WEBVTT

NOTE Ideology and Theories of History

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000
The first thing I'm going to start out with is the Contra-Huig Theory of History.

2
00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:12.000
The Huig Theory of History really begins in the early, mid-19th century, and it's sort of taken over, and it's still with us.

3
00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:17.000
As a matter of fact, it's still dominant, despite criticisms in the 30s and 40s.

4
00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:23.000
Basically, what the Huig Theory of History says is that history is an inevitable march upward into the light.

5
00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:29.000
In other words, step by step, the world always progresses, and this progress is inevitable.

6
00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:34.440
Now, the theories themselves were kind of lovable, they were moderate classical liberals, I guess,

7
00:00:34.440 --> 00:00:35.600
in the favor of...

8
00:00:35.600 --> 00:00:40.340
And when they coined the theory in the 1830s, 40s and 50s,

9
00:00:40.340 --> 00:00:44.860
there was a certain amount of justification for it, in the sense that, indeed, if they look back on the past,

10
00:00:44.860 --> 00:00:46.900
things seem to be always getting better and better.

11
00:00:46.900 --> 00:00:51.020
There's an increase in freedom, an increase in civilization, and standards of living,

12
00:00:51.020 --> 00:00:55.840
and science, and knowledge, and so forth and so on, and so they came to the, unfortunately, made this

13
00:00:55.840 --> 00:01:02.080
Impressionistic conclusion to a doctrine and saying that all this is inevitable.

14
00:01:02.080 --> 00:01:09.200
If this is 1870, we're always better off in every way than 1860, et cetera, et cetera.

15
00:01:09.200 --> 00:01:14.840
This implies heavily that everything that was at any stage of the game was right,

16
00:01:14.840 --> 00:01:20.000
or was the best possible at the time, and therefore anything that is now is right,

17
00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:23.080
or at least is the best possible for this epoch.

18
00:01:23.080 --> 00:01:33.320
So this is essentially determinist and inevitability, and also puts a stamp of approval in everything in the past and present, where it amounts to.

19
00:01:33.320 --> 00:01:44.960
Because it says things like, well, slavery was bad of course, but slavery of course now is bad from a law perspective, but slavery in the old days was good because it was better than whatever the pre-slavery thing was.

20
00:01:44.960 --> 00:01:50.400
Now, of course, they had a problem with the Dark Ages, where everybody admits things got worse

21
00:01:50.400 --> 00:01:55.240
from about the 5th to the 10th century AD, after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

22
00:01:55.240 --> 00:01:59.240
But they sort of said, wow, that was one glitch,

23
00:01:59.240 --> 00:02:03.200
non-repeatable glitch in the upward march of progress.

24
00:02:03.200 --> 00:02:09.480
So what we have now, now that the, looking at it from the perspective of 1986,

25
00:02:09.480 --> 00:02:12.280
the idea that everything is always getting better is much shakier, obviously.

26
00:02:12.280 --> 00:02:23.780
In the 20th century, in many ways, a century of genocide, but still in all, the great theory of history is flourishing, and it's gotten even more hard-nosed, so to speak, more locked in.

27
00:02:23.780 --> 00:02:31.780
And we see this, for example, getting to economics, we see this, unfortunately, among what we can call the Friedmanite or Buchananite theory of history.

28
00:02:31.780 --> 00:02:37.280
Everything in the past, first of all, the analysis of history is very cryptic.

29
00:02:37.280 --> 00:02:44.360
Economists and dealing with history usually, in these days, usually, for example, the North

30
00:02:44.360 --> 00:02:49.320
Thomas book on the economic history of Europe covers, I don't know, 600 years and about

31
00:02:49.320 --> 00:02:57.000
a few equations, sort of condenses everything, a couple of equations, and this is explicitly

32
00:02:57.000 --> 00:02:58.000
rigged to the core.

33
00:02:58.000 --> 00:03:03.840
Not only that, the idea is that anything that existed must have had a good function, functionally

34
00:03:33.840 --> 00:03:37.840
This is derived from the fact that it existed and it existed for a certain period of time.

35
00:03:37.840 --> 00:03:40.840
It's sort of like an existence theory of ethics.

36
00:03:40.840 --> 00:03:43.840
If it lasted for a while, it must have been okay.

37
00:03:43.840 --> 00:03:49.840
The fact that murder has lasted for a long time, from the beginning of mankind, theft, slavery, etc.

38
00:03:49.840 --> 00:03:53.840
It doesn't necessarily make it good, of course. It doesn't make it even functional.

39
00:03:53.840 --> 00:03:56.840
Or we can look at it this way, function from whose perspective?

40
00:03:56.840 --> 00:03:59.840
The perspective of a robber or the robbed.

41
00:03:59.840 --> 00:04:04.840
This weak theory of history permanates economic history in particular.

42
00:04:04.840 --> 00:04:10.840
The worst example I know of, this kind of interesting example, Echelon and Tollison, two distinguished public choicers of Buchananites,

43
00:04:10.840 --> 00:04:14.840
have written a book called Mercantilism as a rent-seeking society.

44
00:04:14.840 --> 00:04:18.840
Now, they don't pretend, it's a short book, they don't pretend to do any historical research at all, and they admit it.

45
00:04:18.840 --> 00:04:20.840
I mean, they're upfront about that.

46
00:04:20.840 --> 00:04:26.840
They take Heckscher's great book on mercantilism and simply engage in exegesis of it.

47
00:04:26.840 --> 00:04:35.840
Hector is magnificent. He wrote this book about 80 years ago. There have been some advances since then, but that's a criticism. We don't have to deal with that.

48
00:04:35.840 --> 00:04:43.840
What I'm interested in more is the echelon policy method of analyzing stuff. They say that mercantilism is essentially a theory of mercantilism.

49
00:04:43.840 --> 00:04:49.840
Ideology is a rationale for seeking monopoly privileges and part of the merchants and the bureaucrats, etc., etc.

50
00:04:49.840 --> 00:04:55.840
I agree with that, except for the fact they use the word rent-seeking, which I'm extremely critical of.

51
00:04:55.840 --> 00:05:25.840
This is something I hope to get back to later on, but it's a, it derives from the Ricardian theory of rent, which is still ex-span, it's still permeating, it's still, unfortunately, dominant, based on the idea that rent is a differential, which can be easily taxed away, it's a surplus, a non-productive surplus, so to speak, and therefore can be taxed. It's like saying that if Dustin Hoffman is making $2 million a year, and Joe Zoach and other actors making $20,000, $10,000 a year, the difference is differential, and Hoffman's $999,000 a year,

52
00:05:55.840 --> 00:05:59.840
Mercantilism works fine with this, but then the Echelon and the Taliesin have a question.

53
00:05:59.840 --> 00:06:02.840
How did Mercantilism disappear? Why did free trade come in?

54
00:06:02.840 --> 00:06:12.840
If everybody's seeking monopoly privilege, you know, the usual public choice stuff about how consumers are not interested and the privileged seekers are always interested.

55
00:06:12.840 --> 00:06:18.840
How did this get, how did they get rid of this? Why isn't it locked in forever? Stigler claims that statism is locked in forever now.

56
00:06:18.840 --> 00:06:23.840
So searching around for an explanation, the obvious explanation for anybody who thinks that ideas are important

57
00:06:23.840 --> 00:06:30.840
The Free Trade Movement came in, a mass movement consisting of merchants, lower classes, intellectuals, etc. etc.

58
00:06:30.840 --> 00:06:37.840
A free trade movement which swept the board, a mighty ideological movement which got rid of this web of privilege.

59
00:06:37.840 --> 00:06:40.840
Echelon and Talisman can't say that because they think ideology is unimportant.

60
00:06:40.840 --> 00:06:47.840
So what they say is, they base it all, this is the escape hatch for all Buchananites, for all public choices throughout history.

61
00:06:47.840 --> 00:06:51.840
Transaction course, it's like a talisman, it's like the magic talisman.

62
00:06:51.840 --> 00:07:02.840
and Social Development, anything that happens to history, transaction costs, as if the object of everybody's life is to minimize transaction costs, the main value that everybody's holding in their heart.

63
00:07:02.840 --> 00:07:06.840
I really don't care about transaction costs, I mean, the heck with it, but anyway.

64
00:07:06.840 --> 00:07:20.840
So here's the idea of why free trade and laissez-faire succeeded, replaced mechanism, is that it became too, now get this, as the king was replaced by parliament, it became too costly to lobby parliament,

65
00:07:20.840 --> 00:07:45.720
In the first place, there's no evidence of a cheaper transaction course.

66
00:07:45.720 --> 00:07:48.480
He seems to assume there's one king, and it's very simple to lobby.

67
00:07:48.480 --> 00:08:00.780
And the whole court, if you have an absolute king, you've got lots of dukes and earls and mistresses and everybody else vying for power, it's probably just as expensive, just as high transaction cost the lobby of the king as it was in parliament.

68
00:08:00.780 --> 00:08:09.980
They certainly present no evidence that it was cheaper. And secondly, of course, it misses the fact that the real point is ideological, the thing which sweeps aside special privilege in history is ideology.

69
00:08:09.980 --> 00:08:23.380
Despite the fact that the public choice people are claiming that ideology is irrational, because you're not devoted to it 24 hours a day, it's only ideology, and yet some people are devoted to ideology, as we know for, well, right now, the Ayatollah Khomeini, etc.

70
00:08:23.380 --> 00:08:34.980
Obviously, the Khomeini movement was not founded on close-benefit analysis, it was founded on deeply-felt, passionate ideology, which swept aside only the vested interest.

71
00:08:34.980 --> 00:08:40.980
I'm not saying that I'm unfavorable of the results of the commune, but I'm simply saying that ideology is extremely important in history.

72
00:08:40.980 --> 00:08:45.980
And there, by the way, I think Hayek, of course, is far superior and is famous.

73
00:08:45.980 --> 00:08:49.980
I think one of the best things Hayek ever wrote was intellectuals and socialism, which I commend everybody here.

74
00:08:49.980 --> 00:08:52.980
The influence, how ideas are influenced in history.

75
00:08:52.980 --> 00:08:58.980
They start out with theoreticians and they permeate down to what he calls second-hand dealers and ideas, and I think it's a very good term,

76
00:08:58.980 --> 00:09:02.980
journalists and activists, and they start permeating through the general public.

77
00:09:02.980 --> 00:09:16.980
And then if you put it in the value of cost-benefit terms, you can say that ideology then becomes a deeply held value on the part of people, superseding even transaction costs as something which you're devoted to, devoted your life to.

78
00:09:16.980 --> 00:09:20.980
Can you imagine anybody voting their life and minimizing transaction costs?

79
00:09:20.980 --> 00:09:28.980
At any rate, by the way, I should also say the Marxists are also, oddly enough, weak theorists, so they're in a special conflict version.

80
00:09:28.980 --> 00:09:36.980
So even though the Marxists don't believe in a step-by-step linear approach upward, it's a dialectic approach upward. It's sort of a zigzag approach.

81
00:09:36.980 --> 00:09:46.980
And when the Marxists too, they fall back into this historicist viewpoint. Slavery in their days. Marxists are very anti-slavery now. There'll be some forms of slavery, not their own.

82
00:09:46.980 --> 00:09:52.980
But slavery in the old days was good, but it was better than whatever the other thing was. The system was better because it was better than slavery.

83
00:09:52.980 --> 00:09:59.480
They too have this big theory, historicist theory, and the revolution becomes inevitable.

84
00:09:59.480 --> 00:10:05.480
And by the way, this is why Marxists and Marxism, the English call them, Marxoids, or semi-Marxists,

85
00:10:05.480 --> 00:10:07.480
why they always use the term progressive and reactionary.

86
00:10:07.480 --> 00:10:10.480
I don't know if any of you have ever thought about the use of the term.

87
00:10:10.480 --> 00:10:16.980
For Marxists, the only, or the highest moral, or the only moral truth is to be in favor of the inevitable revolution.

88
00:10:16.980 --> 00:10:20.980
In other words, to be in tune with the inevitable laws of advance.

89
00:10:20.980 --> 00:10:30.980
And so these are the progressives, and those progressives are people who are in tune with the next phase of the inevitable historical development, like the revolution, the proletarian revolution.

90
00:10:30.980 --> 00:10:37.980
Reactionaries are those who are opposed to it. In other words, the whole term progressive and reactionary is a term which is used, of course, on an implicitly ethical basis.

91
00:10:37.980 --> 00:10:41.980
It's really a question of who's in tune with the coming events and who isn't.

92
00:10:41.980 --> 00:10:47.980
Who's in touch with the zeitgeist of the coming zeitgeist and who's not in touch with it. It's the only standard.

93
00:10:47.980 --> 00:10:51.660
By the way, Schumpeter pointed out in one of his capitalism, socialism, andocracy,

94
00:10:51.660 --> 00:10:55.260
I think his introduction was second edition,

95
00:10:55.260 --> 00:10:58.220
he said, Schumpeter claimed that socialism was inevitable,

96
00:10:58.220 --> 00:10:59.900
but for very different reasons than Marxists.

97
00:10:59.900 --> 00:11:01.820
He claimed basically it was inevitable for one reason,

98
00:11:01.820 --> 00:11:06.380
because capitalism breeds intellectuals who subvert it.

99
00:11:06.380 --> 00:11:11.500
At any rate, he said, people say that because I think that socialism is inevitable,

100
00:11:11.500 --> 00:11:12.860
it means I'm in favor of it.

101
00:11:12.860 --> 00:11:15.420
Quite the contrary, why can't you say, why can't you look at your boat,

102
00:11:45.420 --> 00:11:53.420
The Great Theory ignores the great, it ignores free choice, it ignores the great moral problems, since free choice involves moral choices.

103
00:11:53.420 --> 00:12:01.420
And they do not realize that history is a great moral drama, a drama of advance, of conflicts, of retro-aggression, of good versus evil, etc., etc.

104
00:12:01.420 --> 00:12:10.420
And to wind up with my own doctrine about history, following Albert J. Nock, history is essentially a race or a conflict between state power and social power, as Nock put it.

105
00:12:10.420 --> 00:12:17.220
Social Power is a network of voluntary interactions of the economy, of civilization, and whatever.

106
00:12:17.220 --> 00:12:21.140
Anything that is voluntarily interacting, I call social power, and state power, of course,

107
00:12:21.140 --> 00:12:25.220
is the state, which is always trying to repress it, cripple it, tax it, loot it, whatever,

108
00:12:25.220 --> 00:12:26.220
et cetera, et cetera.

109
00:12:26.220 --> 00:12:29.220
So history becomes a race between these two forces.

110
00:12:29.220 --> 00:12:34.580
Okay, to get down to a subset of this, or an application of this, the history, the weak

111
00:12:34.580 --> 00:12:39.860
theory of the history of science, I'm coming to economics in a minute, weak theory of the

112
00:12:39.860 --> 00:12:44.860
The History of Science, which is very similar for us to the Wake Theory of History, period.

113
00:12:44.860 --> 00:12:51.860
The Wake Theory of History of Science was dominant, probably is still dominant in high school textbooks, was dominant until the 60s.

114
00:12:51.860 --> 00:13:02.860
Essentially, he said that science, the growth of knowledge, is an upward and upward step-by-step approach from the year 0 and minus 0 to now.

115
00:13:02.860 --> 00:13:07.860
Now, a lot of implications of that, one implication is you don't have to read The History of Science unless you're an antiquarian.

116
00:13:07.860 --> 00:13:15.860
In other words, if you're a physicist in 1986, there's no point in reading some physicist in 1930, unless you're interested in special conditions of what happened to him.

117
00:13:15.860 --> 00:13:17.860
You don't learn anything from it.

118
00:13:17.860 --> 00:13:21.860
In other words, you never lose any knowledge.

119
00:13:21.860 --> 00:13:32.860
Theory is that at every step of the way, science patiently tests its assumptions, its premises, and discards those which turn out to be unacceptable or false, and adds those which are acceptable.

120
00:13:32.860 --> 00:13:39.860
So everybody's always testing their, patiently testing their axioms, or whatever, and finally keeping advancing. Therefore, we don't lose any, no loss of knowledge.

121
00:13:39.860 --> 00:13:44.860
The current textbook then incorporates all of the best of everything from the years zero until the present.

122
00:13:44.860 --> 00:13:46.860
This is the theory, in any rate.

123
00:13:46.860 --> 00:13:50.860
Here the famous Kuhn Doctrine, I think, comes in very neatly.

124
00:13:50.860 --> 00:13:57.860
Famous paradigm theory of Thomas Kuhn, called the Structure Scientific Revolution, which is, I think it came out in the late 60s.

125
00:13:57.860 --> 00:14:05.860
He effected a revolution in history of science.

126
00:14:05.860 --> 00:14:09.860
Kuhn has had a lot of flack on his philosophy of science, which he claims he doesn't really have.

127
00:14:09.860 --> 00:14:13.860
In other words, I think he's not interesting as a philosopher.

128
00:14:13.860 --> 00:14:16.860
He is interesting as a historian and a sociologist of science.

129
00:14:16.860 --> 00:14:18.860
How did science actually develop?

130
00:14:18.860 --> 00:14:22.860
And essentially what he says is that instead of this linear step-by-step stuff,

131
00:14:22.860 --> 00:14:25.860
first of all, nobody ever tests their basic axioms, ever.

132
00:14:25.860 --> 00:14:32.460
ever, and which is obviously true. Once an axiom or a paranoia, he put it, a set of basic

133
00:14:32.460 --> 00:14:37.740
beliefs is followed, is adopted, and people just test the, just apply it to various personal

134
00:14:37.740 --> 00:14:42.700
matters and puzzles, he calls it, come up. And anybody who challenges a basic paranoia

135
00:14:42.700 --> 00:14:47.980
is considered not a scientist, not that he's refuted or anything, just out of the dialogue

136
00:14:47.980 --> 00:14:53.540
he's had it. And so this pegs on for a while until various anomalies pop up, until the

137
00:14:53.540 --> 00:14:59.300
The Theory begins, obviously, not with fails and explaining a lot of stuff, and then there's a crisis situation, as he calls it,

138
00:14:59.300 --> 00:15:05.300
when confusion and competing paradigms come up, and some new paradigm can solve these problems better,

139
00:15:05.300 --> 00:15:11.300
it then begins to take over and establishes a new paradigm, and they forget about all the rest of this stuff.

140
00:15:11.300 --> 00:15:15.800
Now, he is alleged to have said that no paradigm is any better than the other. I don't think that's true.

141
00:15:15.800 --> 00:15:19.300
But at any rate, the interesting thing about what happens here is that you lose knowledge.

142
00:15:19.300 --> 00:15:24.300
Even if this paradigm is better than that, often stuff gets lost along the way.

143
00:15:24.300 --> 00:15:29.300
One example is, of course, Greek fire. We didn't know until very recently what Greek fire was.

144
00:15:29.300 --> 00:15:33.300
We now know it's like flamethrowers, but we only found that out when we invented flamethrowers.

145
00:15:33.300 --> 00:15:37.300
In 1900, nobody knew what Greek fire had been in ancient Greece.

146
00:15:37.300 --> 00:15:42.300
Another example, of course, is the Stradivarius shellac, or whatever it is.

147
00:15:42.300 --> 00:15:48.300
Nobody can duplicate, because you can't test everything, you can't figure out the composition.

148
00:15:48.300 --> 00:15:51.300
The Secret Formulas, in other words, which get lost.

149
00:15:51.300 --> 00:15:53.300
Well, these are obvious, sort of blatant examples.

150
00:15:53.300 --> 00:15:58.300
A friend of mine, as a history of science, says there are certain laws of 18th century optics which we've forgotten.

151
00:15:58.300 --> 00:16:01.300
In other words, we know less in certain areas of optics than they did in the 18th century.

152
00:16:01.300 --> 00:16:06.300
At any rate, when we get to the social science of philosophy, of course, this is much more true.

153
00:16:06.300 --> 00:16:12.300
Oh, by the way, another thing I should say before leaving this is that the old guys never changed.

154
00:16:12.300 --> 00:16:14.300
They don't shift into the new paradigms, usually.

155
00:16:14.300 --> 00:16:17.300
In other words, the old guys will stick to it until they die.

156
00:16:17.300 --> 00:16:25.300
People who adopted new paradigms were the younger people, graduate students, college students who were not intellectually locked into the old paradigm.

157
00:16:25.300 --> 00:16:33.300
A famous example of that is Joseph Priestley, the great late 18th century libertarian and physicist who invented oxygen and refused to believe it was really oxygen.

158
00:16:33.300 --> 00:16:38.300
He said, no, no, you're still locked into the phlogiston theory. He said it's only dephlogisticated air.

159
00:16:38.300 --> 00:16:43.300
He refused to acknowledge the implications of his own invention, his own discovery.

160
00:16:43.300 --> 00:16:56.300
This is very typical. This is why, by the way, strategically, if you're an Austrian, you shouldn't spend your time trying to convert Paul Samuelson or Milton Friedman.

161
00:16:56.300 --> 00:16:59.300
These guys are not going to be converted. They're locked into their paradigm.

162
00:16:59.300 --> 00:17:05.300
The people you convert are people who are just coming up, new people, people on the fence, graduate students. These are the people you convert.

163
00:17:05.300 --> 00:17:11.300
You don't waste your time trying to convert Samuel or Friedman or whoever the other paradigm people are.

164
00:17:11.300 --> 00:17:14.600
So the war is for the souls of the people coming up, so to speak.

165
00:17:14.600 --> 00:17:18.700
Now obviously, it's pretty clear that in social sciences, economics, philosophy, etc.,

166
00:17:18.700 --> 00:17:21.700
there's even more of this, because there's less testable stuff, obviously.

167
00:17:21.700 --> 00:17:25.600
So that if this is true in science, physical science, which I think it is,

168
00:17:25.600 --> 00:17:30.200
it's all the more true in social science, economics, and stuff, where you can really lose knowledge very drastically,

169
00:17:30.200 --> 00:17:33.900
because you can replace a good paradigm by a lousy one.

170
00:17:33.900 --> 00:17:38.800
In other words, it's difficult to do that in physics, probably, if they do it or not,

171
00:17:38.800 --> 00:17:42.800
It's certainly very easy to do it in philosophy and economics and political thought.

172
00:17:42.800 --> 00:17:46.800
It's very easy for a new paradigm to get established for one reason or another.

173
00:17:46.800 --> 00:17:50.800
There's nothing to do with its truth value. It could be fashion, it could be politics, it could be the king.

174
00:17:50.800 --> 00:17:54.800
It could be throwing all the old paradigm people into the Ljubljanka.

175
00:17:54.800 --> 00:17:57.800
And whatever. There's all sorts of reasons why.

176
00:17:57.800 --> 00:18:01.800
So in other words, reading history of economics thought or philosophic thought even more so

177
00:18:01.800 --> 00:18:05.800
is not just an interest for a historian to see how theory developed.

178
00:18:05.800 --> 00:18:15.800
It's of interest to also find out the truth, because somebody 1850 might be better than somebody writing now, the math usually is, in economics, philosophy, and whatever.

179
00:18:15.800 --> 00:18:23.800
So the whole history of thought then becomes, in the social sciences and in philosophy, a much more exciting enterprise, seems to me, than in physics.

180
00:18:23.800 --> 00:18:31.800
The guiding, again, the guiding philosophy in the history of thought, the history of economics, and how to get into that.

181
00:18:31.800 --> 00:18:36.800
The Guiding Doctrine has been rigged again, even though it seems to me obviously untrue.

182
00:18:36.800 --> 00:18:41.800
And almost every textbook is a rigged text. A hallmark of it would be this.

183
00:18:41.800 --> 00:18:47.800
Any group, they talk about any, whatever they're talking about, any group has something positive to contribute to the building up of economics.

184
00:18:47.800 --> 00:18:54.800
Whatever, even though they're totally contradictory, you know, one group is obviously nutty, doesn't make any difference, they're not nutty, they're part of a great dialogue.

185
00:18:54.800 --> 00:19:09.800
And so any group then takes their place. And so whoever you're talking about, French, the scholastics, the British classicists, the Austrians, the Keynesians, the institutionalists, they're all great guys. They all somehow contribute to this great edifice.

186
00:19:09.800 --> 00:19:19.800
As a result of this, of course, the historian of economic thought who does this is non-controversial, quote-unquote, nice guy, because he likes everybody.

187
00:19:19.800 --> 00:19:24.800
The fact that he's dead wrong doesn't seem to make that much difference.

188
00:19:24.800 --> 00:19:29.800
Un-dogmatic, and all the other odious things which these people are.

189
00:19:29.800 --> 00:19:37.800
It seems to me these things are almost worthless, because it's true that a good historian, even in a vague approach, can sum up what each group says, what each person says.

190
00:19:37.800 --> 00:19:44.800
But that's not really enough, because it seems to me a historian should be critical, should find out, is this guy wrong, or to what extent is he wrong, is he right, and what's going on here.

191
00:19:44.800 --> 00:19:52.800
In economics and philosophy it's not just a cut and dry thing where we now have a laser beam before we only had two sticks together.

192
00:19:52.800 --> 00:20:00.800
By the way, probably the worst example of this sort of thing is the Leo Straussian Doctrine in History of Local Thought.

193
00:20:00.800 --> 00:20:09.800
Leo Strauss was a German refugee who came to the University of Chicago and set up what could only be called a cult group of Straussians.

194
00:20:09.800 --> 00:20:16.800
Strausians, and they're all very self-consciously Strausian. They follow the master in all things, etc., etc.

195
00:20:16.800 --> 00:20:23.800
Strausians take a few, what they call great thinkers, and I'm going to criticize that too, the concept of taking only great thinkers.

196
00:20:23.800 --> 00:20:29.800
They take a few great thinkers, more or less arbitrarily selected. How do they know they're great thinkers? Well, everybody says they're great.

197
00:20:29.800 --> 00:20:33.800
Machiavelli, Aristotle, Dewey, whatever. We don't even want to talk about Hobbes.

198
00:20:33.800 --> 00:20:38.800
And then they say, since this guy is a great thinker, he must have been consistent.

199
00:20:38.800 --> 00:20:46.800
Why must he be consistent? Well, he's a great thinker. Who am I? A schnook. A schnooking professor to challenge the greatness of this guy.

200
00:20:46.800 --> 00:20:53.800
The assumption is this guy's a great thinker. Now, if he's inconsistent, which most of these guys are very inconsistent, contradicts himself whenever he pays.

201
00:20:53.800 --> 00:20:55.800
Keynes contradicts himself all the time.

202
00:20:55.800 --> 00:21:00.800
Well, it looks as if he contradicts himself, but he couldn't because he's a great thinker and therefore consistent.

203
00:21:00.800 --> 00:21:03.800
So we have to look for the deep inner consistency.

204
00:21:03.800 --> 00:21:23.800
The deep medical system, a mouse is almost like astrology, it's numerology. Strauss will say, if you take the fifth book of Machiavelli's Prince and compare it with the fifth book of the world, then you get this number magic, you see, you get the five, you look for the deep thing which really explains what he's saying, and it's really bizarre.

205
00:21:23.800 --> 00:21:37.800
So that's the, we'll give them a go on hog wild. I mean, desperately action, everybody's great and consistent as well as contributing to an edifice of thought.

206
00:21:37.800 --> 00:21:46.800
So what we have to realize, it seems to me, is that just the opposite. Many thinkers are great, other thinkers are lousy, some develop truth, others sank into error,

207
00:21:46.800 --> 00:22:16.800
And therefore, analyzing historians, economists and historians, separating who these guys are, to what extent were they correct, what extent were they bad, what extent did they push economics into a wrong detour, etc. That's true that there's a so-called vice of presentism where you attack everybody for not having read Human Action, you attack coinists for not having read Human Action, it's called presentism, but very few people do that, I think it's a store man, I don't know if anybody

208
00:22:16.800 --> 00:22:22.800
The Real Vice is the other way around. The Real Vice is thinking everybody is great and everybody is true in some sense.

209
00:22:22.800 --> 00:22:26.800
Just to paraphrase one of my favorite quotes from Oscar Wilde when he said,

210
00:22:26.800 --> 00:22:31.800
you remember Miss Prism, an importance of being earnest, was asked whether certain of her novels,

211
00:22:31.800 --> 00:22:35.800
she had written a three volume novel, whether it had a happy ending or not.

212
00:22:35.800 --> 00:22:40.800
She drew herself up and she said, the good end happily, the bad unhappily, that is what fiction means.

213
00:22:40.800 --> 00:22:47.800
I would say to Lord Acton that the role of the historian is to praise the good and denounce the bad.

214
00:22:47.800 --> 00:22:49.800
That's the meaning of history.

215
00:22:49.800 --> 00:22:55.800
Anyway, Acton said the muse of the historian is not Cleo, but Radamanthus. Cleo is the official Greek muse of myth.

216
00:22:55.800 --> 00:22:59.800
He said the muse is really Radamanthus, the avenger of innocent blood.

217
00:22:59.800 --> 00:23:05.800
And he went on to say the historian must be a judge and a hanging judge of that, to lighten the wounds of history.

218
00:23:05.800 --> 00:23:16.800
The basic methodological or philosophical approach is Skinnerism. I don't mean the evil B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist.

219
00:23:16.800 --> 00:23:24.800
I mean Clinton Skinner. Clinton Skinner is a Cambridge political theorist who wrote a magnificent book, which I recommend to everybody.

220
00:23:24.800 --> 00:23:32.800
It's not libertarian, it's not free market, it's a marvelous book on political thought called The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.

221
00:23:32.800 --> 00:23:40.800
The Renaissance and the Reformation, the first volume is on Renaissance thinkers, the humanists, the second is on the Reformation, Luther, Calvin, etc.

222
00:23:40.800 --> 00:23:46.800
And it's just magnificent, because what he does is, not only does he analyze each of these guys and ask the sort of questions I think are important,

223
00:23:46.800 --> 00:23:54.800
political theory, religious theory, etc. He also doesn't deal with, in the history of political thought, in the history of economic thought too,

224
00:23:54.800 --> 00:24:01.800
the standards thing, you have three guys or five guys, right? A typical book in the history of political thought would be three French thinkers,

225
00:24:01.800 --> 00:24:06.800
or five great political theorists, Aristotle and Machiavelli,

226
00:24:06.800 --> 00:24:10.800
sort of like Strauss, except not necessarily assuming they're all great or consistent.

227
00:24:10.800 --> 00:24:16.800
Five great thinkers in the history of economic thought, the Heilbrunner approach for example,

228
00:24:16.800 --> 00:24:21.800
Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Marshall, Keynes, let's say, five guys, five economists.

229
00:24:21.800 --> 00:24:24.800
I think this is a rotten way of approaching history of thought.

230
00:24:24.800 --> 00:24:30.800
First place, all these political thinkers and economic thinkers were involved in movements, almost all of them.

231
00:24:30.800 --> 00:24:38.800
They're also doing, when they say anything, they have a certain intention. They use the words in a certain way. They have a certain author's intention.

232
00:24:38.800 --> 00:24:43.800
In order to understand their intention, you have to understand who they're talking to, who they're dealing with, who their friends are, who their enemies are.

233
00:24:43.800 --> 00:24:48.800
In other words, who they're reacting against. In other words, the historical context of what they're saying.

234
00:24:48.800 --> 00:24:54.800
Skinner goes into detailed critiques of each of these people. He doesn't slight that, but he also talks about the so-called lesser people,

235
00:24:54.800 --> 00:25:01.800
and also who they're reacting against and how the influence spread from one university after the other to one country after the other.

236
00:25:01.800 --> 00:25:03.800
You really got a whole sense of the sweet history.

237
00:25:03.800 --> 00:25:10.800
So the political texts, the political flow, are not just isolated texts sitting up there to be worked on,

238
00:25:10.800 --> 00:25:14.800
but it's part of the whole sweep of modern history and history of thought.

239
00:25:14.800 --> 00:25:20.800
Also, you can't really understand these guys without figuring out who the other people are and who they're reacting against.

240
00:25:20.800 --> 00:25:31.800
And secondly, a lot of the so-called lesser people are just as good as, just as important as the big shots, in fact, in some ways even better, because they're usually pure, often very, they take the master's doctrine and build in a consistent framework.

241
00:25:31.800 --> 00:25:36.800
On a political level, for example, in American history, Jefferson, you always talk about, you always hear about Jefferson.

242
00:25:36.800 --> 00:25:43.800
Well, Jefferson was a great guy, but the Jeffersonians were much better than he was. They were more consistent. Jefferson was selling out, especially when he was in power.

243
00:25:43.800 --> 00:25:46.800
But the Jeffersonians usually didn't. They were usually attacking him for selling out.

244
00:25:46.800 --> 00:25:55.800
So when you deal with the leading Jeffersonians, Macon and Randolph and Taylor, etc., you get a much harder core doctrine than you do if you're only dealing with leadership.

245
00:25:55.800 --> 00:26:04.800
So anyway, I'm favoring the whole Skinner approach. There's a very good book on Locke, I just mentioned somebody here, by Richard Ashcraft.

246
00:26:04.800 --> 00:26:10.800
This came out called Revolutionary Politics and the Two Treatises of Government.

247
00:26:10.800 --> 00:26:23.800
and what Ashcraft does, and he sparks this, it doesn't really affect this method, what he does is he talks about Locke not only as what his thought was in the context of revolutionary libertarian struggle which they were engaged in.

248
00:26:23.800 --> 00:26:30.800
He and the Leveller, everybody from the Leveller was on, it shows how he's related, descended directly from the Levellers, from the libertarian dissident group.

249
00:26:30.800 --> 00:26:34.800
It also explains why Locke, you know, Locke is famous for being a real scaredy cat.

250
00:26:34.800 --> 00:26:40.800
In other words, he wrote everything not only anonymously, he kept everything in a locked drawer and so forth and so on.

251
00:26:40.800 --> 00:26:46.800
Welcome to the city of pathologically. Why is the guy scared? Why is he a scared rabbit? He was a scared rabbit. He was in exile for ten years of his life.

252
00:26:46.800 --> 00:26:51.800
His friends were all being arrested and shot. A good reason to be scared.

253
00:26:51.800 --> 00:26:58.800
Anyway, that's just one aspect of it. My mentor in history, Joseph Dorfman, was something like this in the history of American economic thought.

254
00:26:58.800 --> 00:27:00.800
The Theory of Money and Credit

255
00:27:28.800 --> 00:27:34.480
It's much more difficult to find who the other people are, but that's the way life is, as Mises once used to say.

256
00:27:34.480 --> 00:27:40.880
He used to claim that historians, European historians, should know about eight languages, and everybody's not blanching there in the seminar.

257
00:27:40.880 --> 00:27:45.160
Well, nobody's forcing you to be a historian if you don't want to learn eight languages.

258
00:27:45.160 --> 00:27:54.400
At any rate, so I think this is very important to get the so-called lesser people involved in this thing, as well as the three or four top, the five top guys.

259
00:27:54.400 --> 00:27:59.600
Okay, getting to the historiography of economic thought.

260
00:27:59.600 --> 00:28:04.400
I've already, I trust you've already read the counter-articles in my article on scholastic economics.

261
00:28:04.400 --> 00:28:07.200
I wouldn't have to repeat it, just sort of condense it a little bit.

262
00:28:07.200 --> 00:28:12.300
The key thing, the regular historiography, the orthodox historiography of economic thought,

263
00:28:12.300 --> 00:28:15.700
starts as follows. I'm sure you're all familiar with this.

264
00:28:15.700 --> 00:28:19.800
There are a bunch of mercantilists running around talking about specific things like,

265
00:28:19.800 --> 00:28:24.600
to the government to keep billion in the realm, to make sure we have tariffs, etc., etc.

266
00:28:24.600 --> 00:28:30.520
And then, in 1776, emerging like Athena out of the realm of Zeus or whatever, was Adam

267
00:28:30.520 --> 00:28:31.520
Smith.

268
00:28:31.520 --> 00:28:35.080
Out of his head, creates the world of modern economics, free market, economics, the whole

269
00:28:35.080 --> 00:28:36.080
business, right?

270
00:28:36.080 --> 00:28:37.080
And that's it.

271
00:28:37.080 --> 00:28:43.320
Then you have Ricardo, and you have Marx and whatever, sort of somehow deriving from it.

272
00:28:43.320 --> 00:28:47.720
Then you have Marshall, or Austrians, whatever, Marshall and Keynes, and that's about it.

273
00:28:47.720 --> 00:28:55.720
Anyway, Smith becomes then the originator, to the extent of some of your beloved people here in Washington, where Adam Smith ties.

274
00:28:55.720 --> 00:29:00.720
He's only the tribute to the founder of economics, laissez-faire, whatever.

275
00:29:00.720 --> 00:29:03.720
This is pure baloney from start to finish, this myth.

276
00:29:03.720 --> 00:29:06.720
This is one of the things, unfortunately, counter talk.

277
00:29:06.720 --> 00:29:08.720
Couter is one of the first people to mention it.

278
00:29:08.720 --> 00:29:10.720
That's his two articles.

279
00:29:10.720 --> 00:29:16.720
Schumpeter, who wrote a year or two after Couter, was the famous book which really sort of set this thing forth.

280
00:29:16.720 --> 00:29:20.720
The History of Economic Analysis

281
00:29:20.720 --> 00:29:24.720
Unfortunately, Schumpeter did not live to complete it,

282
00:29:24.720 --> 00:29:28.720
so it's badly written and even more badly organized, in many ways almost incomprehensible.

283
00:29:28.720 --> 00:29:32.720
He's definitely a revisionist in this sense. In other words, he believes that

284
00:29:32.720 --> 00:29:36.720
life existed before Adam Smith, economics existed before Adam Smith, and better.

285
00:29:36.720 --> 00:29:40.720
Not only existed, but better. In other words, the counter-paradigm,

286
00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:44.720
the correct one, is what you have is

287
00:29:44.720 --> 00:29:50.320
Hundreds, hundreds, many hundreds, even thousands of years of sound economic analysis engaged

288
00:29:50.320 --> 00:29:55.360
in by the scholastics in the middle ages down through the late, the Spanish scholastics in

289
00:29:55.360 --> 00:30:01.480
the 16th century, taking Aquinas even before that, down to the late Spanish scholastics.

290
00:30:01.480 --> 00:30:04.680
That's about, that's several hundred years.

291
00:30:04.680 --> 00:30:11.920
And then a French tradition in the 18th century, continuing then in France and Italy, and in

292
00:30:11.920 --> 00:30:15.760
In the 18th century, leading to a fantastic flowering of economic thought, modern economic

293
00:30:15.760 --> 00:30:20.800
thought, Camelot and Tourgault in particular, and you have everything there, you have laissez-faire

294
00:30:20.800 --> 00:30:25.980
much more pure and much more sound than Adam Smith, and in fact Tourgault, if you've read

295
00:30:25.980 --> 00:30:30.080
my little pamphlet on it, is really a pre-Austrian in every sense, he's got time preference

296
00:30:30.080 --> 00:30:34.880
in there, he's got the bumblebeck in theory of capital, he's got the whole business, fantastic,

297
00:30:34.880 --> 00:30:40.080
he's got the law of diminishing return, he's got the whole schmear, we have this great

298
00:30:40.080 --> 00:30:48.080
and then Bingo and the Collapsant with Smith.

299
00:30:48.080 --> 00:30:54.080
Schumpeter is properly assiduous about Smith. He reads between the lines particularly. Schumpeter is obviously a total contempt for Smith and for good reason.

300
00:30:54.080 --> 00:31:02.080
He hates Ricardo. It's not a great thing. The hatred of Ricardo shines through the book. It's almost a major feature of the book. It pops up every 50 or 100 pages.

301
00:31:02.080 --> 00:31:11.080
Schumpeter is bizarre. He likes John Stuart Mill. There's no obscure reason. Schumpeter can't figure it out. Mill is only bringing back Ricardo.

302
00:31:11.080 --> 00:31:17.080
So anyway, you can't look for much consistency in Schumpeter. But the fundamental paradigm is consistent.

303
00:31:17.080 --> 00:31:24.080
It was a big blow when it came out. Orthodox economists and historians of thought were shattered by Schumpeter's book.

304
00:31:24.080 --> 00:31:30.080
If we go back and read Frank Knight's review of it, we can understand why he was pro-Catholic.

305
00:31:30.080 --> 00:31:37.080
Knight, if you know about Knight, was a hysterical anti-Christian, literally went ape on a Christian's question.

306
00:31:37.080 --> 00:31:44.080
Protestant and Catholic, particularly Catholic, so he was not exactly equipped to be very objective about this when it came out.

307
00:31:44.080 --> 00:31:51.080
But Knight used to do, when he taught his course in graduate economics, if there were any nuns or priests in the class, he'd just insult the Catholic Church until they left.

308
00:31:51.080 --> 00:31:55.080
Then he'd say, now we can begin. Really, really a weird duck.

309
00:31:55.080 --> 00:32:01.040
So I commend Cato, a marvelous statement in Cato when he says about Smith and making waste

310
00:32:01.040 --> 00:32:06.160
and rubbish a 2000 years of economic thought. I'll get into that. Anyway, the counter thesis

311
00:32:06.160 --> 00:32:11.680
against scholastic economics basically is that the scholastics emphasize utility and

312
00:32:11.680 --> 00:32:16.360
scarcity as the key determinants of value and of production or whatever. By the way,

313
00:32:16.360 --> 00:32:19.800
the neoclassical smear against the Austrians is that they're only interested in utility

314
00:32:19.800 --> 00:32:39.800
The whole point is, as you know, if you put the familiar two-dimensional diagram, you have quantity of a good on the x-axis, and then you have utility or whatever on the y-axis in some way, you know, it's ordinal, not cardinal, in some way, you're very broad about it.

315
00:32:39.800 --> 00:32:53.800
What we're saying is diminishing utility of good and the intersection of the demand curve with the supply will bring you the economic value of the price of the product.

316
00:32:53.800 --> 00:33:05.800
It's not that supply is unimportant. What you're really saying is that you have subjective demand which then impresses itself on the economic system and values everything which is there, all the stuff which is there is being evaluated by people.

317
00:33:05.800 --> 00:33:09.800
So you have people doing evaluating of things out there which are being evaluated.

318
00:33:09.800 --> 00:33:16.800
The things of the supply. It's important to have supplies as a vertical curve, not to confuse the situation.

319
00:33:16.800 --> 00:33:22.800
It's just that the Austrians of course and the Scholastics deny the role of so-called cost in determining price.

320
00:33:22.800 --> 00:33:26.800
That was the point. Cost only affects price by determining, helping determine scarcity.

321
00:33:26.800 --> 00:33:29.800
It gets back to the supply of the product.

322
00:33:29.800 --> 00:33:34.800
Product. And as Calder points out and as Schimpeta points out and later on De Roover and Rice

323
00:33:34.800 --> 00:33:39.680
Hutchers and a whole bunch of other revisionists on the scholastic front, the entire view that

324
00:33:39.680 --> 00:33:44.360
economists had of scholastics for a couple hundred years is totally oral-wet. And the

325
00:33:44.360 --> 00:33:49.320
basic view that I'm sure you've read is that scholastics believed that just price was the

326
00:33:49.320 --> 00:33:54.840
cost of production plus a guaranteed profit, or and or, keeping your station in life. Whatever

327
00:33:54.840 --> 00:33:59.040
your station is, of course if your station is humble, you keep being humble. It's totally

328
00:33:59.040 --> 00:34:04.040
The Oral Wetness, as all these guys have shown, DeRuver and all these people, shown in detail.

329
00:34:04.040 --> 00:34:09.040
Very few scholastics had this doctrine, two or three, and these were minor fringe people.

330
00:34:09.040 --> 00:34:15.040
The mainstream of scholastics thought was utility, scarcity, and free market. In other words, the just price was the market price.

331
00:34:15.040 --> 00:34:19.040
Now it's true they weren't total libertarians. I'm not going to say that.

332
00:34:19.040 --> 00:34:24.040
In the first place, they didn't like the idea of individual bargaining. They thought the market had to be a market.

333
00:34:24.040 --> 00:34:28.040
If you and I agreed on some price and it's not the market price, they would say that's unjust.

334
00:34:28.040 --> 00:34:33.040
Second of all, they were not against price control. They thought that price control could also be just.

335
00:34:33.040 --> 00:34:38.040
But that's very far from saying that something else has to replace the market.

336
00:34:38.040 --> 00:34:42.040
Basically, they were pro-market people and very keen market analysts.

337
00:34:42.040 --> 00:34:49.040
The only thing I want to say about Scholastic personally is that one of the best of them, a magnificent character, Pierre de Jean-Olivier,

338
00:34:49.040 --> 00:34:58.040
He wrote about 1400, who was not only a great market analyst in the event of sophisticated utility theory, even down to marginal utility theory,

339
00:34:58.040 --> 00:35:04.040
he was also an extreme spiritual Franciscan, a rigorous Franciscan, in other words, an extreme pro-poverty person.

340
00:35:04.040 --> 00:35:11.040
The Franciscan movement started out as pro-poverty and then with a pledge of poverty,

341
00:35:11.040 --> 00:35:18.040
then as the Franciscan church began to accumulate money from donations or whatever, they began to have second thoughts.

342
00:35:18.040 --> 00:35:23.020
and began to be more realistic about the whole thing, and then the rigorous winning of Franciscan

343
00:35:23.020 --> 00:35:26.680
was high, well, the thing you guys are being, selling out the Franciscan doctrine, Franciscan

344
00:35:26.680 --> 00:35:31.280
heritage, and all of these were the extreme leader, the leader of the Provençal group

345
00:35:31.280 --> 00:35:36.160
of extreme co-poverty people, I mean, the emaciated, obviously, from the Franciscan,

346
00:35:36.160 --> 00:35:40.400
even real Franciscan didn't eat much, more like the rigorous Franciscan. I mean, very

347
00:35:40.400 --> 00:35:44.680
poverty-stricken, sort of like a movie character, you know, very skinny, wandering around, and

348
00:35:44.680 --> 00:35:51.440
and he was a great sophisticated market analyst, it's amazing, it's one of the great anomalies in the history of thought.

349
00:35:51.440 --> 00:35:55.460
The only thing that scholastics were weak on was the usury, usury question,

350
00:35:55.460 --> 00:35:57.840
the thing which really discredited them eventually.

351
00:35:57.840 --> 00:36:03.120
And they had a real problem, they couldn't understand time preference, and after all, nobody until Turgall really understood it.

352
00:36:03.120 --> 00:36:05.300
You can't blame them that too much.

353
00:36:05.300 --> 00:36:09.480
They couldn't understand why you should charge interest on a riskless loan.

354
00:36:09.480 --> 00:36:14.440
And they understood about profit, they understood about opportunity costs, they got the whole thing down,

355
00:36:14.440 --> 00:36:17.080
Time preference is a major weakness.

356
00:36:17.080 --> 00:36:21.520
Even with that, however, the scholastics managed to sophisticate the whole thing and evade,

357
00:36:21.520 --> 00:36:27.120
just avoid the whole business of brilliant maneuvering to allow usury anyway.

358
00:36:27.120 --> 00:36:32.840
But the brilliant maneuvering of course was evasive and therefore was open to attack.

359
00:36:32.840 --> 00:36:36.000
The other counter-thesis is that it's not an accident.

360
00:36:36.000 --> 00:36:38.600
This is what I first read as I thought it was very interesting, but speculative.

361
00:36:38.600 --> 00:36:42.360
I now think there's a lot to it, I think getting deeper into it,

362
00:36:42.360 --> 00:36:53.360
that it seems to me no accident that the only labor theory of value of people, in other words, in the history of thought you have a thousand years of scholastics or several hundred years of consumption theorists, utility theorists,

363
00:36:53.360 --> 00:37:02.360
all of a sudden the labor theory pops up. According to the account, there's no accident of the Calvinists, it's only among Calvinists that labor theory of value flourished.

364
00:37:02.360 --> 00:37:08.360
Calvinists believed in a divine obligation for labor, in other words, almost labor as an end in itself.

365
00:37:08.360 --> 00:37:18.360
Catholic thinkers tend to be in favor of consumption, moderate enjoyment, and labor as a means to an end, which is more or less the economic way of looking at it, so to speak.

366
00:37:18.360 --> 00:37:26.360
Whereas the Catholics tend to be anti-enjoyment, and want to keep consumption limited to a minimum, and really the fury of continuing labor.

367
00:37:26.360 --> 00:37:32.360
I'm not saying every Calvinist is like this, or every Catholic, but I think as a broad summary, I think it's pretty accurate.

368
00:37:32.360 --> 00:37:36.920
If you look, for example, in Scotland, we have Catholics and Calvinists living side-by-side.

369
00:37:36.920 --> 00:37:45.000
Catholics are always attacking the Calvinists for being doer, you know, standoffish, unfriendly, etc., etc.

370
00:37:45.000 --> 00:37:49.720
And the Calvinists are attacking Catholics for being lazy, shiftless, drink a lot.

371
00:37:49.720 --> 00:37:52.280
They're probably both right, in many ways.

372
00:37:52.280 --> 00:37:55.400
But the thing is, that's the sort of difference you get.

373
00:37:55.400 --> 00:37:58.840
This seems to go through throughout.

374
00:37:58.840 --> 00:38:02.120
Catholics seem to be much more relaxed, so to speak.

375
00:38:02.120 --> 00:38:05.800
As we'll see, the first real labor theory valued person was really Adam Smith.

376
00:38:05.800 --> 00:38:08.040
It was not John Locke. I denied it was John Locke.

377
00:38:08.040 --> 00:38:12.040
I think the pocket of labor theory of property is very, very different from labor theory of value.

378
00:38:12.040 --> 00:38:17.400
It simply means, how do you get unknown resources into private ownership? What way to do it?

379
00:38:17.400 --> 00:38:21.160
Because he was, of course, a homestead theorist, mixing your labor with the soil,

380
00:38:21.160 --> 00:38:23.880
you then becomes your private property. I don't think that's a labor theory of value at all.

381
00:38:23.880 --> 00:38:27.800
It's total misconception by historians, of course, to get the whole thing mixed up.

382
00:38:27.800 --> 00:38:40.600
The Natural Law Tradition, the Aristotelian Stoic Tradition, which was then picked up

383
00:38:40.600 --> 00:38:46.320
by Aquinas and the Scholastics, especially after Aristotle was rediscovered, means that

384
00:38:46.320 --> 00:38:50.840
man, by use of reason, can discover natural law, laws of reality, which include laws of

385
00:38:50.840 --> 00:38:56.600
ethics, and which also put a firm limit on the state, in which the state may not invade

386
00:38:56.600 --> 00:39:00.600
the sphere of rights or the sphere of each individual.

387
00:39:00.600 --> 00:39:09.600
I think in addition to that, that's one sense in which Catholicism had a firm check on state power throughout the Middle Ages and later.

388
00:39:09.600 --> 00:39:14.600
And the other important thing is that the Catholic Church had a transnational check on state rule.

389
00:39:14.600 --> 00:39:18.600
I don't want to go on a limb, but I think it's the only case in history where the church and state were not the same.

390
00:39:18.600 --> 00:39:23.600
In other words, in most civilizations, church and state were fused together.

391
00:39:23.600 --> 00:39:42.600
The King, taxing people, church, church telling people to obey the king, state and church oppressing the public, taxing and controlling, etc.

392
00:39:42.600 --> 00:39:48.600
Most intellectuals throughout history have been churchmen. The idea of a lay intellectual comes in the last couple of hundred years.

393
00:39:48.600 --> 00:39:54.600
The State and Church are a very powerful instrument for despotism and state power.

394
00:39:54.600 --> 00:39:57.600
I think this is the only case in history where the State and Church were separate.

395
00:39:57.600 --> 00:40:03.600
In other words, the Catholic Church was transnational and therefore kept a severe limit on the power of each king.

396
00:40:03.600 --> 00:40:09.600
As a matter of fact, particularly, and I recommend a marvelous little book by Jean Beckler,

397
00:40:09.600 --> 00:40:12.600
a French economic historian, called The Origins of Capitalism.

398
00:40:12.600 --> 00:40:14.600
Why did capitalism arise only in Western Europe?

399
00:40:14.600 --> 00:40:21.600
in Western Europe, obviously there's been trade in every civilization, real capitalism, market phenomena, etc. really comes in only in Western Europe.

400
00:40:21.600 --> 00:40:31.600
And what is it that made it so? And he essentially pinpoints the fact that power was decentralized, was feudalist, of course, instead of being central empire, central despotism.

401
00:40:31.600 --> 00:40:39.600
So each power is limited, you have independent principalities, you have villages, you have autonomous power, many instances, and feudal landlords have autonomous power.

402
00:40:39.600 --> 00:40:41.600
The Expansion of Capitalism's Power

403
00:40:41.600 --> 00:40:44.600
And you have a transnational church to check the individual state.

404
00:40:44.600 --> 00:40:49.600
So you have very little state power, either externally or internally, as a result of these checks, which allowed the market to flourish.

405
00:40:49.600 --> 00:40:53.600
As a matter of fact, there's a marvelous phrase here where he says, Beckler says,

406
00:40:53.600 --> 00:40:58.600
The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and its raison d'etre to political anarchy.

407
00:40:58.600 --> 00:41:03.600
The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and its raison d'etre to political anarchy.

408
00:41:03.600 --> 00:41:06.600
And particularly, it's no coincidence, according to Beckler,

409
00:41:06.600 --> 00:41:23.600
The Real Expansion of Capitalism comes in the 11th century, the so-called Renaissance of the 11th century, which coincides with Gregory VII's magnificent smashing of the power of the state from investiture, the power of the king, who the kings of course are always trying to grab religious power.

410
00:41:23.600 --> 00:41:32.600
So then with the Protestant Reformation, all this more or less comes to an end. In other words, first place, many of the Protestant churches become state churches.

411
00:41:32.600 --> 00:41:44.600
The Anglican Church, the total state church, Calvinists, usually what happens is that religious groups tend to be in favor of tyranny when they're in the majority, in favor of religious freedom when they're in the minority.

412
00:41:44.600 --> 00:41:53.600
But the Calvinists were the same thing. When they took over in Geneva or Massachusetts, they were pretty rigorous, smashing sin.

413
00:41:53.600 --> 00:42:00.600
Whereas when they were in the minority, of course, they became quite libertarian. They evolved into libertarian inclusions.

414
00:42:00.600 --> 00:42:30.600
And the thing is the Catholic, so in the Catholic countries even they had a slippage as the church itself lost a lot of influence. In France, in particular, the growth of absolutism, tremendous growth of absolutism, of course reaching a peak with Louis the 14th and the late 17th century and continuing on until the French Revolution. What happened in France was you had two groups, the Calvinists were very much against the establishment, the state tyranny, and the Catholic leaders, the extreme Catholics were also against it.

415
00:42:30.600 --> 00:42:35.600
And then they have a series of sort of rebellions and battles with both the extreme Catholics

416
00:42:35.600 --> 00:42:39.600
and the Calvinists coming up with great libertarian political theory on the course of it.

417
00:42:39.600 --> 00:42:42.600
What happens in the centralist takeover is usually, often what happens, is called the

418
00:42:42.600 --> 00:42:46.600
politiques, who the historians have called moderate.

419
00:42:46.600 --> 00:42:49.600
They're only moderate in the sense that they weren't in favor of religion killing each

420
00:42:49.600 --> 00:42:51.600
other because they didn't care that much about religion.

421
00:42:51.600 --> 00:42:52.600
That's essentially why.

422
00:42:52.600 --> 00:42:55.600
But they were not moderate in the sense that they wanted total state power, total power

423
00:42:55.600 --> 00:42:57.600
of the king and forget about religion.

424
00:42:57.600 --> 00:43:02.200
religion becomes an instrument of the king and so the politics winning over

425
00:43:02.200 --> 00:43:06.360
and then you have in France the Catholic Church becomes only it gets on the

426
00:43:06.360 --> 00:43:10.360
influence of crypto Calvinist group called the Jensenists who were such

427
00:43:10.360 --> 00:43:15.480
really so really Calvinist and sheep's clothing and really take over the

428
00:43:15.480 --> 00:43:19.640
French Church and they're very pro-absolutist yes yes the king is

429
00:43:19.640 --> 00:43:22.560
right in all things and sufferance so that was the one of the reasons why the

430
00:43:22.560 --> 00:43:25.800
Catholic Church does not limit the power of French the growth of French

431
00:43:25.800 --> 00:43:29.640
Absolutism, and then also had another complication in Protestant countries had

432
00:43:29.640 --> 00:43:33.960
scholastics, Hugo Rochas was a sort of free market, sort of free market type of

433
00:43:33.960 --> 00:43:38.460
Dutch Calvinist, not really, Dutch Protestant I should say, scholastic, and

434
00:43:38.460 --> 00:43:42.680
Scotland influenced Scotland and the Scottish Enlightenment which of course

435
00:43:42.680 --> 00:43:47.120
Leif Adam Smith was also scholastic, Protestant scholastic or neo-Calvinist

436
00:43:47.120 --> 00:43:49.880
scholastic, it becomes complex but that's basically it.

437
00:43:49.880 --> 00:43:54.880
Well, Grotius was in the Armenian camp, in their free will camp in Holland.

438
00:43:54.880 --> 00:43:59.880
While we're dealing with, by the way, one of the things about natural law, I should say,

439
00:43:59.880 --> 00:44:04.880
in addition to limiting, setting up a sphere for individual rights and limiting the government,

440
00:44:04.880 --> 00:44:09.880
it also sets limits. And if you really believe in natural law, you believe that our natural limits demand omnipotence,

441
00:44:09.880 --> 00:44:12.880
or any individual is omnipotent. If you don't believe in natural law, anything goes.

442
00:44:12.880 --> 00:44:16.880
You can do anything. You can conquer the world, whatever, without any ill consequence.

443
00:44:16.880 --> 00:44:29.880
I just want to mention absolutist thought in Anglican and Englund, Tudor and Stuart in the 16th and 17th century, Anglican and Englund, of course the British Church, the Anglican Church was a straight state church.

444
00:44:29.880 --> 00:44:40.880
They worked out the so-called correspondence theory, one of the most bizarre theories in my experience for absolutism. Sir Albert Stollmer was attacked by Locke as a beautiful example of this.

445
00:44:40.880 --> 00:44:45.880
The theory is called by analogy or by correspondence. The argument is by correspondence. Namely,

446
00:44:45.880 --> 00:44:49.880
we have a hierarchy of power throughout the world.

447
00:44:49.880 --> 00:44:55.880
God, the angels, men, and critters.

448
00:44:55.880 --> 00:44:58.880
I say critters. Animals, things like that.

449
00:44:58.880 --> 00:45:00.880
Animals, vegetables, whatever, right?

450
00:45:00.880 --> 00:45:05.880
So this is the power. God has top power and the others are subordinated. Each one is subordinated to the other.

451
00:45:05.880 --> 00:45:29.880
In the same way, and I've got this little axiom there, each individual has a head which runs things, and a heart and limbs, and all that, and the head is ruling the others, and see the idea of man rebelling against God, of course, is evil and sinful and impossible, etc., and the same way the idea of limbs or heart rebelling against the head is equally sinful and impossible.

452
00:45:29.880 --> 00:45:40.880
In the family, the father, the god-like, head-like figure, the mother, the wife, and the kids.

453
00:45:40.880 --> 00:45:45.880
Subordinate, social and political implications.

454
00:45:45.880 --> 00:45:52.880
And then, of course, the state, the king, some of the all-powerful nobles, middle class,

455
00:45:52.880 --> 00:46:07.880
This is the big argument for royal absolutism. It's not an argument most of us find convincing, compelling.

456
00:46:07.880 --> 00:46:14.880
The right-wing lotion is a two-circle, known as a guy's known as a two-circle, and a view of consent.

457
00:46:14.880 --> 00:46:20.880
Everybody had consent. Everybody had natural rights of consent and so on, absolute rights, except some shadowy time in history.

458
00:46:20.880 --> 00:46:24.880
The History of the Gate, they surrendered all these rights to the King in perpetuity, they can't get it back.

459
00:46:24.880 --> 00:46:33.880
That was the Two Circles argument for absolutism. The film has said, no, that's a sellout. Once you start with rights and consent, you're on a slippery slope, you lead directly to anarchism.

460
00:46:33.880 --> 00:46:42.880
In the sense he was right. Hobbes, Hobbes was a moderate compared to the Two Circle. Hobbes was a liberal deviationist from the Two Circle.

461
00:46:42.880 --> 00:46:49.880
He believed that, yes, everybody surrendered all their rights to the King in order to keep the peace, et cetera, but if the King is really coming at you with a gun and just about to shoot you,

462
00:46:49.880 --> 00:46:54.280
You have the right to shoot, you have the right to run away, there's this one concession or right,

463
00:46:54.280 --> 00:47:00.280
of course the Cusicko says, you know you have no right to run away, you should bury your buck in the king's assault.

464
00:47:00.280 --> 00:47:08.280
And then of course there's the libertarians or the classical liberals, the liberals in Locke, etc. who are essentially either Calvinists or Protestant independents.

465
00:47:08.280 --> 00:47:16.680
We've talked a lot about religion so far, but so far it's been fairly familiar, the labor theory, value, utility, and scarcity, and natural law.

466
00:47:16.680 --> 00:47:22.680
Now I'm coming to another section, another part, which is not as familiar, other aspects of religion and theology, which are also extremely important.

467
00:47:22.680 --> 00:47:29.680
I want to mention, there was a thing in Newsweek last week, timid text, short strip for religion.

468
00:47:29.680 --> 00:47:35.680
They talk about high school texts or grade school texts in history, world history, American history, and religion has dropped out.

469
00:47:35.680 --> 00:47:44.680
For example, this one world culture text for sixth graders manages to discuss Joan of Arc without mentioning God, religion, or her canonization.

470
00:47:44.680 --> 00:47:49.680
In other words, 20 pages on Tanzania, but none on the Protestant Reformation.

471
00:47:49.680 --> 00:47:56.680
All religions drop out. A friend of mine is writing a college text of readings in medieval ancient history and modern history.

472
00:47:56.680 --> 00:47:59.680
They can't put anything about religion in it. It's not a question of being for religion or against it.

473
00:47:59.680 --> 00:48:04.680
Anything about it is considered controversial, and therefore has to be killed.

474
00:48:04.680 --> 00:48:11.680
It's absolutely bizarre because religion has influenced all of thought and all of action, at least until the 19th century and probably until the 20th.

475
00:48:11.680 --> 00:48:14.920
and so we're talking about a history of anything, especially a history of thought,

476
00:48:14.920 --> 00:48:18.680
to leave religion out, to leave most of the stuff out, to leave the values

477
00:48:18.680 --> 00:48:23.000
and the ideals that motivate us. It's really crazy.

478
00:48:23.000 --> 00:48:27.280
You don't have to be pro-religion or pro-christianity to realize that it's been extremely important,

479
00:48:27.280 --> 00:48:31.680
not to talk about it, but it's absurd. I'm not a theologian, I don't want to get into theology per se,

480
00:48:31.680 --> 00:48:37.200
but I must say I find theology fascinating because it's sort of a deductive system, something like praxeology,

481
00:48:37.200 --> 00:48:40.000
except of course the axioms are different.

482
00:48:40.000 --> 00:48:47.000
Once you have the axioms, you can spin almost the whole thing out, and you can talk about coherent deductive systems versus incoherent, I think.

483
00:48:47.000 --> 00:48:56.000
Anyway, the two things I want to talk about, which are very obscure, seemingly not important, but I think very vital, the history of thought and economic thought,

484
00:48:56.000 --> 00:49:02.000
are two things which get left out, even by people who know about natural law and absolutism and all that.

485
00:49:02.000 --> 00:49:13.000
One is creatology, or the science, using science as a type of wisdom, you know, not physical measurement, science of the creation of the universe.

486
00:49:13.000 --> 00:49:16.000
Why did God create the universe, in other words?

487
00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:22.000
Seemingly, to some of us, it's a seemingly trivial question, actually pregnant with fantastic political implications.

488
00:49:22.000 --> 00:49:26.000
There was one slight difference in axioms, another thing about theology deductive system,

489
00:49:26.000 --> 00:49:32.000
One seemingly unimportant difference in the axiom can cause tremendous differences in political conclusions or social conclusions.

490
00:49:32.000 --> 00:49:36.000
Why did God create the universe?

491
00:49:36.000 --> 00:49:40.000
In both of these areas, by the way, in creatology and the other one,

492
00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:47.000
my conclusion is, purely as a layman, that the Orthodox Christian position is the safest, let's put it that way.

493
00:49:47.000 --> 00:49:55.000
Creatology, eschatology, namely the science of the last days, how will the world come to an end and when.

494
00:49:55.000 --> 00:49:58.000
and the Creatology, the Science of the First Days.

495
00:49:58.000 --> 00:50:01.000
This might seem to some people, some secularists, irrelevant,

496
00:50:01.000 --> 00:50:04.000
but it's not irrelevant at all, it's extremely important.

497
00:50:04.000 --> 00:50:08.000
But before I get to that, I just want to say what actually relates to the Creatology,

498
00:50:08.000 --> 00:50:10.000
and particularly Creatology,

499
00:50:10.000 --> 00:50:13.000
one of the key things which Christianity brought to the world, I believe,

500
00:50:13.000 --> 00:50:18.000
more than any other religion, is individualism, the supreme importance of the individual.

501
00:50:18.000 --> 00:50:21.000
And I think that's the individual stamped on the image of God,

502
00:50:21.000 --> 00:50:27.000
and his or her salvation becomes of extreme importance and moral choices and all the rest of it.

503
00:50:27.000 --> 00:50:31.000
The Greeks, even though I revere the Greeks, they're great rationalists and all that.

504
00:50:31.000 --> 00:50:33.000
The Greeks are polis-oriented.

505
00:50:33.000 --> 00:50:39.000
So that what they care about is not the individual but the polis, the state community, the city-state.

506
00:50:39.000 --> 00:50:44.000
And so when Plato and Aristotle are talking about virtue and what the virtuous life is,

507
00:50:44.000 --> 00:50:47.000
they're talking about the life through the city-state, not for each individual.

508
00:50:47.000 --> 00:50:49.000
They don't care about the individual.

509
00:50:49.000 --> 00:50:55.520
Accounts. So it's a collectivist doctrine to the city-state. Now some of my friends like

510
00:50:55.520 --> 00:51:00.360
Doug Rasmussen and Leo Aristoteles are trying to claim that they really meant the community

511
00:51:00.360 --> 00:51:03.880
and not the state, but I doubt this. I have to be proven, shown this in detail, but I

512
00:51:03.880 --> 00:51:07.800
really think this is a city-state. Also not unrelated to the fact that most of these guys

513
00:51:07.800 --> 00:51:12.400
were slave owners, and slavery was of course guaranteed by the city-state. In other words,

514
00:51:12.400 --> 00:51:16.440
if you're a part of a small slave-owning caste, you've got plenty of time to discuss philosophy,

515
00:51:16.440 --> 00:51:19.880
philosophy, for example, the slaves are doing all the work, and it's small number, it's

516
00:51:19.880 --> 00:51:23.640
only the slaveholders voted and so forth and so on, you tend to identify yourself with

517
00:51:23.640 --> 00:51:27.280
the polis, because the polis is you and then, you know, 500 other guys or a thousand other

518
00:51:27.280 --> 00:51:32.840
guys, so it becomes understandable why they slipped into this collectivist mode.

519
00:51:32.840 --> 00:51:39.160
And then other parts of cretology we'll see is species-oriented, it's even more collectivist.

520
00:51:39.160 --> 00:51:42.920
Man as a species, or collective species rather than as an individual.

521
00:51:42.920 --> 00:51:54.920
I think Christianity is unique in bringing an individual into focus as a key element of concern, and of moral choice and salvation and all that sort of thing. It's magnificent, and I think it could not be overstressed.

522
00:51:54.920 --> 00:52:11.920
Creatology, seemingly obscure or unimportant. The orthodox Christian position is that God created the universe out of pure love. God is perfect, almost by definition, created the universe out of pure love, and that's it.

523
00:52:11.920 --> 00:52:14.640
is the safest approach, whether it's correct or not, at least a theologian.

524
00:52:14.640 --> 00:52:18.360
Certainly the safest approach. The other approach, I don't know what to call it,

525
00:52:18.360 --> 00:52:21.480
I haven't found a name for you, I'll just call it the mystical approach.

526
00:52:21.480 --> 00:52:28.240
This is the Orthodox Christian approach. The mystical approach is that God created

527
00:52:28.240 --> 00:52:32.720
the universe out of felt need, out of what Mises would have called felt uneasiness.

528
00:52:32.720 --> 00:52:39.760
God was lonesome, right? God knows God was imperfect and needed creation of the

529
00:52:39.760 --> 00:52:40.760
of the Universe.

530
00:52:40.760 --> 00:52:42.760
So what are the implications of this?

531
00:52:42.760 --> 00:52:50.320
The implications are that the way this works in the picture is that at the beginning, God

532
00:52:50.320 --> 00:52:51.320
and man were united.

533
00:52:51.320 --> 00:52:54.960
It's very difficult for me to make sense out of this, I'm trying my best.

534
00:52:54.960 --> 00:52:57.280
God and man united in the sense that they were fused together.

535
00:52:57.280 --> 00:53:01.160
There was no man, obviously man hadn't been created yet, but in some sense they were united.

536
00:53:01.160 --> 00:53:03.840
So they had unity, but God was imperfect.

537
00:53:03.840 --> 00:53:09.400
Then God creates man, and this sets up, this is important, it's progressive, because God

538
00:53:09.400 --> 00:53:12.040
God then can develop his perfection, and man can develop his perfection.

539
00:53:12.040 --> 00:53:14.120
In other words, God and man are both imperfect.

540
00:53:14.120 --> 00:53:19.560
So, man imperfect, notice this is man as a species because each individual dies pretty

541
00:53:19.560 --> 00:53:20.560
soon.

542
00:53:20.560 --> 00:53:24.980
We're talking about a collectivist man as species, collectivist.

543
00:53:24.980 --> 00:53:30.240
Man is imperfect, God is imperfect, and they both, and history, human history is a process

544
00:53:30.240 --> 00:53:35.360
by which God and man develop, become more and more perfect.

545
00:53:35.360 --> 00:53:38.080
So this is good, but there's also a bad side to this.

546
00:53:38.080 --> 00:53:43.080
Man is now separated from God for the first time. Alienated.

547
00:53:43.080 --> 00:53:47.080
And this, my friends, is the core origin of the famous word alienation,

548
00:53:47.080 --> 00:53:50.080
which I am sick of, if you aren't.

549
00:53:50.080 --> 00:53:53.080
This is what alienation is. Alienation does not mean feeling unhappy.

550
00:53:53.080 --> 00:53:56.080
It does not mean you don't like the state, you don't like your parents.

551
00:53:56.080 --> 00:53:59.080
Alienation to these guys means the fundamental separation from God

552
00:53:59.080 --> 00:54:02.080
with whom we had previously been united.

553
00:54:02.080 --> 00:54:05.080
We, in a collective sense, obviously I wasn't united with God

554
00:54:05.080 --> 00:54:07.080
20 million years ago, whenever I was.

555
00:54:07.080 --> 00:54:13.080
Fundamentally, alienation is a bad part, and a good part is the development.

556
00:54:13.080 --> 00:54:19.080
Then finally, so we have, we start off with this unity, and then we have a separation, alienation,

557
00:54:19.080 --> 00:54:25.080
and then we have a final recombination of history, will be, and here we have, of course, an eschatology,

558
00:54:25.080 --> 00:54:31.080
will be a reunion of man and God, and a one great, mighty, climactic reunion,

559
00:54:31.080 --> 00:54:35.080
which will be the perfection of man and the perfection of God also.

560
00:54:35.080 --> 00:54:42.080
of Man as a Species. The individual is nothing. The individual people are just atoms in this whole thing.

561
00:54:42.080 --> 00:54:49.580
So, man and God will be united in some cataclysmic species unity. Each individual will also be united with every other individual, one blob.

562
00:54:49.580 --> 00:54:56.580
One species blob, which will also be united with God, one mighty species blob, and this will be the end of history. History will come to an end.

563
00:54:56.580 --> 00:55:00.580
This is also eschatology, too, obviously.

564
00:55:00.580 --> 00:55:14.580
So this is collectivist, and it means that God is working through history. History becomes an important process by which these things are happening. Also, you start here, you then have a German called Aufhebung, in other words, I'm sick of already.

565
00:55:14.580 --> 00:55:25.580
Aufhebung meaning transformation or negation, the premium Hegelian Marxoid word. Aufhebung means one stage somehow magically is transformed into another one.

566
00:55:25.580 --> 00:55:32.580
This one and this one finally have a combination. There's always three, by the way. Three is a key. Three stages. There's always three stages.

567
00:55:32.580 --> 00:55:37.580
The third stage would be a mighty fantastic one. Everybody's the blobs that are united to each other.

568
00:55:37.580 --> 00:55:45.580
There's a great phrase. I can't refrain from reading this. One of my favorite writers of all time is G.K. Chesterton.

569
00:55:45.580 --> 00:55:54.580
He's talking about the social theory of Annie Bazant, who was a Fabian and theosophist from an orthodox Catholic position of this mystical theosophist viewpoint.

570
00:55:54.580 --> 00:56:01.580
where all individuals are blobbed in to each other and you have a final super blob.

571
00:56:01.580 --> 00:56:05.580
So this is the alienation, this is the dialectic.

572
00:56:05.580 --> 00:56:09.580
This is the famous dialectic where one stage of history is transformed,

573
00:56:09.580 --> 00:56:12.580
some imaginary transformation to its opposite, so it's something very different,

574
00:56:12.580 --> 00:56:17.580
and then finally transformed into a final climactic.

575
00:56:17.580 --> 00:56:22.580
Now some of the big shots, and one of the things, by the way, about this is, of course, the problem of evil is solved.

576
00:56:22.580 --> 00:56:26.740
The Problem of Evil, of course, as you all know, if God is good and omnipotent, how can

577
00:56:26.740 --> 00:56:27.740
we have evil in the world?

578
00:56:27.740 --> 00:56:30.740
This is, of course, a famous theological problem.

579
00:56:30.740 --> 00:56:34.700
By the way, my favorite solution to this is an Orthodox one by H. R. Mencken, also my

580
00:56:34.700 --> 00:56:35.700
favorite writer.

581
00:56:35.700 --> 00:56:40.460
Mencken said that, well, God was created by a committee of gods, each of whom are omnipotent

582
00:56:40.460 --> 00:56:44.340
and benevolent, but they just, being a committee, they screwed up.

583
00:56:44.340 --> 00:56:48.140
It was an extremely charming doctrine.

584
00:56:48.140 --> 00:56:50.860
One thing it does is it has several different solutions for the problem of evil.

585
00:56:50.860 --> 00:56:57.860
In other words, the Orthodox Christian solution is that man is created, individuals are created with free will who are free to either choose good or evil.

586
00:56:57.860 --> 00:57:09.860
But this solution says, the mystical solution, that there is no evil. All seeming evil is really part of a good process, a process of the dialectic which ends up in a mighty fusion of the blobs.

587
00:57:09.860 --> 00:57:14.860
There's no evil in the world because they're all taken care of. Anything that happens is probably inevitable or inevitable.

588
00:57:44.860 --> 00:58:14.860
Kowakowski, The Main Currents of Marxism, The First Volume, The Philosophical Roots of Marxism, The Polish Immigrant in England, John Scotus Origina, a Scottish-Irish late 9th century philosopher living in Paris, and the famous Christian mystic of the 13th century, Meister Johannes Eckhart, these are some of the big names in the development of mystical thought of this sort, and then Hegel,

589
00:58:14.860 --> 00:58:44.860
I finished my study of Hegel from my book, the second one, one thing I'm not going to go into is Hegel in any great length, but Hegel, Hegelianism really develops this, with Hegel himself becoming God, God integrates with Hegel at the end of history, at the end of the dialectic, God and Hegel fusing, he, Hegel, obviously, I just think he's a nut, let's face it, but anyway, there have been, of course, a lot of Hegelians in the world still are, just one quote from Hegel, which I think is charming here, enlightening,

590
00:58:44.860 --> 00:58:49.740
He loved Napoleon, he saw Napoleon riding down the street after Napoleon's victories

591
00:58:49.740 --> 00:58:54.940
in Prussia. He writes a friend of his, he says, I saw Napoleon in the soul of the world,

592
00:58:54.940 --> 00:58:58.980
riding through town. It was indeed a wonderful sight to see, concentrated in a point, sitting

593
00:58:58.980 --> 00:59:05.540
on a horse, an individual overruns the world and masters it. What Hegel called world historical

594
00:59:05.540 --> 00:59:11.300
figures, that's mood history. And Hegel felt that the dialect of history was ending in

595
00:59:11.300 --> 00:59:25.300
and his own, since he was the big shot philosopher for the new Prussian state, professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, the newly created state university, and therefore that's it. He's sort of like the end of history.

596
00:59:25.300 --> 00:59:36.300
Christology is the science of the final days. Orthodox Christian viewpoint developed by St. Augustine and still followed by Catholics, Lutherans, etc.

597
00:59:36.300 --> 00:59:44.300
The question is, well, obviously Christianity is messianic. Jesus will return in second advent and put an end to history. That's accepted by everybody.

598
00:59:44.300 --> 00:59:49.300
The question is in what sense or what form? Particularly, what about the millennium, as mentioned in the Bible?

599
00:59:49.300 --> 00:59:53.300
What about a thousand years of the Kingdom of God on Earth? Where does that fit in?

600
00:59:53.300 --> 00:59:57.300
When Jesus comes, the day of judgment and history is over.

601
00:59:57.300 --> 01:00:05.300
The amillennialist, the orthodox Christian physician in St. Augustine on, is the millennium is simply a metaphor for the Christian Church.

602
01:00:05.300 --> 01:00:10.300
And that's it. There's no real Kingdom of God on Earth in any more concrete sense.

603
01:00:10.300 --> 01:00:15.300
And Jesus will return in the Second Advent at some time, at his own time, in a permanent history.

604
01:00:15.300 --> 01:00:25.300
The Millennium is an object of political concern. The Millennium is out of politics. Individual salvation becomes the important thing.

605
01:00:25.300 --> 01:00:32.300
So history does not become a process where the Millennium is organized, so to speak. It is outside of history.

606
01:00:32.300 --> 01:00:38.300
There are two other wings, of course there are many sub-variants within each wing. Two other wings disagree with us.

607
01:00:38.300 --> 01:00:45.300
Pre-Millennialism

608
01:01:08.300 --> 01:01:14.300
When Jesus returns, the millennium before the millennium establishes a lot of problems,

609
01:01:14.300 --> 01:01:20.300
a lot of hectic, seven years of hectic stuff going down, wars and all sorts of things, conflicts.

610
01:01:20.300 --> 01:01:23.300
So the pre-millennials usually look for signs of this developing.

611
01:01:23.300 --> 01:01:25.300
Usually in times of turmoil, wars suffer.

612
01:01:25.300 --> 01:01:29.300
They will pop up and say, aha, the millennium is, Jesus is about to return.

613
01:01:29.300 --> 01:01:37.300
During the Reformation, the 17th century wars, the French Revolution, the outcroppings of the pre-millennialists.

614
01:01:37.300 --> 01:01:47.300
The problem politically was, looking for signs, the signs are things like the beast, the dragon, the scarlet woman, the return of the Jews to Palestine and their conversion to Christianity, et cetera, et cetera.

615
01:01:47.300 --> 01:01:51.300
Who the beast is is for exegesis for people more murdered than I am in these matters.

616
01:01:51.300 --> 01:01:55.300
But the problem, the thing is that all these people are committed to certain dates.

617
01:01:55.300 --> 01:01:57.300
There's the timetable of prophecy.

618
01:01:57.300 --> 01:02:00.300
Sir Isaac Newton, for example, thought that physics was relatively unimportant.

619
01:02:00.300 --> 01:02:07.300
is real contribution trying to figure out how old the world is and when it will come to an end by biblical exegesis.

620
01:02:07.300 --> 01:02:12.300
They're looking for signs and usually picking specific dates, the most famous of which were the Millerites,

621
01:02:12.300 --> 01:02:19.300
who were very popular in England in the 1840s, and one historian speculates that this influence marks,

622
01:02:19.300 --> 01:02:22.300
and I'm not sure there's no evidence for that, but certainly around at the time.

623
01:02:22.300 --> 01:02:29.300
In other words, the Millerites said that Jesus will return on October 22nd, 1844, period.

624
01:02:29.300 --> 01:02:34.300
The problem with specific predictions of the story is very much like economic forecasting.

625
01:02:34.300 --> 01:02:39.300
What do you do when October 23rd comes around and there ain't no second advent?

626
01:02:39.300 --> 01:02:42.300
That's the big problem with the prophecy of the story.

627
01:02:42.300 --> 01:02:44.300
So, Millarism became discredited.

628
01:02:44.300 --> 01:02:47.300
Usually what they do is they say, oh, sorry, my calculations are slightly off.

629
01:02:47.300 --> 01:02:49.300
It's really 1864, something like that.

630
01:02:49.300 --> 01:02:55.300
But basically, the Millarites went and had it, and it was succeeded by a new theory,

631
01:02:55.300 --> 01:03:01.900
which established essentially current fundamentalism now, premillennial fundamentalism, the theory

632
01:03:01.900 --> 01:03:07.540
of dispensationalism invented by John Milton Darby, the English premill, which is that,

633
01:03:07.540 --> 01:03:10.860
see, the thing is you can't have this timetable. The timetable stops when the Christian church

634
01:03:10.860 --> 01:03:16.500
is established. The Christian church, as they call it, is a big parenthesis, and so the

635
01:03:16.500 --> 01:03:21.460
prophecies of the timetable stops and only resumes at some date which might be soon but

636
01:03:51.460 --> 01:04:02.460
So we get to the post-millennialists who believe that man has to establish the Kingdom of God on earth first in order for Jesus to arrive.

637
01:04:02.460 --> 01:04:08.460
Key difference. In other words, this is essentially, here you don't worry about the millennium, the young millennialists.

638
01:04:08.460 --> 01:04:13.460
Here you get Jesus establishing, although you have various assistants for a cadre.

639
01:04:13.460 --> 01:04:18.460
As a matter of fact, in the dominant view of the pre-trib, the question is, when does the trib come?

640
01:04:18.460 --> 01:04:35.460
The seven years of heartache, the tribulation, the orthodox view among premillennialists is that Jesus arrived just before the trib, and rapture is not the only good guys to heaven, but they can just stand alone with Jesus and see the jerks being slaughtered down below, and then return after the Armageddon to establish the kingdom of God on earth.

641
01:04:35.460 --> 01:04:45.460
This is the orthodox pre-tribule. There are many mid-tribbers and post-tribbers. I hate to be a post-tribber. You're in for a bad time. You have the trib first and then Jesus comes.

642
01:04:45.460 --> 01:04:51.460
The Post Mills believe that man has to establish a thousand years of King of God on Earth first in order for Jesus to return.

643
01:04:51.460 --> 01:04:54.460
This places on man a heavy of a theological responsibility.

644
01:04:54.460 --> 01:05:01.460
And almost always, not in every case, but in most cases historically, pre-Mills have been raging status because the government has a shortcut.

645
01:05:01.460 --> 01:05:07.460
In other words, if Jesus comes and brings on Armageddon, then the bad guys will slaughter Armageddon.

646
01:05:07.460 --> 01:05:14.460
But if man has to establish the King of God on Earth first, it means the bad guys have to be some way eliminated by human means,

647
01:05:14.460 --> 01:05:21.960
by slaughtering the bad guys, or gradually by the government sort of spifling them in another version.

648
01:05:21.960 --> 01:05:27.960
But at any rate, the Post-Neil has almost always turned the state to be the great instrument of bringing on the King of God on earth.

649
01:05:27.960 --> 01:05:31.460
This is where it becomes extremely important.

650
01:05:31.460 --> 01:05:38.960
I think, basically, I believe that Erich Vogelon is a famous Christian political theorist who died recently as an Austrian, at least I think originally.

651
01:05:38.960 --> 01:06:08.960
He was also a student of Mises' seminar, anything that means, but Voigelin's turgid writings, his basic theme was, his guiding theme was, don't imitantize the eschatone, a very complex way of saying something very important, don't imitantize the eschatone, a sort of Germanic way of saying something important, namely, if you bring eschatology, in other words, if you bring the millennium into human history, you're in trouble. The Orthodox Christian view, a millennial view,

652
01:06:08.960 --> 01:06:13.960
In the last days, Kingdom of God or whatever is up in heaven, so you don't worry about it on earth, so to speak.

653
01:06:13.960 --> 01:06:21.960
If you bring it down to earth, you immanentize it, make it immanent within the earth, within human affairs, within human history,

654
01:06:21.960 --> 01:06:26.960
and you have all sorts of problems. You have people who kind of stamp out sin like fire and limestone, etc., etc.

655
01:06:26.960 --> 01:06:32.960
And that, I think, is an important insight by Vogel, in spite of its sort of jargon formulation.

656
01:06:32.960 --> 01:06:33.960
Thank you very much.