 We begin on time and we end on time. It's not another group. I was going to, considering this proud, I was going to say something totally on PC, but maybe an ethnic joke or one of these things, but I heard it will go over the web, so I will be careful. And this is one beat, and I'm really glad, you know, when the slides start. I'm really glad that nothing funny popped up from my computer, because you never know. Anyway, this, it usually begins with John Locke. The reference is, as someone correctly said yesterday, the reference is to a very famous classic libertarian movement, memoir, which usually begins with Ayn Rand, 1972, which was actually a memoir about the 60s in the libertarian movement in America. It's full of facts and fiction, as you probably know, but it was somewhat an interesting book. And it was written when the movement was pretty young. Now we're getting older, much more sophisticated, and so it's time, it's not probably time for active political participation, some people may think so, I do not. And it's time for reflection and learning, and when it comes to reflection and learning, maybe Ayn Rand is not the exact philosopher or scholar you want to turn to. Maybe we want to turn to John Locke, and actually from the intellectual point of view, it all begins with John Locke. And we'll see immediately what begins with John Locke. I would say just basically three things that are very important to us. The first one is pretty good, and the second pretty bad, and the third one is just as bad. So the first one is the account of property rights and the original acquisition of property, and also saying self-ownership as the real fact, and a peculiar view of the self as widespread, that is what comes from John Locke first, but then there's a theoretical, number two there's a theoretical, and the other unhistorical, that's an inaccurate account of the birth of the state. And the third thing is the delusion that many classical liberals, and I want to tell Hoppe that I do agree with everything he said about classical liberalism in the 1900s, the only thing of course John Locke didn't know that yet, but classical liberals of today should really know what happened after that. There's one thing that tells you everything about the failure of classical liberalism, is that Golema and Auschwitz came 250 years later, the death of John Locke, 241. So the delusion that somehow the state, though it could be considered Leviathan, brutal beast, anything you just name it, could be actually chained, chained down by what, by a constitution or, anyway, a domesticated somehow. But still, let's go back to the idea of self-ownership of John Locke. And the claim of self-ownership, you know, this single sentence from the Second Treatise of John Locke is very important. Every man has a property in his own, his own her, of course, her own person. This nobody has a right to but herself. Now this to me is the single most important sentence in the Second Treatise of Gov. And in a nutshell, the view, in Locke's political philosophy, is the view that human beings are rights-bearers by nature and because they're self-owners. And the primary moral fact of human existence is self-ownership. And this was a very solid foundation and according to me, and a long tradition, of course, before me and I believe after my death will still be there. It is that it's probably the possibly the best account of property as a source and it's also a source of morality and justice in human relations. And it was a big change. You know, most people consider gross use as the father of modern natural rights theory, but it might well be John Locke because the idea of John Locke is that natural rights do not stand directly from natural law but from the fact, the simple fact of self-ownership. And I know that some, especially British libertarians, Steve Davis, some of my good friends, do prefer Hume's account but I still think that not only Locke's is better but it's politically more viable. And also, now the problem begins when property becomes a political thing in John Locke's analysis. And property, as you know, for John Locke is everything. He says property that is his life, liberty and a state, her life, he was brought. So this broad notion of property is what men aim to protect by establishing government. It didn't happen like that, of course, you know, but that was his idea. So there are the political implications of the term property. On one side you have the idea of a natural origin of property. On the other side you have the idea that the ultimate end of government is the protection of property. So property became, in that jargon, the code word for life, liberty and a state that is natural rights and freedom. And for Locke, we can see that it's a way of just talking about the legitimacy of the political order. And we can say there's a good book from John Locke which is called On the Edge of Anarchy. And I know that Paul Gottfried doesn't like that interpretation. It was just, I believe, that Locke was quite conservative indeed. But what comes out of his theory is that society, that is government, is preferable to the state of nature only under certain conditions. As the natural state is a state to which only certain limited forms of political society will be preferable. And also in this sense classical liberalism was really shaped by Locke. Of course you know that he died about 100 years prior to the word liberalism. It was in use in Europe and it started to be used in Spain of all places. And so it's really predicated on the notion that human beings enjoy inalienable rights. Or inalienable, inalienable, doesn't, is not in John Locke, but the concept clearly is there. So the protection of rights is also the ultimate test of legitimate government actions. The state must provide a safe environment for the individual's enjoyment of her natural rights. Now it all sounds like Disneyland these days, but that's the way it was with classical liberalism. And you probably know what Gandhi said to a journalist who just visited the UK. And so he said, since according to a lot of press he was bet mouth in England, for many years he said, so what do you think about British civilization? And he said, well it would be a great idea. And so that's the same thing. What do you think about John Locke? It would be a great idea. The only thing is we know it did not exactly work like a Swiss watch. Quite the contrary. And so what is really the problem? The problem, well guess, take a wild guess where the problem is. It is the state. Now the first thing I wanted to tell you is that libertarianism, I would think it's like the Austrian school, so the understanding of the markets that brought into existence some sort of radical anarcho-capitalist or like pure libertarianism. But I think it's very important that it was the failure of classical liberalism that brought libertarianism into existence. It was the failure of classical liberalism to tame the state. It was a disastrous attempt. And so some people said John Locke tried to build a non-sovereign state. That's an oxymoron, contradiction in terms. There will never be a non-sovereign state. So, and that actually, that spectacular failure comes from a total lack of understanding of how the state works, of what the state is, and how it was shaped into a new, very flexible secular religion. And most classical liberals just never understood that. Beginning with John Locke, of course, he was in the 1600s and then going to Buchanan, Milton Friedman and Hyatt. In short, classical liberalism was actually destroyed by the very success of the state. That's one thing we have to recognize. In the beginning of the 1500s, there were probably around two or three states, France and England. Now there are 225 states all over the globe. It had tremendous success. When I hear libertarians saying that the state is not successful, it's like when the Marxists were saying that the market doesn't work. We've got to cope with that. That's a fact of life. But the thing is, the success of the state was certainly not the minimal state, not the state imagined by John Locke, but it was Leviathan, as it is, and not a watered-down version that was just wishful thinking about the state. Now there's very common in classical liberal circles. Now I'll give you just one example of how even the natural rights doctrine that seems perfect, a shield for the individual, was turned into a status tool. And classical liberalism was quite helpful for establishing the power of the state in modern times. Under the pressure of the natural law project, the state accelerated its growth, bringing about a stage reduced to two actors. And that, from the beginning, was the real project of the modern state, believed in the same two actors, the state and the free individual. You can take a wild guess about whose actor was more powerful. So modern state and the modern individual are the consequence of the same process, and they became allies in the same life-and-death struggle against old ideologies and practices, that is, against the medieval cosmos that dominated them. In practice, there was this promise of the modern state to the modern individual, I will free you from all these masters. You have like 16 or 17, you've got your corporation, you've got your church, your family, your children, even your friends will free you from everything. And actually, if you're a servant of 16 masters, maybe you're not such a slave. But if you do have only one owner, then you do become a slave. And so Locke actually believed that natural rights were a shield for the individual, but the outcome, as I said, was very different. Natural law theory turned out to be the most sophisticated country of legal myth ever created over the long history of legal thought. Such a complex order of myths gave rise to a true legal mythology on which the state still thrived. To put it very bluntly, the state, or the man who we're talking on behalf of the state, said, you know, you're right, you're Locke. Lives. Lives improper. We're here to protect them. What else? So, the thing is, classical liberalism never understood much about the essence of the state, and I will tell you very briefly what it is. First of all, the project of the essence, this would be like the essence of the state project. First of all, the idea was to destroy the medieval universe by freeing the individual from all other authorities and relations. Second one, and probably the most important one, was the centralization of power to create one command center for all governmental operations. A single decision-making room where you could just take all the decisions which gradually imposed itself on all other centers. And then it was the creation of boundaries. Now, the boundaries are very important for the modern state. You cannot even think of a state without boundaries. Remember where the astronauts left Earth for the first time? And so the first question, Cate Canaveral, was, how does the Earth looks like? And I said, well, we don't see any borders. And so they started, we're all the human race, we're all equal. No, they were just saying a very simple thing. We're used to see the world with borders. Borders are not a natural thing, but the thing is, they're so natural to us that they became natural. Institutions tend to become very natural. Now what were you thinking? So, the idea of the borders was that you created a legal order and a political order inside. And inside them, you made good citizens through education. You could control the money. You could control the goods and everything else. And the idea was actually to bring peace. And one thing we have to cope with, or just simply to admit, is that there was a certain pacification of society with the state. In due time, it was a very long process. But right now, crime is much lower than it used to be 40 years ago, 100 years ago. You can take old statistics and that will show that. Of course, the amount of violence was exported in the outside in the other arena of the state. Libertarians have this terrible habit of just using the term state to describe political power. But the word and the object are very recent. The expression modern state in itself is pleonastic, like the Middle French, like you said yesterday. It was just a Belgian joke. So it was rather pleonastic though. Because the state is only modern. There's nothing like the state prior to modern times. And actually the word came out in the Prince for the first time and used in the modern sense at the beginning of the 16th century. And during the 16th and 17th centuries, the medieval order was destroyed by the success of this new entity that imposed radically new relations and a special one, of course, with the individual, the only other one. The state recognized only individuals, never communities, churches, nothing else. The state was there to emancipate and liberate the individuals. They're all individuals shaped by the modern state. Now, all right. This is what I would call the grand, the spectacular Libertarian illusion. Because there's a small group of people acting in the name of the state, you know, the rulers, and they definitely are a separate group with norms and a different ethical code. They created a lexicon in due time. So in order to defend their position, a great dichotomy was erected between the public sphere and the private sphere. And this is, so the grand Libertarian illusion is that you can destroy the state in your mind if you just do this. You just break this dichotomy. And so because Libertarians do entertain the bizarre idea that what is illegitimate in private law, theft, murder, should not be legitimate in public law. So this, somehow Libertarians believe that dichotomy has to be destroyed and thus the state would be seen by everyone, immediately as a predatory organization based on permanent aggression on individual rights. It might happen, but it doesn't disappear like a nightmare, you know, when you do this, the dichotomy is blah. I don't know how I could do that. Now the other thing, the other story of the Libertarian, I will go very quickly through that, of the Libertarian view of the state is the idea of plunder and property. So on one side this is, it kind of begins with Friedrich Bastiat that was written in, I guess it comes from the law in 1948 and then of course Galmoun. And the idea that men can live and satisfy his wants only by ceases labor. And this is the origin of property, but of course you can get the property of others. And this processes the origin of plunder. And this other one which is public choice of the 1850 is the idea that the unequal fiscal action of the government commuted into great classes, those who pay the taxes and those who are in fact supported by the government, taxpayers and tax consumers. This is another very well known quotation for Libertarians. Now this is another one, Oppenheimer, a Marxist, that although a radical school of the beginning of the century that somehow Libertarians fell in love with from Albert J. Nock to Rothbard. And you know this quotation very well. So economic means and political means and then of course there's Albert J. Nock and then you have this very nice quotation from Rothbard that says social power is men's power over nature, state power is the coercive and parasitic seizure of this production, the draining of the fruits of society for the benefit of non-productive rulers. While social power is over nature, state power is power over men. Very nice to put and very true indeed. And then actually Rothbard says something which may not be true because he says the 20th century has been primarily an age in which state power has been catching up with a consequent reversion to slavery, war, and destruction. That's true, that's definitely true. But the creation of wealth during the 20th century it happened anyway and that's a little bit of a problem for that kind of analysis. But anyway from Bastiat to Rothbard the state appears as a machinery controlled by the ruling class to exploit and dominate society. And this is very much true but it's not the essence of the state. This theory in fact identifies state and power, state and coercion. And it sees the state operating in ancient times. The barbarians had a state, the medieval time had a state. And it's really bathed in a sociological model of the state that ignores the core of the state which is the historical dimension and the historical aspect of the state. So if we want to know something about the state history is crucial. History is the key point because the type of political order enforced today far from being the sole and inevitable product of universal reason is but the rather occasional result of a series of historical junctures. Oh alright this was easy. And also another thing that is the idea that the modern state is a secular religion and that's not part and parcel of the libertarian understanding of the state. And also if you think about many modern and contemporary political philosophers and fuzzies and importance of a civic religion from Machiavelli to Rousseau to Charles Taylor to all these kind of people and the importance is clear actually because the main unethical principles in which the state is based cannot be accepted without a strong theoretical framework defending the power and legitimacy of secular institutions. This is what exactly what the rightist and leftist state of secularism are doing. There are two different ways to build a strong religious ideological support for the state. So what's the lesson from this? If you believe that the state power is historical it is also contingent. And it is changing over time a little bit. It's got a project but it changes. I mean it responds to certain changes over time. And also you have to realize that we're not fighting against the Roman Empire. We're not fighting against the Greek Paulists. We have quarrel with our enemy, the state, the very modern modern state. So we could realize that people lived for many years under different institutions that were not a state and we could learn a lot by that from medieval times. And one time after the end of the state we know that the human race will live under different arrangements. And another thing we could learn is that there is certainly no scientific law imposing the state solution for the so-called public goods problem or the production of security. So if we realize that the state is a provisional and recent European invention and it's very important for libertarians and we might consider it a nightmare but the only way of beginning to wake up is to understand how it works and how it came to existence. And actually the key to the success of the state but I will not have time to elaborate upon that is that the state does not exist. It exists only in people's minds. We do not live in state as societies. We live in societies shaped by centuries of discussions about the state. So actually I've never seen the state but I see people always talking about the state and on behalf of the state. Also, I've never seen sovereignty. Have you seen sovereignty? I guess not. Not even a nation or anything like that or the jargon that's used by the people who talk on behalf of the state. But I know that there are hundreds of theories of sovereignty and of course Jean Baudin's is still the most important for the birth of the state. And just to show you that you can learn something even from Jean Le Carré, I will end with this quote from Le Carré. The state is a dream, a symbol of nothing at all and emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But states make war, don't they? And imprison people. Thank you.