 Welcome once again to Mises Weekends, and on behalf of everyone at the Mises Institute, let me wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. This weekend we're pleased to feature a talk by David Gordon from our recent Mises Circle event in California. David's topic is thinkers who challenge the state, and in less than 20 minutes he takes us through a compelling survey of Plato, Aristotle, Stoic philosopher, Zeno of Sidium, Frenchman Frederick Bastiat, and into the 20th century with Franz Oppenheimer and Albert J. Nock. In doing so, David demonstrates that the fundamental question of whether society requires a coercive monopoly has been considered throughout the history of human affairs. This is a great talk that I'm sure you'll enjoy, especially if you want a better understanding of the historical underpinnings of Rathbardian and Hopian anarcho-capitalism. Stay tuned. I am very glad to see so many people here who are open-minded to the notion of society without the state. Some people are not like that. They will read, they can read in all sorts of things about how bad the state is, but they'll reject without thinking about it the notion we could get along without the state. They put one in mind of the man who read so much about how bad smoking is for your health that he gave up reading. What I like to do in talking about fingers of challenge of state rather than give a futile task of giving a comprehensive history of political thought on the subject in 20 minutes, I want to concentrate on what I take to be a curious paradox in the history of political thought on the subject of anarchism. The paradox is this. If we ask people today about the notion of society, about the state, about anarchism, many people will respond, as Jeff Deist mentioned in his talk, by saying this is a good idea. In theory, it would be a very nice thing if we could have a society without the state but it just wouldn't work. We have to be realistic and accept the existence of the state and perhaps try to limit it, but we couldn't get along without a state so it's a very good idea but it just wouldn't work. The paradox is if we look to ancient political thought, we find something completely different. The idea there was anarchism could work but it wouldn't be a very good idea so it's just the reverse of what we have today. Now if we take a couple of little strains that we look in book two of Plato's Republic, the situation is imagined in which we have a small society of people who are each living and producing things and they're exchanging things with each other, exchanging goods and services with each other and seems like we might think this is a very good society but Plato calls this a society, the city of pigs, he said this is really, if this happened we would need people might get too greedy, they might just start accumulating wealth and that wouldn't be a good idea so you'd have the notion of people peacefully trading and producing among themselves according to Plato wasn't a good idea. We need to have a special guardian class to reign people in and make sure they don't get out of control so Plato is saying, well maybe we could have a society without a state but this is the city of pigs and similarly Plato and Aristotle don't often don't always agree but they agree on this point. In book one of Aristotle's politics, Aristotle describes how the state arises, he said well we can start off with families and then we imagine families uniting into a community where again they're producing exchanging goods and services among themselves but Aristotle goes a bit differently from Plato, Plato remembers saying well we need the guardian class to make sure that people don't get out of hand. Now what Aristotle says is we need to have a state because the highest life is not one of producing, it's one where people are engaged in public deliberation, people are deliberating about the public order and you need to have a state to have that so according to Aristotle we need to have a state because this is part of the best life. Now the best life absolutely is a life of the philosophy but that's available only to a few so for most people the best life is being involved in the state. Now in antiquity there are intimations of people who reject to the notion of the state for example the third century Stoic philosopher Zeno of Chidium wrote a book called The Republic it's usually referred to as Zeno's Republic which favored anarchism but the unfortunate thing about that book is it really did it didn't survive past antiquity so we don't really know much what was in it but in general the picture in the in the ancient world then was of anarchism the ancient political thought was that anarchism might very well work but it wouldn't be a very good idea. Now I want now want to jump we're skipping over all the middle ages the renaissance I want to jump now to thinker that many of you will be familiar with who challenged a fundamental assumption we find in Plato and Aristotle and this the thinker I have in mind is the great French economist Frédéric Bastiat in his book short book The Law which came out I think was published in June 1850 and Bastiat died that same year. Now what Bastiat challenged was the notion we find this as I just explained in Plato and Aristotle that we need to have a class of people the guardians in Plato's case or the state in Aristotle that is above the people and guiding the people they're kind of the state is viewed as an educator someone who has to mold the people into a certain pattern the people are viewed as not capable of of living by themselves or at least not living a good life by themselves and Bastiat asked why should we assume this why should we think that there's this superior class why are they better than other people where do they get their supposed wisdom from they seem to be just taking it for granted that they're better than everyone else and able to guide them and he raised a point he himself didn't take this fully in an anarchist direction but the argument clearly has anarchist implications and the point he raised was if we start by saying that people have certain rights say people have rights to life liberty and property uh the only way an organization can such as a state could acquire rights is if people agree to give it certain powers so people would have to get together and agree that the state would have certain powers to do things and people the state if people did that couldn't acquire additional rights other than individuals rights the individuals had so the state wouldn't be some kind of superior entity that would be able to violate people's rights take away their lives liberty and property but the state couldn't acquire any rights that individuals didn't have so if you take this argument to its full implications really the state wouldn't have any right to do anything at all that would violate any one's right so it if you hold that the state wouldn't if an individual say wouldn't have the right to have a monopoly of the protective services over a certain territory the state couldn't acquire that right either so it wouldn't wouldn't be able to exist now i think boss yacht's argument really destroys the intellectual basis of a state but i want to now to shift to two other thinkers if we have if a state really doesn't have an intellectual basis we have a question about why do we have states what it why is it that states exist and here i want to mention two very important writers i'm going to take them together because one was a disciple of the other i have in mind first france oppenheimer who was a german sociologist who uh it was born in 1864 and he lasted till the 1940s he in fact he lived in in his later years in the united states and he was in exile from uh hitlers germany and in fact he died in los angeles so it's fairly close by here and so and his the other person was his disciple uh albert j nock who was an american writer and literary figure now oppenheimer wrote a book uh called the state which came out in german in 1908 and it was translated into english and uh nock was very much influenced by this book and he wrote a work that was along the same lines as uh oppenheimer's book called our enemy the state which came out in 1935 so what uh the argument that oppenheimer and nock gave was that they distinguish two different ways people can acquire wealth how can you get various goods that you want one is to engage in peaceful production and trade they call this the economic means and the other is to seize them by from others to just grab what other people produce and they call this the political means so according to oppenheimer and nock they define the state as the organization of the political means so in their view the state was not as Plato and Aristotle thought some kind of educational organization was designed to help people improve their characters on the contrary it was a predatory group gang of robbers who was trying to seize what people have produced now one might say well this is a very interesting theory but how do we know it's true uh and this was what what happened to in order to uh demonstrate their theory of course in history in history where is not a a priori discipline we can't deduce that certain events or institutions have to exist but what they did was they gave historical examples they tried to show that states that actually originated in this way what oppenheimer spent a great had studied great deal at the anthropological literature and he tried to show that every state that he could find it originated in this way as a predatory group that had seized what other people had taken and he goes into great detail going through the ancient world the medieval world down through the 19th century trying to show that states are predatory bodies and knock following in the lead of oppenheimer applied this view to especially in our enemy state to american history and he tried to show how the state had in american state had been a predatory group also interesting their knock was very sympathetic to the view we usually associate with the progressives charles beard remember he had a famous book economic and economic interpretation of the constitution the united states 1930 arguing that the constitution was really written to help a certain group of wealthy people it would they would be economically better off and knock said that that view is correct that he's the constitution was written that way so he's arguing that the american state was has always been a predatory organization so knock and oppenheimer knock in my view given a very good historical case for this their theory that the state is a predatory organization now just to make clear the logical structure of the argument this came up in one of my online classes that i'm fortunate enough to give for the measles student said well look aren't there examples of stateless societies in the past as if this was a refutation of oppenheimer but remember what oppenheimer is saying is every state is a predatory organization to refute him you would have to come up with a state that wasn't a predatory organization it wouldn't be and it wouldn't refute him to show that you could have a society without the state that would he be perfectly happy with that so again what he's what knock and oppenheimer saying is that every state state is predatory organizations i think their views are very helpful to us in combating what niches so aptly calls that coldest of all cold monsters the state thank you