ethics).” For the former, it is Mises; for the latter, it is Rothbard.
I have nothing against Mises or Rothbard. Frankly, I know little about them. Theirs are also on the list of books that I am told will change my life; I have copies already of "Human Action" and "Ethics of Liberty," though so far they gather dust. I’m just always a little, or a lot, wary when informed that The Truth has been discovered by This Specific Modern Man, and I should sit still, open my mind, and get ready to receive. Exacerbating my mistrust, like all libertarians, Hoppe’s primary frame of viewing human society is economic; gain and exchange, never transcendence, virtue, or valor. Unlike Phlebas the Phoenician, Hoppe does not forget the profit and the loss. In fact, so far as I have read, that’s most all he ever thinks about.
This book is exactly what it claims to be, a “short history of man.” It is divided into three chapters: “On the Origin of Private Property and the Family”; “From the Malthusian Trap to the Industrial Revolution”; and “From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy.” In the first chapter, like Yuval Noah Harari in "Sapiens", Hoppe is much exercised by the so-called Cognitive Revolution, wherein homo sapiens, already homo sapiens, apparently suddenly developed the capacity for abstract thought and speech. Fair enough, although my confidence was undermined by errors, such as Hoppe telling us incorrectly that the Flores Island “hobbits,” genetically identified as homo floresiensis, are homo erectus. He also relies heavily on Luigi Cavalli-Sforza’s claims about the movements of humans in pre-history, which as David Reich has recently shown, have been made obsolete by genetic research. That said, these are not central items, and Hoppe has worthwhile points to make about hunter-gatherer societies. His focus, as befits his frame, is property. He observes that hunter-gatherers were probably quite egalitarian, in terms of sharing property, but that doesn’t mean that there was much individual autonomy. To a modern leftist, those two things go hand-in-hand, but there is no reason they should, and in fact communitarianism, egalitarian or not, implies lack of individual autonomy, a point I intend to expand upon in a separate analysis.
Quickly Hoppe reaches his core point, which is that hunter-gatherers were necessarily parasites, mere consumers, not producers. The necessary result was small populations, kept low by warfare and migration. While within a group, of no more than around one hundred and fifty people, cooperation was possible based on division of labor, no cooperation between groups was possible, since cooperation is only possible if both groups are producers with something to trade (though Hoppe ignores the trade in women, common in many primitive societies). Even intra-group cooperation was limited by the law of diminishing returns—exemplified here by the Malthusian Trap, that eventually more inputs to labor, in the form of more people, diminishes per capita return. So far, a fairly ordinary history, although Hoppe shows subtle notes of the obsession with the genetics of intelligence that later become more prominent. In any case, driven by these spurs and limitations, and reacting to changing climactic conditions, humanity spread around the globe.
The big change was the Agricultural Revolution, what Hoppe calls the Neolithic Revolution. This, no surprise, he views through the lens of who was deemed to own “ground land” when in human history, asserting that the key step in farming was the ownership of land, a change from the former mere parasitism of humans. Similarly, with animals. This alleviated the effects of diminishing returns to labor and allowed more people to exist. (I suspect that this analysis is meant as a response to other analyses, presumably Marxist ones, but I don’t know enough about it to say, and Hoppe does not say either.)
We then turn to social structure. According to Hoppe, the family had never existed before the reduction of land to ownership, because for hunter-gatherers, as he puts it, both the benefits and costs of additional offspring were socialized. Thus, everybody had “group marriage,” like a permanent, smellier version of a 1970s key party. When agriculture arrived, though, it made sense for individuals to capture the benefits of more offspring (and pay the costs), since, no longer being mere parasites, they could expect a return on investment in creating more people. Hoppe concludes that this new social organization was economically superior, encouraging production and preventing free-riding, and so it spread, displacing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Now, this claim that the family is of recent origin is highly controversial. It’s obviously nearly impossible to get archaeological information on what the social arrangements of hunter-gatherers were, and modern advocates of free love have for quite a long time been happy to believe laughable things about primitive societies if they fit preconceived notions (most famously in the case of Margaret Mead, hoodwinked by the Samoans). Thus, you would think that Hoppe would offer strong evidence for this thesis, to reinforce his analysis. Nope. We are instead referred, extensively, to mainly one source—Friedrich Engels, writing in 1884. The mind boggles. In fairness, Hoppe buttresses Engels with one other source—some guy named Lewis H. Morgan, writing in 1871. Hoppe even notes Engels’s conflict of interest, that he eagerly wanted to promote free love, but still buys what he’s selling, without saying why, or adverting to the century and a half that has passed since. OK, then. And that’s the end of the chapter.
In the next chapter, Hoppe turns to the creation of the modern world, something on which it is easier to deliver concrete evidence. He begins with a reiteration and expansion of his earlier discussion of the Malthusian Trap, citing among others Gregory Clark for the data showing that only in the Industrial Revolution did (part of) humanity escape. The causes of this, the Great Divergence, are hotly debated, but Hoppe does not address various theories, merely noting that “the standard answer among economists,” by which he means Mises and Rothbard, is that private property rights had developed by the late eighteenth century enough to permit this takeoff. With due apologies to his mentors, Hoppe disagrees.
The core of his disagreement, that Mises and Rothbard are factually wrong, is pretty obviously correct. Property rights were, in most of Western Europe and particularly in England, quite firmly established by around A.D. 1200, or earlier—better, Hoppe claims, that today, which is probably true, though more variation existed in earlier times. (Films like "Braveheart" and many others have given the average person a grossly false idea of the amount of chaos and lack of rule of law in European medieval times. It’s as if people in A.D. 2400 used "Saving Private Ryan" to judge the average condition of Europe since 1800.) Certainly, private property is necessary to the takeoff, but not sufficient.
Hoppe’s explanation is economic, of course, but with a gloss of science. It is that eventually some people got smarter, because “it takes time to breed intelligence,” and only then could they kick-start the Industrial Revolution. What led to the Industrial Revolution was technology invention, by intelligent people, and also that technology gave something for people to invest surpluses in, namely expansion. No more detail is offered; Hoppe appears to think that intelligence self-evidently self-executes awesomeness. As to the origin of this purported increase in intelligence in some human populations, Hoppe offers a potted and unoriginal explanation, combining Toynbee’s observations that too-easy or too-hard climates produce little forward movement for humanity, with offerings from controversial modern scientists (notably Richard Lynn) who claim to find gradients in IQ, lowering from north to south. His conclusion is that as a result of challenge-and-response some people, most of all Europeans, became smarter, and thereby, through some inevitable mechanism, escaped the Malthusian Trap.
As I have said elsewhere, questions of intelligence across human populations don’t exercise me; I think that any society simply has to work with the different types of people that make up that society, or other societies. But Hoppe’s reasoning is not remotely convincing. Narrowly focusing on Europe, there is exactly zero evidence that in earlier times Europeans were less intelligent than now, or than in 1750, and much reason to believe the contrary. Nor could there be evidence—people like Lynn purport to offer evidence about modern populations, but neither Stanford nor Binet was wandering around Europe in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the idea that somehow people reached a step-function tipping point of intelligence in 1750 doesn’t make any sense. Why a step-function? If intelligence is normally distributed, and increasing over time, shouldn’t invention increase linearly over time? None of this makes any sense, really. I’m willing to believe that more intelligence, all other things being equal, leads to more progress over time, but Hoppe jumps from that to a set of totally unsupported premises and conclusions.
But Hoppe’s point in all this is not just history; it is to attack the institution of the State. He and Albert Jay Nock would get along well. (No doubt Hoppe has a tentacled voodoo doll in his office, labeled “The State,” which he sticks with pins when he’s bored.) His claim is that in a pre-Malthusian society, the state is merely a type of pest, self-limiting since there is only so much the host of a parasite can take. But in a post-Malthusian society, the state has no natural limit, for if per capita output keeps going up, the state can “continuously grow without lowering the per capita income and reducing the population number,” thereby becoming “a permanent drag on the economy and per capita incomes.” Worse, the post-Malthusian state allows the stupid people to breed by removing the tie between getting money and intelligence, creating dysgenics, rather than Hoppe’s desired eugenics, and so the “population stock becomes increasingly worse.”
Finally, in the third chapter, we get the meat of Hoppe’s political claims, why democracy is a terrible system and what we should install instead. I can certainly get one hundred percent behind democracy being terrible. On the other hand, the reader’s confidence in Hoppe’s analysis is eroded in the first paragraph, when we are instructed that all human conflicts result from only one cause, the “scarcity of goods.” This is self-evidently false; Hoppe ignores that man is not homo economicus. Did Achilles lack goods? Hoppe then declaims that the modern state, arbiter of all things and judge in its own cause, is a contradiction, and only an insane person would submit to it, in the same way only an insane person would agree that someone with whom he has a conflict should assume all power over him. This suggests that Hoppe adheres to some type of contractual theory of the origin of the state. But that’s not right; it’s much more organic that that, in Hoppe’s narration.
In Hoppe’s reconstruction, the natural human default is a system where what each person owns is clear and agreed-upon. If that were possible, permanent total peace and harmony would automatically result. Of course, it’s not possible, since disputes always arise about who own what. To settle these disputes, someone has to decide somehow—that is, in Hoppe’s words, someone has to discover the law, a valid exercise, as opposed to make new law, an inherently illegitimate exercise. In Hoppe’s telling, the progression from earlier forms of government to the modern liberal democratic state (we will ignore here whether the modern Western state is actually either liberal or democratic) is a story of decay, not progress. Hoppe even inverts the claim, most forcefully made by Steven Pinker, that progress is shown by us being riches. Rather, he says that we would be far richer if we had stayed with an earlier system, namely mixed government consisting of an aristocracy combined with elective monarchy. Such a system is best at discovering the law in a way that preserves everyone’s property.
Hoppe observes that to decide disputes outside of a government framework, people most often turn to other people (they could turn to violence, and sometimes do, but that’s expensive). Not just random ones, though—to those with “intellectual ability and character,” whose decisions are more likely to be sound and more likely to be respected by everyone. Such people are the “natural aristocracy.” “Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, bravery, or a combination thereof, some individuals come to possess more authority than others and their opinion and judgment commands widespread respect.” Such authority tends to accumulate in families, “because of selective mating and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance.” As a result, “It is the leaders of the noble families who generally act as judges and peacemakers, often free of charge, out of a sense of civic duty. In fact, this phenomenon can still be observed today, in every small community.”
Critically, these decision-makers, given authority to decide disputes, are still under the laws like everyone else. They can “only apply law, not make it.” This distinguishes them from the state. For more details, Hoppe refers us to another book of his, "Democracy: The God That Failed". In essence, though, he recommends that society be structured as an idealized version of early medieval Western Europe, where (an elected and removable) king and aristocracy ruled jointly, unable to tax without consent and unable to make new law, which was a contradiction in terms. It’s not that Hoppe says this system was perfect; it was merely “a natural order,” unlike modern orders. Most importantly, the king maximized the value of the society, in the interests of benefiting himself in the long-term (as well as, potentially, his heirs). That is, in Hoppe’s terms, he has a “time preference” that weights the future.
This system went to hell, though, when “feudal and then constitutional kings” replaced the elective kings. These new kings made new law, arrogated to themselves the unilateral ability to tax, and in effect turned all private property into their own property. Moreover, the kings increased violence, since in the past the costs of violence were generally borne by those who chose to engage in it, whereas the kings could externalize the costs onto “tax-payers and draftees.” And how did the kings manage to put themselves in this position, when other men of power in the society would naturally resist? The king enlisted the benighted masses; he “aligned himself with the ‘people’ or the ‘common man.’ ” What he offered them was appeals to envy, freedom from contractual obligations, and an improved economic position that they did not earn. At the same time, he defanged the aristocrats by offering them baubles in the form of court positions (which seems like a trade they would not accept), and flattered intellectuals, so they would “produce the necessary ideological support for the king’s position as absolute ruler.” Such support took the form of falsely claiming the past was bad and imagining that the people had agreed to the king seizing property and making new laws. Here, as throughout the book, Hoppe is pithily nasty. “The demand for intellectual services is typically low, and intellectuals, almost congenitally, suffer from a greatly inflated self-image and hence are always prone to and become easily avid promoters of envy.”
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History from the anarcho-capitalist view. There are interesting theories on prehistoric man, the development of marriage, the state and the Industrial Revolution. But much of the book is concerned with the author's theories rather than what happened in the past, especially in the last section. That's because this is an essay collection rather than one book which makes it feel disjointed. The author doesn't succeed in debunking Hobbesianism or Social Contract theory. The author argues that historiography in monarchy and democracy developed to justify itself by arguing for things that weren't true. This is the weakest part of the book and an essay on that historiography would have served much better. Rather, the explanations provided by the historians that the author objects to ideologically are grounded in the facts of the matter. I suggest the works of
Steven Pinker and
Ian Morris for that. -
While this book was extremely well written and the author gives a logical explanation of how family, social bonds and private properties came into existence and how we escaped the Malthusian trap I could not buy his argument on how aristocracy is better than democracy. I agree that the economic slavery we see today is just as bad as serfdom, but he seemed hell bent on not seeing that nobles are also as susceptible to corruption and tyranny as politicians in a democracy and how class differences back in those days can be perceived as more free is beyond me. I also felt that the book was incomplete as it focused on so little.
Despite that it was a thought provoking and interesting read. -
9.75/10.
Hoppe throws off public opinion, venturing his way through the constraints of political correctness to write a short but masterful exposition of how humans went from hunter-gatherer existence (complete consumption) to farming and animal cultivation (producing more, although incomes remain constant) to the industrial revolution (living standards shoot up exponentially) to our own states feeding off of that surplus ever more (especially in modern democracies).
The first two essays of this collection (how humans [temporarily] escaped from Malthus's trap) have a very intelligent structure. First, Hoppe lays out the a priori considerations using praexeology to determine the structure of human action in our natural state. Then he provides the historical and statistical data to back it up. It really is a "short history of man"! And, of all the economists I know, Hoppe is the only one to look at the empirical and historical data of IQ and apply it to human economic history, including the neolithic and industrial revolutions.
Austrian economists like Hoppe use a priori logic about human action for most of their reasoning, which requires a sharp mind suited to abstraction in order to understand. No doubt, this book requires a lot of mental effort. However, the explanatory power of this book renders the effort most worthwhile, just like the triumph one feels after climbing a mountain is infinitely worth the struggle of climbing to its apex.
The value of this book appreciates when you take a step back and realize how much you have learned; how you can make logical observations about the structure of human life in certain periods; how you can explain why major transitions in human evolution happened; and how you can explain how the modern world has gone utterly, utterly wrong.
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One institution that Hoppe illuminates is the economic nature of the family. Before the family was instituted after the invention of farming, children were collectively raised within the band of 15-40 hunter-gatherers, with many dying in childhood (40% of children died in childhood, and 50% did not reproduce in adulthood). But the problem with this is that it de-incentivizes "keeping your pants up", as Hoppe says. Because you and your partner do not directly have to raise your child, the economic cost of its upbringing is socialized, thereby leading to over-reproduction. This, in turn, is what keeps humanity in the Malthusian trap, because the number of people rapidly multiply to consume all surpluses.
But once the family comes in, the cost of the child is privatized to the family so that the bread-winner must feed it bread or else the child will die. The family is also bad for the reproductive prospects of women, because they cannot hypergamously mate with Alpha Male #1 anymore, but must settle for a male in similar social stature and attractiveness to them. This is because, in a monogamous society, the top males and females will go together, taking themselves both out of the sexual marketplace. When it gets down to a medium value female in the sexual marketplace, she will have to pair with a similar value.
Furthermore, the family secures civilization by appeasing these middling males. If the top male is able to have sex with nearly all females, then the males in the middle are going to get angry that they cannot pass on their genes. And then they may gang up and create mini civil wars within their bands or societies. But once you pair nearly every male with a female of equal attractiveness, then the males can become satisfied and not go around like members of a gang.
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The key point about hunter-gatherer societies is that they did not produce any goods. They only consumed the natural resources around them: plants and animals. Once their societies had spread throughout the world, a population maximum had been reached (about 4 million). The only way to escape out of this permanent consumption is to have a low time preference (saving for the future) and to be smart enough to know that through roundabout production methods (farming, taming animals) you will get more food.
Such is the roots of farming. But farming could only arise in a sufficiently intelligent population. However, it also required a large enough season to grow the crops. Because of these two factors, we find farming arising in about the same latitude around the world. Hoppe reminds up that, the further from the equator humans get, the more environmental hardships they must face. The more they must prepare for adverse conditions, for long winters, for long dry spells, and for uncertain and wildly varying weather. Instead of having constant rain all year long, instead of having temperatures comfortable all year (70-85 degrees Fahrenheit), there will be many hardship for which one must plan for. From this simple fact, we can logically and empirically refute the egalitarian.
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The legal system which makes the most logical sense is one with an unchanging sense of the law, which is eternal because it is the natural law. The natural law is simply, "he who first makes use of or finds a natural good, owns that good; he who takes a good without consent of the initial owner must give it back". Law must be deciding on the facts of the case, not legislating new law. New legislation destroys law, because legislation is made by man, and is furthermore now made under compulsion today. What a stupid idea to give our government and its caretakers the power to make the laws and enforce them without our consent! Pause; and think about how stupid that is. That is how all monopolies on law are run.
The previous way of how it worked (early feudal era) was that the natural aristocracy (those best in intelligence, morality, dignity, and justice) was appealed to apply the natural law in cases. There may have been a "best man" of this nobility (a king), but he still did not make laws, but only apply the law to cases. If he was unjust, he could be nullified of any power to apply the law by other members of the nobility. Any taxation or payment of the people which he or the natural aristocracy wanted must be gotten by express consent of the people, by asking them directly.
The problem is when a king said, "I shall have a monopoly on justice", "all shall come to me and my will must be enforced". How did such a thing happen? As all terrible things happen in history: by appealing to the people, and using the intellectuals in support of such a terrible choice. The king could easily say, "People, I will forgive your debts; the yoke of the aristocracy will render under my just sword". Then the next step is to employ the intellectuals (always resentful at how they are not desired) to justify the monopolization of justice. Eventually, the intellectuals are so good that they convince us all that constitution are great things of the past, when in reality a constitution makes nearly eternal the unilateral ability of the state to legislate and enforce taxation and exploitation. And remember, anyone who dissents against these laws made by the state, must resort to a trial with an arbiter of . . . the state! What fun!
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There is lots more in this book; it is packed full of logical observations and interesting facts about the development of Homo sapiens, although I will end my review here. I would recommend Hoppe's work to all. -
الكتاب هو دراسه في أصل الملكية شبيه بكتاب إنجلز أصل العائلة والملكية الخاصة والعامة بيبتدي بشرح سيكولوجية الإنسان البدائي وبيقارنه بسلوك الهومو اركتوس والنيادرتال وبيشرح ازاي كانوا بيعيشوا وبيتعاملوا مع الملكية في فترة الصيد ووصف فترة الملكية العامة أثناء فترة الصيد بالشيوعية البدائية زي إنجلز ، وبعدها بدأ يتكلم عن بداية الثورة النيوليثية وأكتشاف الزراعة وتطور وعي الإنساان وفكره وتربيته للحيوانات وتأثيره علي تطور أنواع زي الكلاب إلخ ، بعدها بدأ يتكلم عن محدودية الإنتاج الزراعي وتكوين الثورة الصناعية واتكلم عن مميزاتها وعيوبها ، بعدها اتكلم عن سيكولوجية النظام الإقطاعي وأصل الملكية وقارنها بالنظام الديمقراطي ، كمان اتكلم عن أصل الدولة . وكان بيهاجم النظام الديمقراطي بقوة والدولة وميله للأناركية ، كتاب عجبني الصراحة واستفدت منه جامد .
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Hoppe is a student of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard, and is influenced by their analysis of society, economics and history. And while these thinkers were undoubtedly occasionally very conservative, Hoppe outdoes them both in his reactionary views. This book is a concise exposition of a hyperconservative Austro-libertarian version of man's history, of its "progress and decline" (the latter word always a sure mark of a conservative writer). Logically, and carefully, he presents his appeal to a revisionist history, in which egalitarianism is replaced by a "natural aristocratic elite", democracy by monarchy or anarchy, value pluralism by a strict conservative ethos that worships (non-democratic) power and (non-political) money, equality between the sexes and races by a sexist and racist agenda of the natural superiority of capitalist white men. As such, Hoppe's appeal to science and history ends up in a strange, unwelcome, unpopular place. Hoppe wishes to reform modern capitalism into a neo-feudal world order of nobles and big businessmen.
To this end, he presents a non-original anthropological account of the origins of private property, and weaves this into a theory of cultural development, according to which racial distinctions of intelligence and time preference (a technical term that means the propensity to save and invest - when low - or to consume and waste - when "high") are the reason for the undoubted economic superiority of the White Man of Europe. While this remains a plausible hypothesis, Hoppe does not provide good evidence for it, unfortunately. The notion that agriculture, irrigation, the bow and arrow, and other such inventions, were literally "invented" by intelligent individuals, is somewhat contradicted by the current understanding of anthropology, according to which innovations were spread from community to community via various complex routes of trade and influence. He completely ignores the obvious fact that intelligence might play very little role, or even none at all, in differentiating cultural paths from each other. Even societies of equal intelligence could diverge very rapidly under more or less fortuitous circumstances, such as weather, ideological influences, trade routes, cultural exchange, habits of life, etc. Thus Hoppe's main argument rests on very shaky premises, indeed.
The fact that Hoppe does not see such obvious counterarguments, and is equally ignorant (or silent?) of the abuses of power under monarchies, means that his argument is either very flawed, or very dishonest, or perhaps both. The end result is a confident and occasionally compelling, and incredibly one-sided, history.
However, his analysis, while superficial at best, is clear and concise, and his arguments about monarchy and natural aristocracy, although dangerously reactionary (and I think mostly wrong), provide a fresh and unique perspective on some of the most important struggles and ideological battles of our time, including the extreme veneration of democracy, egalitarianism and "progress". Even fans of the above, just as myself, should sharpen or knives and blades by parrying with a master of controversy, a devil's advocate, like Hoppe. -
كتاب محير
لا أعلم ما هو رأيي فيه بشكل واضح
فالكتاب يقدم نظرة مختلفة للتاريخ
ويقدم نقد للديمقراطية من حيث أنها المحتكر الوحيد للقضاء والتعليم والحماية
ولكن البديل المقترح غريب ويبدو فوضويًا وبعيدًا عن الواقع -
كتاب للإقتصادي هوبه يشرح بإختصار كيفية نشوء الملكية الخاصة و العائلة عند البشر من بدايات الثورة الزراعية, ثم يتحدث عن الثورة الصناعية, ثمّ يعرض كيف تغيرت انظمة الحكم من ارستقراطية إلى الملكية و حتى الديموقراطية و نشوء الدول بمفهومها الحديث.
يعارض هوبه بشدّة النظام الديموقراطي, و يعرض في آخر الكتاب سيئاتها و بعض الطرق العملية للتغييرها كبداية و التخلص منها لاحقاً.
بغضّ النظر عن مدى قبولك و إقتناعك بالأفكار الواردة في الكتاب لكنها بلا شكّ ستجعلك تتسائل و تفكر فيما يُعتبر من البديهيات. -
Nesse breve e interessante tratado, Hoppe tenta explicar três dos principais eventos da história: a origem da propriedade privada, a origem da revolução industrial e a origem do Estado.
Traz na introdução um pensamento de que a genética de casamentos seletivos contribuiu para o sucesso da sociedade.
Explica resumidamente como que algo pode se tornar propriedade, através da causalidade e intenção do uso de algo, como a terra, para algum fim. E segue mostrando como isso foi um marco para quebrar a armadilha malthusiana primitiva, através da delimitação de propriedade.
Escreve sobre a "invenção" da família, quando deixou-se de haver um "amor livre", com a migração para unidades monogâmicas e poligâmicas, e seus incentivos para o aumento da produtividade geral da sociedade.
Aponta o aumento da inteligência como fator predominante para as revoluções neolíticas e industrial, mas é um fator que requer tempo de maturação. Quer colocar a "importância" do controle de natalidade, mas falta frisar que é uma balança, que ainda que seja útil pra manter as condições vigentes de renda per capta, quanto mais gente no mundo, mais chance de desenvolvimento de novas tecnologias, que podem ser disruptivas o suficiente, como na revolução industrial, para dar um basta na armadilha malthusiana.
Faz seu longo argumento para tentar justificar que a seleção natural é que determinou o sucesso econômico/reprodutivo, favorecendo o hemisfério norte, onde houve mais dificuldades climáticas, por isso mais inteligência.
Na última parte é onde Hoppe brilha, mostrando o golpe contra a aristocracia e elites naturais, apontando que na época dos reis feudais, se havia uma proteção muito maior da propriedade privada, e em especial não havia monopólio da justiça, nem mesmo um legislador. E que os "intelectuais", pouco demandados até então, ganharam um poder de intelectuais da corte, moldando a cabeça do povo em ficções como "contrato social".
Por último, o rei se transformou em rei constitucional, onde a constituição, analisa corretamente Hoppe, protegia não as pessoas do rei, e sim o rei das pessoas. Logo em seguida o rei também sofre um golpe através dos intelectuais, que forçaram a transição de monarquia para democracia.
Mostra que na democracia, a verdadeira elite são os plutocratas, uma subclasse dos super-ricos, que forçam subsídios, contratos estatais e leis que os protegem da concorrência, através de lobby. Na democracia também surgem guerras totais, em detrimento das guerras privadas dos reis medievais, por conta da possibilidade de externalizar os custos.
Prevê um colapso econômico quanto mais perto do governo global, estimulando novamente tendências descentralizadoras e separatismo.
Tempo estimado de leitura: 3h. -
Hoppe is a thought-provoking author, but here he makes some pretty wild assumptions about the history of man that are not well backed-up, and in my opinion he has an overly romantic, not very fact-based view of how free feudal Europe actually was.
There are basically two premises in the book: One, that the reason it took so long to escape from the Malthusian trap of overpopulation is that mankind had not been bred into sufficient intelligence. And two, that feudal aristocracy is freer and more natural than either monarchy or democracy.
The first claim is interesting, though somewhat dubious. I think the ancient Greeks and Romans would dispute that they were genetically too dumb to prosper. Hoppe also claims that until recently, survival of the fittest favored the most intelligent humans. But it has always been the case that the poorest, least educated people reproduce at a faster rate than the richest, most educated.
I don't know enough Medieval history to dispute the second claim, but I require a lot more convincing before I will accept that taxes under feudal lords were paid "voluntarily" as Hoppe asserts.
This should have been a longer book with the time taken for him to support Hoppe's claims with better evidence than is contained here. -
كتاب قصير وجميل يشبه في فكرته ما طرحه الكاتب يوفال نوح هراري او ان الاخير هو من تتبع ذات الفكرة وطرحها في كتابه الانسان العاقل، يركز على ان اليات الارتزاق هي ما تفرض نمط النظام الاجتماعي والسياسي
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هذا الكتاب إشكالي قليلاً، فهانز هيرمان هوبه لا يحب فكرة الدولة، وخصوصاً الدولة الديمقراطية، ويدعو للاخلص منها. يمكنك إذا اعتبار هذا الكتاب طرحاً ثوؤياً، لكنه لا يثور لأجل الديمقراطية بل يثور ضدها!
فالطرح المركزي في هذا الكتاب الذي هو اللادولة أو اللا دولانية، هو طرح يرى أن الدولة كيان مقيِّد للحرية ومهدد للملكية الشخصية وهدام، بل وطفيلي أيضاً. وهو طرح ينتمي إلى تيار فكري له وزنه يدعى اللبرتارية.
يتألف الكتاب من جزأين، الأول هو استعراض لتاريخ البشرية وصولا إلى حدث اختراع الدولة والحجج ضد هذا الحدث الذي يعتبره الكاتب -على عكس أغلب التأريخ المتعارف عليه- انتكاسة في التطور البشري.
أما الجزء الثاني فهو محاضرة تحاول رسم خارطة طريق -وإن بالخطوط العريضة- لكيفية الانقلاب على هذه الانتكاسة.
ولأني لا أعتقد ان الدور الأساسي لهذا الاستعراض هو تلخيص الكتاب بل هو مناقشته، لذلك سوف أركز على محاور الاختلاف مع التيار الفكري السائد ونقاط الجدل التي يثيرها هذا الكتاب.
ففي الاستعراض التاريخي لتطور البشرية، نلاحظ محورين اثنين يمكن اعتبارهما نقطتي اختلاف مع التأريخ السائد. المحور الأول هو المحاجة أن البشر غير متساويين في الذكاء، ليس كأفراد بل كجماعات، وأن هذا الاختلاف جذري وناتج عن تطور البشر في بيئات مختلفة. وحيث أن البيئات المختلفة تفرض تحديات بيئية مختلفة، فالمجموعات التي نشأت في بيئات اك��ر قسوة لكن مع إمكانية للمناورة انتجت أعلى البشر ذكاء، (تلك هي أوروبا في نظر الكاتب والتي شكلت بيئتها الباردة الوعرة تحدياً عظيما للبشر القاطنين فيها مكنهم من تطوير ذكاء يسمح لهم بأن يكونوا مبدعين). أما البيئات التي لا تسمح بأي مجال للمناورة ولو كانت صعبة فإنها لم تفلح في تطوير ذكاء سكانها بالمثل نتيجة ضعف التحديات التي يمكن لهم العمل عليها (وتلك هي إفريقيا والصحاري عموماً في نظر الكاتب، مكان نشوء الإنسان الأول). أما البيئات المريحة المعتدلة السهلة مثل منطقة الشرق الأوسط والصين مثلاً، فقد كانت مليئة بالإمكانات لكنها لا تطرح التحديات اللازمة لتطوير الإنسان المبدع الموصوف سابقاً، بل هي أتاحت الوصول إلى حلول مستقرة تمثلت في المجتمعات الزراعية التي مثلت نقلة في تاريخ البشرية لكنها توقفت هناك، عند تلك النقطة المسماة بالثورة الزراعية، ولم تتمكن بعد ذلك من التوصل إلى الرأسمالية والثورة العلمية. بالمختصر، فالمجموعات البشرية مختلفة في ذكائها لأسباب تطورية لا حيلة لها تجاهها، ولا مفر لها منها.
يمكننا هنا ملاحظة الرأي الحاد جداً والاستخدام غير المعتاد لنظرية التطور. في الحقيقة هذه ليست النقطة الوحيدة التي تتجلى فيها آراء هوبه المثيرة للجدل لكنها نقطة مهمة نظراً لكونها من أساسيات تحليله. يجب أن نذكر هنا أن هوبه شخصية خلافية فعلا وهو ما سنأتي عليه لاحقاً في تبيان طيف الأفكار الليبرتارية.
بالعودة إلى السرد التاريخي، فالمحور الثاني الذي يميز فكر هوبه عن السرد الشائع هو اعتباره اختراع الدولة حدثاً تراجعياً في تطور المجتمع البشري، واعتباره الديمقراطية أسوأ مرحلة من مراحل الدولة. وعلى عكس فكرة الذكاء المتراوح بين البشر والتي هي فكرة هوبية، فهذه النزعة ضد الدولة هي إحدى سمات المدرسة اللبرتارية عموماً.
بعد السرد التاريخي يقدم الكتاب الحجج ضد الدولة وهي حجج تتلخص في أنها تجمع في يدها بشكل تعسفي كل السلطات وتميل لاستغلال هذه السلطات بشكل متهور لأنها تتألف من بيرقراطية قصيرة النظر ولا مصلحة لها في الاستمرارية، كما أنها طفيلية غير منتجة تعتاش على الضرائب وتعتدي في سبيل فرض الضرائب على الملكية الخاصة وتضر بالثروة، كما أنها هدامة لأنها تتلاعب بالعقول والحقائق من خلال استخدام البروباغندا لإقناع الناس أنها تعمل لمصلحتهم وتقلص من حرياتهم.
في رأيي، وبعد الانتهاء من الكتاب، أنه يؤخذ على هوبه في نقاشه حول دور الدولة أمران، الأول هو اتباعه أسلوب محاجة تراجعياً يستخدم الأخطاء التي تقع فيها الحكومات ويعزوها لكيان الدولة في أساس تكوينه وفي عموم حالاته. مع أن أمثلة عدة قد تخطر على البال عن دولة أو أخرى لا تقع في العيوب الموصوفة، أو أن تكون تلك العيوب خاصة بمرحلة تاريخية معينة أو دولة محددة بما يصعب معه تعميمها.
المأخذ الثاني على محاجة هوب ضد الدولة هو أنه يفترض أن النظام الملكي أفضل من الديمقراطي وأن النظام الإقطاعي -أو للدقة نوعاً ما من نظام حديث قائم على النبالة- هو الحالة المثلى الممكنة للحكم. لكن هذا الفرض مبني على سيناريو أحداث بديل وافتراضات يصعب ضبط عناصرها وبالتالي ضمان نجاحها.
هنا لابد من شرح نظام النبالة المتخيل وسبب تبني هوب له كنظام أفضل من الدولة. يفترض هوب أن القوانين الناجحة يجب أن تكون قوانين طبيعية، وبالتابي أن السلطة وتحديداً سلطة فرض القانون يجب أن تكون مبنية على مكانة طبيعية في المجتمع، وهذه المكانة الطبيعية تتأتى من الملكية والثروة المتأتيين كنتيجة للذكاء الفطري وهي الأمور التي تصنع النبالة.
في نظام النبالة هذا يكون منصب الملك منصباً اتفاقياً يشكل وجوده حكماً في حال الاختلاف في فرض القانون، لكنه لا يكون الحكم الوحيد ولا تكون له أو لغيره سلطة سن القوانين -لأنها كما أصبحتم تعرفون- قوانين طبيعية. وبالتالي ليس لأحد سن القانون لصالحه، وليس لأحد احتكار تطبيق القانون لأن أي نبيل يمكن أن يشكل حكماً في فرض القانون أو قاضياً إذا ما اتفق عليه الناس.
في ظل المجتمع الموصوف هذا، يفترض أن تنخفض الضرائب إلى الحد الأدنى لأن النبيل يكتسب نبالته من إنتاجه وليس من فرضه للقانون كما في حالة الدولة، ولأن كل شخص يشتري احتياجاته بشكل مباشر من الموردين الذين يختارهم بحرية.
الفصل الطبقي في هذا المجتمع كما ترون واضح، لكنه -كما المساواة المطلقة في المجتمعات الشيوعية على الطرف الآخر من الطيف- مطروح كأحد قوانين الطبيعة وسنن الحياة.
يبقى لدينا الجزء الأخير من الكتاب، والذي يتحدث عن كيفية التخلص من الدولة. وهو في سبيل ذلك يدعو إلى دعم كل حركات التمرد والانفصال والعصيان مهما كانت بسيطة، ويدعوا المجتمعات المحلية إلى استعادة السيطرة على مؤسساتها والخروج عن سيطرة الدولة المركزية وإعادة السلطة إلى أصحاب النبالة الطبيعية مما يضع الدولة أمام الأمر الواقع ويشجع جماعات أخرى على أن تحذو حذوهم. لا يبدو أن الكاتب يشجع على العنف تحديداً لكنه لا يرفض أي خيار يقوض الدولة.
بالنسبة لنا في الشرق السعيد، فإن الكتاب يثير لدينا سؤالين منطقيين، الأول هو هل ينطبق هذا التحليل لمنافع الانتقال إلى اللادولة على الدول الهشة الضعيفة والمحكومة بالدكتاتوريات أم أنه مشروط بالدول الناضجة المستقرة ذات الديمقراطيات العريقة؟ فالقدرة على الحفاظ على الملكية الخاصة شرط أساسي هنا والمؤسسات الناضجة شرط أساسي للحفاظ على الملكية.
أما السؤال الثاني، هل ينطبق هذا التحليل على الشعوب الأقل ذكاء بحسب التصنيف التطوري لهوبه؟ أم أن القدرة على الانتقال لما بعد الدولة يحتاج إلى القدرات العقلية للمجموعة الأكثر حظاً في الذكاء حصراً؟
ملاحظة سريعة لتساعدنا على فهم هانز هيرمان هوبه وكتابه، وهي أن آراء هوبة هي توجه من بين توجهات عدة في طيف الليبرتارية المتنوع. يكفي للتمثيل أن نذكر هنا أن هتالك ليبرتارية رأسمالية مثل هوبه وليبرتارية اشتراكية، ولك أن تتخيل شكل اللادولة المتخيلة لدى كل منهما.
الكتاب من ترجمة دار سطور عام ٢٠١٧ ويتألف من١٧٨ الكتاب الصوتي من ستوري تل جيد. -
يتحدث الفيلسوف هوپه في هذا الكتاب عن الانحطاط الذي حصدته البشرية من وهم الديمقراطية والسلطة المركزية التي تهيمن وتتحكم بمصير الفرد وممتلاكته. ويوضح بأن نظام الملكية الخاصة والدويلات التي كانت في القرون السابقة أكثر إنصافاً من الديمقراطية والمساواة المزيفة والمستنزفة لمقدرات الأفراد ومصائرهم. ويطرح، بعد ذلك، رؤيته في كيفية التخلص من الأنظمة المهيمنة في الوقت الراهن، داعياً إلى ثورة تبدأ "من الأسفل " على حد تعبيره.
الكتاب يحتوي على أفكار كثيرة مختلفة عن النمطية السائدة فيما يتعلق بمثل هذه المواضيع، إلاّ أن المؤلف، حسب رأيي، كان يحتاج لتوضيح بعض الآراء التي طرحها هنا. -
Just Austrian's Mambo-Jambo with that acrid smell of conspiracy and a little bit of racism.
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second reading , a book to be studied
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كتاب جميل من هانز هوبه يطرح فيها إشكاليات الليبرتارية
مع تأريخ كامل لتصاعد وتطور الحركة الاقتصادية عبر التاريخ
مع حلول كما تطرحها الليبرتارية النمساوية من وجهة نظر هوبه -
Concise and seemingly correct.
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Arsitocratic Kingdom is the best
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To get straight to the point, A Short History of Man suffers from being too short. The very first, introductory chapter, in which Hoppe talks about the shortcomings of the usual methodologies in historical, sociological and ethical writings, and then defends his own, was a great read. Nothing particularly new, but just having the good old ideas summed up by someone as intelligent as Hoppe is pleasant.
There's nothing bad I can say about the next chapter, either. It was a very solid application of economic principles, first and foremost the malthusian law, to the early history of man, mixed with a good amount of archeological and anthropological evidence. Hoppe describes the migration patterns of the early humans, the evolution of family relationships from polyamorous to monogamous, and the evolution of the cooperation between dogs and man, among other things. This chapter was excellent and stands well on its own.
The next chapter is what really dragged the book down. Hoppe claims that it was the gradual rise of human intelligence that made the Industrial Revolution possible. I don't mind so much that this is politically incorrect, but it doesn't seem to be very well-researched on his part, either, and it has some glaring holes. I'm willing to believe that average intelligence has risen, but who's to say that the average is even important here? That outliers play a bigger role seems more plausible to me, and I'm not convinced that a Hume or a Kant was somehow intellectually inferior to our best contemporary thinkers. And why does Hoppe summarily rule out such factors as a general rise in education, a different educational culture or a change in ideology? What about medical achievements that increased longevity or decreased infant mortality or rates of maternal death? When dropping a bombshell as Hoppe did, one that goes not just against the mainstream but even against thinkers like Mises or Rothbard that were unorthodox to begin with, I simply expect a lot more and a lot better research. As it is, this chapter is a complete disappointment, and barely makes the cut for a decent starting point for further research.
It goes back up with the next chapter, but that's not enough to save this book from a mediocre middle part, and this part feels like it's copypasted from
Democracy--The God That Failed. I mean this quite literally, some passages sounded like Hoppe outright copypasted them. Instead of reading this chapter, just read Hoppes book. You'd have to go back to it anyway to form an intelligent opinion on whether democracy is truly desirable, so why not cut out the middleman?
In summary, A Short History of Man has an excellent start, but then takes a nosedive for mediocrity. I have a lot of respect for Hoppe, and I can say that all his other works I've read are far superior. This one is representative of his radicality and intellectual courage, but sadly not of his other qualities. To see those in action, read the aforementioned
Democracy--The God That Failed, to name one example. -
A short revisionist history of societal development from an economic (libertarian) perspective. Hoppe has an interesting perspective and makes some good points - I had never thought that the invention of agriculture was a consequence of humans having control of all the land and needing more efficient ways of using it -
but he makes some assertions and assumptions that seem completely unwarranted and that do not have any sources. Take a small thing such as that the hunter gatherers practiced abortions. He makes that claim but doesn't have any source for it. How could we know? Or that the reason we didn't escape the malthusian trap until the 1800's was lack of intelligence. There are many societies in the ancient world which did not suffer from a lack of intelligence, I dare say.
Some aspects of human development are not very well explained by economics, too. Hoppe tries to make the case that we would group together because the benefit of living with others outweighed the cost. Yes, but it's not like we sit and calculate those things. The need to be around others is much more primitive than that, it's innate in us. A biological perspective is much better suited to explain animals behaviors.
Hoppe also claims that societies in the tropics didn't evolve due to lack of minerals in the soil. How about there being hideous infectious diseases which cause people living in the tropics to get a lot of children, to ensure that someone survives.
Why then, did I enjoy this book? Its the first anarcho-capitalist writer that I read, and I enjoyed the perspective on aristocracy being a naturally evolved order, how different living environments select for intelligence, and the perspective on how the state emerged as a consequence of kingly vanity and greed. -
If you are patient enough to read through Hans-Hermann Hoppe's pedantic voice and enthusiastic disdain for the State, Short History of Man provides a unique Austrian-school perspective to the most significant events in the history of humanity. The book is divided into three sections, which are actually separate essays combined to form this volume.
Part one focuses on the interesting idea that the formation of the traditional family structure not only fixed the limitations of land area and other available resources, but established private property for individual families in place of group ownership by the entire clan or tribe. Part two discusses the Malthusian trap, which limited the growth of population until around 1800 AD. Part three compares aristocracy to monarchy to democracy. Hoppe surprisingly demonstrates the superiority of aristocracy over the latter two in respect to property rights and the best interests of the people. I initially rolled my eyes at this idea, but Hoppe makes a convincing argument that has me looking at all sorts of historical events with a new perspective.
Since these three essays were written separately and later combined into this volume, there is a lack of continuity between the three sections, with the third feeling a bit like you are reading a different book. However, Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s sociological, economic, and political ideas offer the reader significant opportunities to reevaluate the entire history of humankind from 50,000 years ago to today. -
The book is a waste of time, loved only by people who already agree with the author before ever opening the book.
The first two chapters are passable, but quite useless, adding no new information. The third follows Hoppe's idea that democracy has failed and poses some valid criticisims to democracy and the politics behind it.
The "revisionist" part of it, however, is just brainless.
The idea of a natural aristocracy, a hereditary aristocracy of people of valor in a fragmented world like ours is just naïve, quite frankly. Who does more than 10% of society in general accept as a natural aristocrat? Should that be enough for said aristocrat?
Certain comments, like saying it was out of envy that the intelectuals toppled kings just lacks any evidence whatsoever.
I read the book because of the libertarian rave on Hoppe, but won't be buying any more of his books. -
An enjoyable brief read on macro-history from an evolutionary economic perspective. Hoppe's apparently lazy evolutionary claim about IQ differences between the northern and southern hemispheres is not something I find accurate and that was the main blemish from my perspective. (Sowell's work showing the cultural underpinnings of IQ differentiation is more thorough and convincing.) However, Hoppe excels when he covers the historical and philosophical elements of monarchy, aristocrcy and democracy. He claims that a monarchy that is not absolute and sovereign would be healthier politically than many democratic set-ups, contrasting good monarchy from bad monarchy (such as constitutional monarchy, pragmatically proffered as a release from a 'war of all against all'). I look forward to reading more about these topics through him.
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يحاول هوبة اعادة سرد التاريخ مرة اخرى منذ الهجرة الاولى الى الثورة الصناعية و تشكيل الدول بمفهومها و بنيتها الحديثة ، لكن من وجهة نظر اقتصادية نمساوية .
يعلن هوبة و بكل صراحة انه ضد الحكم الديمقراطي ، و يشرح الطرق التي يقترحها لتحييد النظام الديمقراطي الفيدرالي و من ثم القضاء عليه مرّة واحدة و الى الابد .
ترجمة اكثر من رائعة من حيدر ، لم يخيب ظني ابداً . -
الكتاب الجيد هو الذي لا تكون حياتك بعده كما كانت قبله
كتاب جيد لكاتب سيء و سيء جداً
الكاتب عنصري حد القرف ..
و تجلى ذلك في عدة قضايا :
1- التفضيل العنصري للشماليين على الجنوبيين عندما تحدث ان معدل الذكاء ينخفض كلما اتجهنا جنوبا و ان الطبيعة القاسية حفزت الشماليين ليكونوا اذكى من الجنوبيين
و الكلام منقوض جملة و تفصيلا الشماليين لغبائهم لم يفكروا ليوم ان ينتقلوا من البيئة القاسية الشمالية الى الجنوب الدافئ
حتى ان الاقوام الشمالية و لقسوة الطبيعة لم يكن لها الوقت الكافي لتفكر في الخلق و النشأة لذلك لا نرى لديهم اي آثار او حتى فلكلور او الهة متطورة كالالهة البابلية و الكنعانية و الاغريقية
معظم الاختراعات انطلقت من الرافدين من الزراعة الى الكتابة الى الشعر . الخ
ثانيا :
السود اغبى من البيض لاسباب عضوية و تطورية .
ثالثا :
المعاداة الواضحة للشعب و تلقيبهم في كل صفحة بالهمج او الدهماء و نعتهم بالغوغائية و الغباء
لربما كان كذلك لكن لا يبرر له استخدام هذه الالفاظ المهينة للروح الانسانية الموجودة في هذه الدهماء .
رابعا :
معاداة المؤسسات التعليمية الحكومية و الدعوة الى عدم تعليم ابناء العامة ابداً لانهم لا يحق لهم العلم بالاضافة الى كيل المديح الى المؤسسات التعليمة الملكية السابقة التي انحصر طلابها بابناء النبلاء .
خامساً :
معاداة الدول و الدعوة الى الملكية .
صور الدولة كانها الشيطان الرابض على صدر الشعوب
و صور ان الشعب انقسم الى ذئبين متناحرين ثم التجأ الى الدولة التي كانت الذئب الثالث الذي استحضروه للحكم بينهم فتصالح الشعب و تحولوا الى ذئب في مواجهة اخر احدهما الشعب و الاخر الدولة .
و اعتبر ان الوظيفة العضوية الوحيدة للدول الحديثة هي توفير الامن لافردها و فرض الامان بينهم
لكنه اغفل معظم المهام الحيوية للدولة من الصحة الى الرعاية الاجتماعية الى الثقافة الى التعليم الى التربية الى الاقتصاد
و الدور التنظيمي للدولة بين افراد المجتمع و فعالياته مع التطور الكبير للمجتمعات و التوفيق بين القطاعات المتنامية متناسيا ان المجتمع لم يعد مجتمع زراعي يعتمد على الاقنان و انما اكثر من 60% من القوى العاملة تعمل في قطاعات الخدمات المختلفة .
طرح الكاتب فكرة الملكية و دافع عن الملك كحاكم عادل يؤمن العدل بين افراد الرعية مجانا بدل الدول التي تاخذ مبالغ هائلة مقابل العدل متناسيا ان الملك كان يعرض كل البلاد الى الخطر الذي يصل حد انقراض الشعب كاملا بحروبه الهوجاء الشخصية من اجل مجده و مجد ابناءه الخاص
و متناسيا عدم وجود اي نشاط غير نشاط الاقنان في الزراعة و صناعة الصلب للادوات الحربية في المجتمعات الملكية
و لقد نوه الكاتب في كلمة قالها " و نحن لن نطيل الكلام حتى لا يظن اننا من دعاة الاناركية "
للكنه اثبت في كل لحظة انه من اكبر الاناركيين و دعاة هدم الدول و المؤسسات الاجتماعية
عبر التحريض على تسليح كل فرد من المجتمع و تحريضه العلني في آخر 50 صفحة على الثورة على كل ��لدول و استغلال الديمقراطية لاسقاط الديمقراطيات ..
و حمل السلاح للاستغناء عن دور الدولة في الحماية .
لو كنت في موقع مسؤولية في النمسا بلد الكاتب او اميركا حيث يسكن لاصدرت مذكرة اعتقال فورية له لهذه الافكار الارهابية الهدامة للمجتمع و مؤسساته .
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لكن و برغم كل هذه السلبيات فان مثل هذه الكتب تحرض العقل على التفكير .. ليس كتاب سهل توافقه و تمشي بتياره و انما كتاب يقاتل افكارك السابقة مبادءك و مبادئ المجتمع الذي نحيا به .
بالاضافة الى طرح مجموعة نظريات جيدة جداً لها علاقة بالتطور و تطور المجتمعات من النشوء الاول الى المجتمعات الحديثة ..
فكرة " ان نضع القيم الاخلاقية جانبا ً " و اننا في اثناء تفسيرنا للظواهر الاقتصادية المختلفة لا نفكر في الموضوع الاخلاقي و موضوع التعاطف بين البشر
فلا تعاطف بينهم الا ما اقتضته المصالح الاولية و الشخصية للفرد .
الفكرة الثانية :فكرة ان الطريق الى هدم الديمقراطية يبدا من الاسف الى الاعلى من الطلاب و السيرطة على نظام التعليم ثم نتجه الى الاعلى
الصراحة اذا اردنا بناء مجتمع جديد فيجب اخذ الفكرتين بعين الاعتبار لاننا لا يمكن ان نعول على اخلاق الاشخاص لبناء مجتمع جيد انما عندما نلبي حاجيات الافراد الاساسية و نوضح للشعب ان مصلحته العليا هي بتوفير الطاقة الحالية هو الطريق للمصلحة البعيدة المدى .
هنا تحضرني فكرة من الكتاب حيث يقول كمثال :
ان رجلا على جزيرة معزولة وحيد و لكنه يحصل من الفواكه و الماء كل يوم ما يسد رمقه اذا قرر هذا الشخص ان يبدأ بالزراعة فعليه صنع محراث او معول و هذا يتطلب منه اسبوع على سبيل المثال
خلال هذا الاسبوع فانه سيجوع و لكنه يعرف انه سيحصل على انتاج اكبر بعد ان يصوم و " يدخر الوقت " لمدة اسبوع
حيث ان اللعة هنا هي الزمن .. تدخر زمن معين لتحصل على وفرة لاحقة
عندما تذهب الى فاسد و تقول له :" معك حق بالسرقة لكن بدل ان تسرق مليون اليوم ادخر هذا "الجهد" لعدد من الاعوام و عندها سيصبح بامكانك انت و ابناءك ان تعيش بكرامة و دون سرقة و باكثر من مليون لكل منكم كل عام ".
الافكار الكثيرة الواردة في الكتاب و طريقته في نفض امور لم افكر بها منذ زمن
و الطريقة في تحريضي على التفكير العمييق و " مقاتلة " كل فكرة من الافكار
جعلني اعيد النظر في اولوياتي في القراءة
حيث انني لم اعد ارغب في تضييع وقتي على كتب سهلة او روايات لمجرد المتعة و انما بدأت البحث اكثر في الكتب العلمية و الاقتصادية و التاريخية لعلي اصل الى قبس حول وصولنا الى هذا المستوى من الانحدار في مجتمعاتنا رغم يقيني ان لا شيء يغير هذا المجتمع الا ثورة عميقة تعيد التركيب الاخلاقي و الثقافي لمجتعنا المتهالك
