 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. First, of course, I would like to thank Goldstein Hopper and his charming husband for inviting me to this place. And whether this is something you would like to do, thanking them for inviting me, that remains to be seen. My topic is problems or a short look within half an hour on the philosophical foundations of libertarianism. Now I'm not going to talk about any particular order. This is just based on nearly 40 years of watching libertarians at close range, so to speak. So it's not a dissection of any particular piece of writing. As it were, the state of mind of libertarianism. And I have two problems there, and both stem from the same source, as it were. That is that libertarianism, as we know it, is a modern ideology. It shares, not shares, but shares in all the properties of modern thought. And that creates a problem, because modern thought is not particularly hospitable to human freedom at the basic philosophical level. This is evident, for example, if you go back, starting with present obsession with neuroscience, the idea that there is no freedom in man, because it's all simple neuroactivity. Neuroactivity, everything drives. These are physical processes. There is no room for freedom. But this goes back to the beginning of modern times. And that is one of the things I would like to discuss. This idea that human beings are, as it were, just natural issues with rather peculiar behavior, some of which were highlighted by the previous speaker. Another aspect of modernism that affects or modernity that affects libertarianism is, I think, the inclination towards legalism, the idea that law is a legal system. Now, this is so, as it were, given to the modern mind, that it's almost impossible to think that it should not be the case, that law is not a system. So these are two ideas, very modern, why modern, because they were completely absent during the previous period of the Middle Ages. So modern times is juxtaposed to medieval times. And medieval times had a totally different view of the world and of the human being. So libertarians occasionally show some interesting medieval thinking in the medieval period for one reason mostly, that it was a stateless order. There were no states in the Middle Ages. There were rulers, there were kings, there were leaders and followers, but there was no such thing as a state. So the whole idea that we have of society was absent in the Middle Ages. That requires a complete rethinking of all we know or think we know about human relations. The second point of interest for libertarians of the Middle Ages is that the word libertarianism itself, when it was first introduced as a technical philosophical term in the 18th century, it referred to the doctrine of freedom of will. And it is difficult to think of any theory that is truly libertarian, is it rejects freedom of the will. Certainly if you connect that with the freedom of thinking, freedom of thought, because if there is no will, then there is no rational thought either. Because if you think that rational thought is a sort of automatic process, something that just happens, that will happen without you thinking, then you have a very peculiar notion of thinking. So you have the will to think rightly is a necessary condition for thinking rightly. Otherwise, who knows what would be considered right thinking. So these are two points, statelessness and the commitment, the philosophical commitment to freedom of the will, which distinguishes, to put it shortly, the medieval idea of the human person from the modern idea of the human individual. So the person, just to use this as a label, comprises not only the individual organism, but also the individual as a personal being, thinking, judging, willing, having a conscience. Whereas the modern individual is purely defined in terms of his physical individuality. From the point of view of reasoning, that makes a difference whether you accept freedom of the will, as I noted, whether you accept freedom of the will as part of your definition of the human person. Because if you are arguing, you want to be seen as making a right point, something that is right, and something that ought to be accepted by the other. It is not just a sales talk arguing. I'm trying to sell you something. Look how elegant I am and look how charming my product is. So you try to make an argument in terms of right and old. But these are two words that fare very badly in modern thinking. Modern philosophy has almost no room for the old and right as the old looked at from the other side. This is hard to place in modern thinking. Now, if we go back to the period where the Middle Ages certainly ended and modern times were about to begin, we stumble upon a very interesting figure, Martin Luther, who is definitely recognized as one of the fathers of modernity, although he was an Augustinian monk, but he shook up the Catholic medieval world to such a degree that nothing would ever be the same. Not even the Catholic Church. How did his ideas, his reformist ideas in theological matters translate into modern individualism, roughly by the following steps, right? You know, he advocated the principles of Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura, and Sola Grazia. People live by faith alone. They live by holy scripture alone. And they will be saved by God's grace alone. There is no room for any individual activity or merit there. Because he was so pessimistic about human beings that he denied that they were capable of doing any good. So his view of mankind was, whatever you do, good or bad, it's nothing you do. It is something God does. So you are merely a passive thing in the world. Anything you do is really God's work. No matter what the moral qualification. So human actions were, in fact, completely divorced from categories of right and wrong. That's the clear implication here. The Church should not judge you for your rightness or your wrongness. That is only God who can do that. And all the rest is irrelevant, right? In saying that, he had the idea that we all have, as it were, an inner side, which is the reservation, the reserved place where each of us meets God. But outside that private conscience, the idea of a private conscience, outside of that, there was no place for God in the world. God is completely apart from the world. Except that, as I quoted earlier, everything that happens in the world is God's work. So you cannot criticize anything in the world because then you are criticizing God. And that was completely out of the question. You do not criticize God. So whatever happens, you have to accept as God's work. It led to, as I said, the idea of a privatized conscience, which is, if you consider it well, an oxymoron. The word itself, conscience, means knowledge shared, conciencia. But if you cut the shared part out of it, everyone is the sole judge of everything he thinks or does. There is no judge apart from one's own convictions. And that is part of the modern individualism, where the individual can say, well, that's where I stand. I do not have to justify myself to anybody. This privatized conscience had, of course, a devastating influence on argumentation, because argumentation is always an appeal to another's conscience. When you argue, you appeal to at least these ideas of right thinking. No, no, no, that doesn't follow. That's a wrong conclusion. You have standards of excellence in thinking to which you appeal. But most argumentations are not simply about the rightness in thinking, but also rightness in acting. So you argue always by appealing to another's conscience that is the things he shares or she shares, or you think they share with you. And then you try to find out what the common basis is and then work out to a common conclusion. And the philosophical dimension of argumentation is that you try to arrive at conclusions that are valid for all human beings, so universally valid conclusions. But when you have all privatized consciences, which are not really accessible to outsiders, then, of course, how do you argue? It becomes just bluffing and threatening. I will win, not because I am right, but because you are not a match for me. It becomes a contest rather than an argumentation, a search for the common truth. As a result, one of the pivots of medieval thinking, the idea of natural law had to go, because if the world as it is in all its details is the work of God, not of any man, then, of course, there is no way you can criticize the world as it is, and you cannot criticize anything in the world on the basis of principles that are of general validity. Because according to the Lutheran conception, the individual man, woman, has no mind or not enough mind to say anything of value concerning the true nature of the world. It is not open to inspection. All these ideas are, of course, dynamite when you consider them from the medieval point of view, but looking back from today, it's all very individualistic. You can have, you can mitigate some of the sayings, which is what other deformers did. They did not follow Luther in his extreme rejection of public conscience, for example. But most of them followed him to such an extent that it became very difficult to resurrect the notion of natural law, meaning that there are principles in the world, real principles in the world, which can be discovered and taken as items to be considered conscientiously by all men. One of the consequences of this Lutheran individualism was, of course, that God became more and more irrelevant to thinking, because he is not directly connected with anything you can know. He is simply in your private conscience is there, but on the outside, there's no way to say anything about it, except he made the world as it is. That's it. So eventually, this individualism became, as they say, in modern language secularized. The idea of God dropped out of the picture. And then you see the rise of typically modern ideologies, such as scientism and neo-humanism, which are, despite protestations by many libertarians, very much present in a libertarian common talk, so to speak. I'm not referring to particular authors, but the, say, the rank and file libertarian mindset is very much tinged with scientific and neo-humanistic ideas. Scientism, as you know, is the idea that every thing can be scientifically understood and explained only if you apply the methods of the natural sciences, natural sciences, first physics and later biology. Libertarians have been weaned away from the first physical scientism, which was very popular in the 19th century with the social physics of the social engineers, which Friedrich Hayek criticized very effectively. But then Friedrich Hayek imported his own kind of biological scientism. When he began to talk about the evolution of society, social evolution, the evolution of law, all this was a sort of using biology-based arguments to make his view, classical liberals, semi-libertarian, however you want to qualify them, seem scientifically warranted. So it was a sort of science, scientific reasoning that crept back in, not in the form of physics, but in the form of biology. And of course today with the neurosciences, the distinction between physics and biology is almost completely wiped away so that you have a more insistent return to physics, writing back in on the back of the physical science, such as neurology. Neo-humanism, too, is very sympathetic to scientific ideas, especially the biology-based version. It's amazing if you go through the new neo-humanist literature also, atheists, literatures, that's another name for the same thing. How often they refer to Bertrand Russell's famous Sophism, which he wrote down as a young boy. That is, if a protozoan cannot think logically, then neither can man. So biology proves that you have no free will unless you are willing to say that free will was already present in the very simple cells. But of course Russell, by the time he became a public intellectual rather than a philosopher of mathematics, he was not too particular about consistency because one of his other famous quips was most men would sooner die than think in fact they do. So the idea here is that you have to choose to think. So what does it tell us about human beings and protozoa? I'm not sure. Anyway, his daughter noted in her recollections of her father concerning the question, do we have free will? My father said no, writing as a philosopher, but he acted yes and wrote yes when his moral passions were engaged. I think that's a very typical attitude among modern intellectuals and also among libertarians who are much engaged, on the one hand, in political current affairs. They want to do something, but they also want to cover their backside, let's to say, against criticism from whatever is current in scientific views. Now the purely physicalist notion of the human being, which is illustrated by scientism and neo-humanism, has as a result a fairly technological approach to human beings and to human progress. Progress is mostly thought of and presented as a conquest of nature, conquering the forces of nature. But of course, if man is seen as but another natural species, that notion of progress implies increasing man's power over man, because it's just another thing that can be manipulated. And the point is, if you can manipulate, control it, then you should control it. So there is a temptation to look at other people as simply matter that can be molded and manipulated and shaped and put into a certain form. This is, of course, another dimension in which modern thinking is completely different from medieval thinking. I just say a few words on the change from the concept of law to the concept of a legal system. The common element in law from the medieval times to modern times is that from about the end of the 11th century, medieval thought was enriched with the discovery of the Roman law books of the emperor Justinian in the sixth century. But that was, of course, something that did not touch ordinary life immediately for many centuries. But it was important in the universities. So what happened was that in the medieval universities, you saw the beginning of a study of law that was completely divorced from the study of actual life. It was an academic study, the law, the Roman law. And for that reason, two things happened. It was not an immediate problem to adapt the Roman law to the stateless conditions of medieval times. But it was important to, as it were, find principles in it that were compatible with Christianity, because universities were Christian institutions. So the medieval theologians read the Roman law in the light of their main principles. First medieval principle is the equality of all human persons, regardless of rank, status, and position under God, and therefore under natural law. All inequalities in position and rank are due to problems of local organization, household, economic problems. They are not basic to understanding the law. Second principle of medieval law, famously formulated by St. Augustine, lacks in Justa non-esplex. An unjust law is not a law at all. So justice is always a conditional sine qua non of your understanding of law. And the third principle of medieval law is the famous admonition you find in Romans 13. First verse by St. Paul, where he says, authority comes only from God. And that meant that since it is unthinkable that God will ever authorize or sanction any injustice or malice or even incompetence, an evil, malicious, incompetent ruler has no authority at all. You either have authority, and then it is the authority which can be attributed to God, or you do not have authority, and then you cannot claim authority. So that meant that the people, the Germanic peoples, who had settled in the territories abandoned by the Roman Empire, and the church could depose any ruler for sheer incompetence or moral inadequacy. Now when the medieval period was at its end, and then we are entering the 15th and 16th century, the number of revolutions occurred almost simultaneously. Discussed already Luther, but you had the general era of the Renaissance, the emergence of the absolute monarchies, emergence of science, the natural science, and so on. And also the reemergence of the Roman law, but this time freed from the medieval Christian interpretation that had been put on it. Because what the Christian interpretation had removed were principles like these. Whatever pleases the prince has the force of law that was smuggled away, because that was completely foreign to medieval thinking. The principle that the prince is above the law, is not bound by law, that, of course, also had to go in the medieval times, but it was indispensable to the claims of the absolute monarchies. And they added, the moderns added, directly as a result of the Lutheran agitation, the principle Kuyus regio, Eus religio. He who controls the land, controls the religion of his subjects. That was also a repudiation of the role of the medieval king or ruler that was as a defender of the common faith, not as the person who decided what the faith of his country would be. So this was a complete revolution. The theme, I will mention it, not elaborated, but what the structure of the Roman law as a legal system concerns, you have to understand that it is based on the notion of a society. Now the medieval world was not a society. It was a mesh of communities and later cities. It was very non-structured but very fluid in its development. And the law was not a system imposed on it. The law was simply that which followed from the reality of life. If you applied principles of natural law or to go back to the former concept of conscience, the gradual institutionalization of the common human conscience. And that was the idea of law. The controlling factor in law was this bringing together in a common conscience so that everybody had access to the law, to the same law. When conscience was privatized, there was no longer a common conscience. So the law of the prince became an ersatz conscience. You could appeal publicly to the law and that was it, a positive notion. But the structure of that society on which this system was applied was a vertically structured society with top position and bottom position and positions in between. And the principle of organization was that the lower position was responsible or answerable to the higher position, meaning that at the very top, there was no responsibility. So at the top of the legal system, it was total irresponsibility, which was fine for the Roman emperors and was also fine for the absolute monarchies in the 16th century. And of course, that had implications for the view, the idea of God, because God was still in the highest of authorities. He became a totally irresponsible God, complete will without control, whereas the medieval God was the epitome of responsibility. Because the notion of God in medieval times was that God represents everything that sets man apart from the rest of nature. So it was a very humanized God. But he had all these virtues or excellences in a not to be better degree. But irresponsibility is not something that sets man apart from the animals. Animals are not responsible beings, so there is a continuity between man and animal if you take irresponsibility as the basic notion of freedom. I do not have to answer to you, right? Get lost. You dismissed the other arbitrarily. You feel you are not responsible to anything. That was, of course, not permitted under medieval law, where you always had to be willing and able to answer questions raised to you. So this freedom as irresponsibility was first located at the very top of this social structure with the king or the emperor. But then in modern times, it became a demand for more and more people, right? So people wanted to be free, meaning that the area where they could act irresponsibly without having to answer to anybody would increase. And if you consider not only libertarians, but also the people who are, as it was, shocked by libertarianism, modern libertarians, it is often this aspect of irresponsibility. I do not have to answer your question. Who do you think you are, this kind of individualism that is really dismissive of questions of argumentation? That's it. I am going to conclude here. My time is up. And I could, of course, go answer questions about the medieval ideas more in detail, but that will be for another occasion. Thank you.