The first thing I'm going to start out with is the Contra-Huig Theory of History.
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.
As a matter of fact, it's still dominant, despite criticisms in the 30s and 40s.
Basically, what the Huig Theory of History says is that history is an inevitable march upward into the light.
In other words, step by step, the world always progresses, and this progress is inevitable.
Now, the theories themselves were kind of lovable, they were moderate classical liberals, I guess,
in the favor of...
And when they coined the theory in the 1830s, 40s and 50s,
there was a certain amount of justification for it, in the sense that, indeed, if they look back on the past,
things seem to be always getting better and better.
There's an increase in freedom, an increase in civilization, and standards of living,
and science, and knowledge, and so forth and so on, and so they came to the, unfortunately, made this
Impressionistic conclusion to a doctrine and saying that all this is inevitable.
If this is 1870, we're always better off in every way than 1860, et cetera, et cetera.
This implies heavily that everything that was at any stage of the game was right,
or was the best possible at the time, and therefore anything that is now is right,
or at least is the best possible for this epoch.
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.
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.
Now, of course, they had a problem with the Dark Ages, where everybody admits things got worse
from about the 5th to the 10th century AD, after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
But they sort of said, wow, that was one glitch,
non-repeatable glitch in the upward march of progress.
So what we have now, now that the, looking at it from the perspective of 1986,
the idea that everything is always getting better is much shakier, obviously.
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.
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.
Everything in the past, first of all, the analysis of history is very cryptic.
Economists and dealing with history usually, in these days, usually, for example, the North
Thomas book on the economic history of Europe covers, I don't know, 600 years and about
a few equations, sort of condenses everything, a couple of equations, and this is explicitly
rigged to the core.
Not only that, the idea is that anything that existed must have had a good function, functionally
This is derived from the fact that it existed and it existed for a certain period of time.
It's sort of like an existence theory of ethics.
If it lasted for a while, it must have been okay.
The fact that murder has lasted for a long time, from the beginning of mankind, theft, slavery, etc.
It doesn't necessarily make it good, of course. It doesn't make it even functional.
Or we can look at it this way, function from whose perspective?
The perspective of a robber or the robbed.
This weak theory of history permanates economic history in particular.
The worst example I know of, this kind of interesting example, Echelon and Tollison, two distinguished public choicers of Buchananites,
have written a book called Mercantilism as a rent-seeking society.
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.
I mean, they're upfront about that.
They take Heckscher's great book on mercantilism and simply engage in exegesis of it.
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.
What I'm interested in more is the echelon policy method of analyzing stuff. They say that mercantilism is essentially a theory of mercantilism.
Ideology is a rationale for seeking monopoly privileges and part of the merchants and the bureaucrats, etc., etc.
I agree with that, except for the fact they use the word rent-seeking, which I'm extremely critical of.
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,
Mercantilism works fine with this, but then the Echelon and the Taliesin have a question.
How did Mercantilism disappear? Why did free trade come in?
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.
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.
So searching around for an explanation, the obvious explanation for anybody who thinks that ideas are important
The Free Trade Movement came in, a mass movement consisting of merchants, lower classes, intellectuals, etc. etc.
A free trade movement which swept the board, a mighty ideological movement which got rid of this web of privilege.
Echelon and Talisman can't say that because they think ideology is unimportant.
So what they say is, they base it all, this is the escape hatch for all Buchananites, for all public choices throughout history.
Transaction course, it's like a talisman, it's like the magic talisman.
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.
I really don't care about transaction costs, I mean, the heck with it, but anyway.
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,
In the first place, there's no evidence of a cheaper transaction course.
He seems to assume there's one king, and it's very simple to lobby.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And there, by the way, I think Hayek, of course, is far superior and is famous.
I think one of the best things Hayek ever wrote was intellectuals and socialism, which I commend everybody here.
The influence, how ideas are influenced in history.
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,
journalists and activists, and they start permeating through the general public.
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.
Can you imagine anybody voting their life and minimizing transaction costs?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They too have this big theory, historicist theory, and the revolution becomes inevitable.
And by the way, this is why Marxists and Marxism, the English call them, Marxoids, or semi-Marxists,
why they always use the term progressive and reactionary.
I don't know if any of you have ever thought about the use of the term.
For Marxists, the only, or the highest moral, or the only moral truth is to be in favor of the inevitable revolution.
In other words, to be in tune with the inevitable laws of advance.
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.
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.
It's really a question of who's in tune with the coming events and who isn't.
Who's in touch with the zeitgeist of the coming zeitgeist and who's not in touch with it. It's the only standard.
By the way, Schumpeter pointed out in one of his capitalism, socialism, andocracy,
I think his introduction was second edition,
he said, Schumpeter claimed that socialism was inevitable,
but for very different reasons than Marxists.
He claimed basically it was inevitable for one reason,
because capitalism breeds intellectuals who subvert it.
At any rate, he said, people say that because I think that socialism is inevitable,
it means I'm in favor of it.
Quite the contrary, why can't you say, why can't you look at your boat,
The Great Theory ignores the great, it ignores free choice, it ignores the great moral problems, since free choice involves moral choices.
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.
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.
Social Power is a network of voluntary interactions of the economy, of civilization, and whatever.
Anything that is voluntarily interacting, I call social power, and state power, of course,
is the state, which is always trying to repress it, cripple it, tax it, loot it, whatever,
et cetera, et cetera.
So history becomes a race between these two forces.
Okay, to get down to a subset of this, or an application of this, the history, the weak
theory of the history of science, I'm coming to economics in a minute, weak theory of the
The History of Science, which is very similar for us to the Wake Theory of History, period.
The Wake Theory of History of Science was dominant, probably is still dominant in high school textbooks, was dominant until the 60s.
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.
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.
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.
You don't learn anything from it.
In other words, you never lose any knowledge.
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.
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.
The current textbook then incorporates all of the best of everything from the years zero until the present.
This is the theory, in any rate.
Here the famous Kuhn Doctrine, I think, comes in very neatly.
Famous paradigm theory of Thomas Kuhn, called the Structure Scientific Revolution, which is, I think it came out in the late 60s.
He effected a revolution in history of science.
Kuhn has had a lot of flack on his philosophy of science, which he claims he doesn't really have.
In other words, I think he's not interesting as a philosopher.
He is interesting as a historian and a sociologist of science.
How did science actually develop?
And essentially what he says is that instead of this linear step-by-step stuff,
first of all, nobody ever tests their basic axioms, ever.
ever, and which is obviously true. Once an axiom or a paranoia, he put it, a set of basic
beliefs is followed, is adopted, and people just test the, just apply it to various personal
matters and puzzles, he calls it, come up. And anybody who challenges a basic paranoia
is considered not a scientist, not that he's refuted or anything, just out of the dialogue
he's had it. And so this pegs on for a while until various anomalies pop up, until the
The Theory begins, obviously, not with fails and explaining a lot of stuff, and then there's a crisis situation, as he calls it,
when confusion and competing paradigms come up, and some new paradigm can solve these problems better,
it then begins to take over and establishes a new paradigm, and they forget about all the rest of this stuff.
Now, he is alleged to have said that no paradigm is any better than the other. I don't think that's true.
But at any rate, the interesting thing about what happens here is that you lose knowledge.
Even if this paradigm is better than that, often stuff gets lost along the way.
One example is, of course, Greek fire. We didn't know until very recently what Greek fire was.
We now know it's like flamethrowers, but we only found that out when we invented flamethrowers.
In 1900, nobody knew what Greek fire had been in ancient Greece.
Another example, of course, is the Stradivarius shellac, or whatever it is.
Nobody can duplicate, because you can't test everything, you can't figure out the composition.
The Secret Formulas, in other words, which get lost.
Well, these are obvious, sort of blatant examples.
A friend of mine, as a history of science, says there are certain laws of 18th century optics which we've forgotten.
In other words, we know less in certain areas of optics than they did in the 18th century.
At any rate, when we get to the social science of philosophy, of course, this is much more true.
Oh, by the way, another thing I should say before leaving this is that the old guys never changed.
They don't shift into the new paradigms, usually.
In other words, the old guys will stick to it until they die.
People who adopted new paradigms were the younger people, graduate students, college students who were not intellectually locked into the old paradigm.
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.
He said, no, no, you're still locked into the phlogiston theory. He said it's only dephlogisticated air.
He refused to acknowledge the implications of his own invention, his own discovery.
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.
These guys are not going to be converted. They're locked into their paradigm.
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.
You don't waste your time trying to convert Samuel or Friedman or whoever the other paradigm people are.
So the war is for the souls of the people coming up, so to speak.
Now obviously, it's pretty clear that in social sciences, economics, philosophy, etc.,
there's even more of this, because there's less testable stuff, obviously.
So that if this is true in science, physical science, which I think it is,
it's all the more true in social science, economics, and stuff, where you can really lose knowledge very drastically,
because you can replace a good paradigm by a lousy one.
In other words, it's difficult to do that in physics, probably, if they do it or not,
It's certainly very easy to do it in philosophy and economics and political thought.
It's very easy for a new paradigm to get established for one reason or another.
There's nothing to do with its truth value. It could be fashion, it could be politics, it could be the king.
It could be throwing all the old paradigm people into the Ljubljanka.
And whatever. There's all sorts of reasons why.
So in other words, reading history of economics thought or philosophic thought even more so
is not just an interest for a historian to see how theory developed.
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.
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.
The guiding, again, the guiding philosophy in the history of thought, the history of economics, and how to get into that.
The Guiding Doctrine has been rigged again, even though it seems to me obviously untrue.
And almost every textbook is a rigged text. A hallmark of it would be this.
Any group, they talk about any, whatever they're talking about, any group has something positive to contribute to the building up of economics.
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.
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.
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.
The fact that he's dead wrong doesn't seem to make that much difference.
Un-dogmatic, and all the other odious things which these people are.
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.
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.
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.
By the way, probably the worst example of this sort of thing is the Leo Straussian Doctrine in History of Local Thought.
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.
Strausians, and they're all very self-consciously Strausian. They follow the master in all things, etc., etc.
Strausians take a few, what they call great thinkers, and I'm going to criticize that too, the concept of taking only great thinkers.
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.
Machiavelli, Aristotle, Dewey, whatever. We don't even want to talk about Hobbes.
And then they say, since this guy is a great thinker, he must have been consistent.
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.
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.
Keynes contradicts himself all the time.
Well, it looks as if he contradicts himself, but he couldn't because he's a great thinker and therefore consistent.
So we have to look for the deep inner consistency.
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.
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.
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,
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
The Real Vice is the other way around. The Real Vice is thinking everybody is great and everybody is true in some sense.
Just to paraphrase one of my favorite quotes from Oscar Wilde when he said,
you remember Miss Prism, an importance of being earnest, was asked whether certain of her novels,
she had written a three volume novel, whether it had a happy ending or not.
She drew herself up and she said, the good end happily, the bad unhappily, that is what fiction means.
I would say to Lord Acton that the role of the historian is to praise the good and denounce the bad.
That's the meaning of history.
Anyway, Acton said the muse of the historian is not Cleo, but Radamanthus. Cleo is the official Greek muse of myth.
He said the muse is really Radamanthus, the avenger of innocent blood.
And he went on to say the historian must be a judge and a hanging judge of that, to lighten the wounds of history.
The basic methodological or philosophical approach is Skinnerism. I don't mean the evil B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist.
I mean Clinton Skinner. Clinton Skinner is a Cambridge political theorist who wrote a magnificent book, which I recommend to everybody.
It's not libertarian, it's not free market, it's a marvelous book on political thought called The Foundations of Modern Political Thought.
The Renaissance and the Reformation, the first volume is on Renaissance thinkers, the humanists, the second is on the Reformation, Luther, Calvin, etc.
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,
political theory, religious theory, etc. He also doesn't deal with, in the history of political thought, in the history of economic thought too,
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,
or five great political theorists, Aristotle and Machiavelli,
sort of like Strauss, except not necessarily assuming they're all great or consistent.
Five great thinkers in the history of economic thought, the Heilbrunner approach for example,
Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Marshall, Keynes, let's say, five guys, five economists.
I think this is a rotten way of approaching history of thought.
First place, all these political thinkers and economic thinkers were involved in movements, almost all of them.
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.
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.
In other words, who they're reacting against. In other words, the historical context of what they're saying.
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,
and also who they're reacting against and how the influence spread from one university after the other to one country after the other.
You really got a whole sense of the sweet history.
So the political texts, the political flow, are not just isolated texts sitting up there to be worked on,
but it's part of the whole sweep of modern history and history of thought.
Also, you can't really understand these guys without figuring out who the other people are and who they're reacting against.
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.
On a political level, for example, in American history, Jefferson, you always talk about, you always hear about Jefferson.
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.
But the Jeffersonians usually didn't. They were usually attacking him for selling out.
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.
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.
This came out called Revolutionary Politics and the Two Treatises of Government.
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.
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.
It also explains why Locke, you know, Locke is famous for being a real scaredy cat.
In other words, he wrote everything not only anonymously, he kept everything in a locked drawer and so forth and so on.
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.
His friends were all being arrested and shot. A good reason to be scared.
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.
The Theory of Money and Credit
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.
He used to claim that historians, European historians, should know about eight languages, and everybody's not blanching there in the seminar.
Well, nobody's forcing you to be a historian if you don't want to learn eight languages.
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.
Okay, getting to the historiography of economic thought.
I've already, I trust you've already read the counter-articles in my article on scholastic economics.
I wouldn't have to repeat it, just sort of condense it a little bit.
The key thing, the regular historiography, the orthodox historiography of economic thought,
starts as follows. I'm sure you're all familiar with this.
There are a bunch of mercantilists running around talking about specific things like,
to the government to keep billion in the realm, to make sure we have tariffs, etc., etc.
And then, in 1776, emerging like Athena out of the realm of Zeus or whatever, was Adam
Smith.
Out of his head, creates the world of modern economics, free market, economics, the whole
business, right?
And that's it.
Then you have Ricardo, and you have Marx and whatever, sort of somehow deriving from it.
Then you have Marshall, or Austrians, whatever, Marshall and Keynes, and that's about it.
Anyway, Smith becomes then the originator, to the extent of some of your beloved people here in Washington, where Adam Smith ties.
He's only the tribute to the founder of economics, laissez-faire, whatever.
This is pure baloney from start to finish, this myth.
This is one of the things, unfortunately, counter talk.
Couter is one of the first people to mention it.
That's his two articles.
Schumpeter, who wrote a year or two after Couter, was the famous book which really sort of set this thing forth.
The History of Economic Analysis
Unfortunately, Schumpeter did not live to complete it,
so it's badly written and even more badly organized, in many ways almost incomprehensible.
He's definitely a revisionist in this sense. In other words, he believes that
life existed before Adam Smith, economics existed before Adam Smith, and better.
Not only existed, but better. In other words, the counter-paradigm,
the correct one, is what you have is
Hundreds, hundreds, many hundreds, even thousands of years of sound economic analysis engaged
in by the scholastics in the middle ages down through the late, the Spanish scholastics in
the 16th century, taking Aquinas even before that, down to the late Spanish scholastics.
That's about, that's several hundred years.
And then a French tradition in the 18th century, continuing then in France and Italy, and in
In the 18th century, leading to a fantastic flowering of economic thought, modern economic
thought, Camelot and Tourgault in particular, and you have everything there, you have laissez-faire
much more pure and much more sound than Adam Smith, and in fact Tourgault, if you've read
my little pamphlet on it, is really a pre-Austrian in every sense, he's got time preference
in there, he's got the bumblebeck in theory of capital, he's got the whole business, fantastic,
he's got the law of diminishing return, he's got the whole schmear, we have this great
and then Bingo and the Collapsant with Smith.
Schumpeter is properly assiduous about Smith. He reads between the lines particularly. Schumpeter is obviously a total contempt for Smith and for good reason.
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.
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.
So anyway, you can't look for much consistency in Schumpeter. But the fundamental paradigm is consistent.
It was a big blow when it came out. Orthodox economists and historians of thought were shattered by Schumpeter's book.
If we go back and read Frank Knight's review of it, we can understand why he was pro-Catholic.
Knight, if you know about Knight, was a hysterical anti-Christian, literally went ape on a Christian's question.
Protestant and Catholic, particularly Catholic, so he was not exactly equipped to be very objective about this when it came out.
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.
Then he'd say, now we can begin. Really, really a weird duck.
So I commend Cato, a marvelous statement in Cato when he says about Smith and making waste
and rubbish a 2000 years of economic thought. I'll get into that. Anyway, the counter thesis
against scholastic economics basically is that the scholastics emphasize utility and
scarcity as the key determinants of value and of production or whatever. By the way,
the neoclassical smear against the Austrians is that they're only interested in utility
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.
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.
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.
So you have people doing evaluating of things out there which are being evaluated.
The things of the supply. It's important to have supplies as a vertical curve, not to confuse the situation.
It's just that the Austrians of course and the Scholastics deny the role of so-called cost in determining price.
That was the point. Cost only affects price by determining, helping determine scarcity.
It gets back to the supply of the product.
Product. And as Calder points out and as Schimpeta points out and later on De Roover and Rice
Hutchers and a whole bunch of other revisionists on the scholastic front, the entire view that
economists had of scholastics for a couple hundred years is totally oral-wet. And the
basic view that I'm sure you've read is that scholastics believed that just price was the
cost of production plus a guaranteed profit, or and or, keeping your station in life. Whatever
your station is, of course if your station is humble, you keep being humble. It's totally
The Oral Wetness, as all these guys have shown, DeRuver and all these people, shown in detail.
Very few scholastics had this doctrine, two or three, and these were minor fringe people.
The mainstream of scholastics thought was utility, scarcity, and free market. In other words, the just price was the market price.
Now it's true they weren't total libertarians. I'm not going to say that.
In the first place, they didn't like the idea of individual bargaining. They thought the market had to be a market.
If you and I agreed on some price and it's not the market price, they would say that's unjust.
Second of all, they were not against price control. They thought that price control could also be just.
But that's very far from saying that something else has to replace the market.
Basically, they were pro-market people and very keen market analysts.
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,
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,
he was also an extreme spiritual Franciscan, a rigorous Franciscan, in other words, an extreme pro-poverty person.
The Franciscan movement started out as pro-poverty and then with a pledge of poverty,
then as the Franciscan church began to accumulate money from donations or whatever, they began to have second thoughts.
and began to be more realistic about the whole thing, and then the rigorous winning of Franciscan
was high, well, the thing you guys are being, selling out the Franciscan doctrine, Franciscan
heritage, and all of these were the extreme leader, the leader of the Provençal group
of extreme co-poverty people, I mean, the emaciated, obviously, from the Franciscan,
even real Franciscan didn't eat much, more like the rigorous Franciscan. I mean, very
poverty-stricken, sort of like a movie character, you know, very skinny, wandering around, and
and he was a great sophisticated market analyst, it's amazing, it's one of the great anomalies in the history of thought.
The only thing that scholastics were weak on was the usury, usury question,
the thing which really discredited them eventually.
And they had a real problem, they couldn't understand time preference, and after all, nobody until Turgall really understood it.
You can't blame them that too much.
They couldn't understand why you should charge interest on a riskless loan.
And they understood about profit, they understood about opportunity costs, they got the whole thing down,
Time preference is a major weakness.
Even with that, however, the scholastics managed to sophisticate the whole thing and evade,
just avoid the whole business of brilliant maneuvering to allow usury anyway.
But the brilliant maneuvering of course was evasive and therefore was open to attack.
The other counter-thesis is that it's not an accident.
This is what I first read as I thought it was very interesting, but speculative.
I now think there's a lot to it, I think getting deeper into it,
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,
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.
Calvinists believed in a divine obligation for labor, in other words, almost labor as an end in itself.
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.
Whereas the Catholics tend to be anti-enjoyment, and want to keep consumption limited to a minimum, and really the fury of continuing labor.
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.
If you look, for example, in Scotland, we have Catholics and Calvinists living side-by-side.
Catholics are always attacking the Calvinists for being doer, you know, standoffish, unfriendly, etc., etc.
And the Calvinists are attacking Catholics for being lazy, shiftless, drink a lot.
They're probably both right, in many ways.
But the thing is, that's the sort of difference you get.
This seems to go through throughout.
Catholics seem to be much more relaxed, so to speak.
As we'll see, the first real labor theory valued person was really Adam Smith.
It was not John Locke. I denied it was John Locke.
I think the pocket of labor theory of property is very, very different from labor theory of value.
It simply means, how do you get unknown resources into private ownership? What way to do it?
Because he was, of course, a homestead theorist, mixing your labor with the soil,
you then becomes your private property. I don't think that's a labor theory of value at all.
It's total misconception by historians, of course, to get the whole thing mixed up.
The Natural Law Tradition, the Aristotelian Stoic Tradition, which was then picked up
by Aquinas and the Scholastics, especially after Aristotle was rediscovered, means that
man, by use of reason, can discover natural law, laws of reality, which include laws of
ethics, and which also put a firm limit on the state, in which the state may not invade
the sphere of rights or the sphere of each individual.
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.
And the other important thing is that the Catholic Church had a transnational check on state rule.
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.
In other words, in most civilizations, church and state were fused together.
The King, taxing people, church, church telling people to obey the king, state and church oppressing the public, taxing and controlling, etc.
Most intellectuals throughout history have been churchmen. The idea of a lay intellectual comes in the last couple of hundred years.
The State and Church are a very powerful instrument for despotism and state power.
I think this is the only case in history where the State and Church were separate.
In other words, the Catholic Church was transnational and therefore kept a severe limit on the power of each king.
As a matter of fact, particularly, and I recommend a marvelous little book by Jean Beckler,
a French economic historian, called The Origins of Capitalism.
Why did capitalism arise only in Western Europe?
in Western Europe, obviously there's been trade in every civilization, real capitalism, market phenomena, etc. really comes in only in Western Europe.
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.
So each power is limited, you have independent principalities, you have villages, you have autonomous power, many instances, and feudal landlords have autonomous power.
The Expansion of Capitalism's Power
And you have a transnational church to check the individual state.
So you have very little state power, either externally or internally, as a result of these checks, which allowed the market to flourish.
As a matter of fact, there's a marvelous phrase here where he says, Beckler says,
The expansion of capitalism owes its origins and its raison d'etre to political anarchy.
And particularly, it's no coincidence, according to Beckler,
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.
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.
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.
But the Calvinists were the same thing. When they took over in Geneva or Massachusetts, they were pretty rigorous, smashing sin.
Whereas when they were in the minority, of course, they became quite libertarian. They evolved into libertarian inclusions.
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.
And then they have a series of sort of rebellions and battles with both the extreme Catholics
and the Calvinists coming up with great libertarian political theory on the course of it.
What happens in the centralist takeover is usually, often what happens, is called the
politiques, who the historians have called moderate.
They're only moderate in the sense that they weren't in favor of religion killing each
other because they didn't care that much about religion.
That's essentially why.
But they were not moderate in the sense that they wanted total state power, total power
of the king and forget about religion.
religion becomes an instrument of the king and so the politics winning over
and then you have in France the Catholic Church becomes only it gets on the
influence of crypto Calvinist group called the Jensenists who were such
really so really Calvinist and sheep's clothing and really take over the
French Church and they're very pro-absolutist yes yes the king is
right in all things and sufferance so that was the one of the reasons why the
Catholic Church does not limit the power of French the growth of French
Absolutism, and then also had another complication in Protestant countries had
scholastics, Hugo Rochas was a sort of free market, sort of free market type of
Dutch Calvinist, not really, Dutch Protestant I should say, scholastic, and
Scotland influenced Scotland and the Scottish Enlightenment which of course
Leif Adam Smith was also scholastic, Protestant scholastic or neo-Calvinist
scholastic, it becomes complex but that's basically it.
Well, Grotius was in the Armenian camp, in their free will camp in Holland.
While we're dealing with, by the way, one of the things about natural law, I should say,
in addition to limiting, setting up a sphere for individual rights and limiting the government,
it also sets limits. And if you really believe in natural law, you believe that our natural limits demand omnipotence,
or any individual is omnipotent. If you don't believe in natural law, anything goes.
You can do anything. You can conquer the world, whatever, without any ill consequence.
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.
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.
The theory is called by analogy or by correspondence. The argument is by correspondence. Namely,
we have a hierarchy of power throughout the world.
God, the angels, men, and critters.
I say critters. Animals, things like that.
Animals, vegetables, whatever, right?
So this is the power. God has top power and the others are subordinated. Each one is subordinated to the other.
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.
In the family, the father, the god-like, head-like figure, the mother, the wife, and the kids.
Subordinate, social and political implications.
And then, of course, the state, the king, some of the all-powerful nobles, middle class,
This is the big argument for royal absolutism. It's not an argument most of us find convincing, compelling.
The right-wing lotion is a two-circle, known as a guy's known as a two-circle, and a view of consent.
Everybody had consent. Everybody had natural rights of consent and so on, absolute rights, except some shadowy time in history.
The History of the Gate, they surrendered all these rights to the King in perpetuity, they can't get it back.
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.
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.
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,
You have the right to shoot, you have the right to run away, there's this one concession or right,
of course the Cusicko says, you know you have no right to run away, you should bury your buck in the king's assault.
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.
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.
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.
I want to mention, there was a thing in Newsweek last week, timid text, short strip for religion.
They talk about high school texts or grade school texts in history, world history, American history, and religion has dropped out.
For example, this one world culture text for sixth graders manages to discuss Joan of Arc without mentioning God, religion, or her canonization.
In other words, 20 pages on Tanzania, but none on the Protestant Reformation.
All religions drop out. A friend of mine is writing a college text of readings in medieval ancient history and modern history.
They can't put anything about religion in it. It's not a question of being for religion or against it.
Anything about it is considered controversial, and therefore has to be killed.
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.
and so we're talking about a history of anything, especially a history of thought,
to leave religion out, to leave most of the stuff out, to leave the values
and the ideals that motivate us. It's really crazy.
You don't have to be pro-religion or pro-christianity to realize that it's been extremely important,
not to talk about it, but it's absurd. I'm not a theologian, I don't want to get into theology per se,
but I must say I find theology fascinating because it's sort of a deductive system, something like praxeology,
except of course the axioms are different.
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.
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,
are two things which get left out, even by people who know about natural law and absolutism and all that.
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.
Why did God create the universe, in other words?
Seemingly, to some of us, it's a seemingly trivial question, actually pregnant with fantastic political implications.
There was one slight difference in axioms, another thing about theology deductive system,
One seemingly unimportant difference in the axiom can cause tremendous differences in political conclusions or social conclusions.
Why did God create the universe?
In both of these areas, by the way, in creatology and the other one,
my conclusion is, purely as a layman, that the Orthodox Christian position is the safest, let's put it that way.
Creatology, eschatology, namely the science of the last days, how will the world come to an end and when.
and the Creatology, the Science of the First Days.
This might seem to some people, some secularists, irrelevant,
but it's not irrelevant at all, it's extremely important.
But before I get to that, I just want to say what actually relates to the Creatology,
and particularly Creatology,
one of the key things which Christianity brought to the world, I believe,
more than any other religion, is individualism, the supreme importance of the individual.
And I think that's the individual stamped on the image of God,
and his or her salvation becomes of extreme importance and moral choices and all the rest of it.
The Greeks, even though I revere the Greeks, they're great rationalists and all that.
The Greeks are polis-oriented.
So that what they care about is not the individual but the polis, the state community, the city-state.
And so when Plato and Aristotle are talking about virtue and what the virtuous life is,
they're talking about the life through the city-state, not for each individual.
They don't care about the individual.
Accounts. So it's a collectivist doctrine to the city-state. Now some of my friends like
Doug Rasmussen and Leo Aristoteles are trying to claim that they really meant the community
and not the state, but I doubt this. I have to be proven, shown this in detail, but I
really think this is a city-state. Also not unrelated to the fact that most of these guys
were slave owners, and slavery was of course guaranteed by the city-state. In other words,
if you're a part of a small slave-owning caste, you've got plenty of time to discuss philosophy,
philosophy, for example, the slaves are doing all the work, and it's small number, it's
only the slaveholders voted and so forth and so on, you tend to identify yourself with
the polis, because the polis is you and then, you know, 500 other guys or a thousand other
guys, so it becomes understandable why they slipped into this collectivist mode.
And then other parts of cretology we'll see is species-oriented, it's even more collectivist.
Man as a species, or collective species rather than as an individual.
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.
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.
is the safest approach, whether it's correct or not, at least a theologian.
Certainly the safest approach. The other approach, I don't know what to call it,
I haven't found a name for you, I'll just call it the mystical approach.
This is the Orthodox Christian approach. The mystical approach is that God created
the universe out of felt need, out of what Mises would have called felt uneasiness.
God was lonesome, right? God knows God was imperfect and needed creation of the
of the Universe.
So what are the implications of this?
The implications are that the way this works in the picture is that at the beginning, God
and man were united.
It's very difficult for me to make sense out of this, I'm trying my best.
God and man united in the sense that they were fused together.
There was no man, obviously man hadn't been created yet, but in some sense they were united.
So they had unity, but God was imperfect.
Then God creates man, and this sets up, this is important, it's progressive, because God
God then can develop his perfection, and man can develop his perfection.
In other words, God and man are both imperfect.
So, man imperfect, notice this is man as a species because each individual dies pretty
soon.
We're talking about a collectivist man as species, collectivist.
Man is imperfect, God is imperfect, and they both, and history, human history is a process
by which God and man develop, become more and more perfect.
So this is good, but there's also a bad side to this.
Man is now separated from God for the first time. Alienated.
And this, my friends, is the core origin of the famous word alienation,
which I am sick of, if you aren't.
This is what alienation is. Alienation does not mean feeling unhappy.
It does not mean you don't like the state, you don't like your parents.
Alienation to these guys means the fundamental separation from God
with whom we had previously been united.
We, in a collective sense, obviously I wasn't united with God
20 million years ago, whenever I was.
Fundamentally, alienation is a bad part, and a good part is the development.
Then finally, so we have, we start off with this unity, and then we have a separation, alienation,
and then we have a final recombination of history, will be, and here we have, of course, an eschatology,
will be a reunion of man and God, and a one great, mighty, climactic reunion,
which will be the perfection of man and the perfection of God also.
of Man as a Species. The individual is nothing. The individual people are just atoms in this whole thing.
So, man and God will be united in some cataclysmic species unity. Each individual will also be united with every other individual, one blob.
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.
This is also eschatology, too, obviously.
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.
Aufhebung meaning transformation or negation, the premium Hegelian Marxoid word. Aufhebung means one stage somehow magically is transformed into another one.
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.
The third stage would be a mighty fantastic one. Everybody's the blobs that are united to each other.
There's a great phrase. I can't refrain from reading this. One of my favorite writers of all time is G.K. Chesterton.
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.
where all individuals are blobbed in to each other and you have a final super blob.
So this is the alienation, this is the dialectic.
This is the famous dialectic where one stage of history is transformed,
some imaginary transformation to its opposite, so it's something very different,
and then finally transformed into a final climactic.
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.
The Problem of Evil, of course, as you all know, if God is good and omnipotent, how can
we have evil in the world?
This is, of course, a famous theological problem.
By the way, my favorite solution to this is an Orthodox one by H. R. Mencken, also my
favorite writer.
Mencken said that, well, God was created by a committee of gods, each of whom are omnipotent
and benevolent, but they just, being a committee, they screwed up.
It was an extremely charming doctrine.
One thing it does is it has several different solutions for the problem of evil.
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.
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.
There's no evil in the world because they're all taken care of. Anything that happens is probably inevitable or inevitable.
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,
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,
He loved Napoleon, he saw Napoleon riding down the street after Napoleon's victories
in Prussia. He writes a friend of his, he says, I saw Napoleon in the soul of the world,
riding through town. It was indeed a wonderful sight to see, concentrated in a point, sitting
on a horse, an individual overruns the world and masters it. What Hegel called world historical
figures, that's mood history. And Hegel felt that the dialect of history was ending in
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.
Christology is the science of the final days. Orthodox Christian viewpoint developed by St. Augustine and still followed by Catholics, Lutherans, etc.
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.
The question is in what sense or what form? Particularly, what about the millennium, as mentioned in the Bible?
What about a thousand years of the Kingdom of God on Earth? Where does that fit in?
When Jesus comes, the day of judgment and history is over.
The amillennialist, the orthodox Christian physician in St. Augustine on, is the millennium is simply a metaphor for the Christian Church.
And that's it. There's no real Kingdom of God on Earth in any more concrete sense.
And Jesus will return in the Second Advent at some time, at his own time, in a permanent history.
The Millennium is an object of political concern. The Millennium is out of politics. Individual salvation becomes the important thing.
So history does not become a process where the Millennium is organized, so to speak. It is outside of history.
There are two other wings, of course there are many sub-variants within each wing. Two other wings disagree with us.
Pre-Millennialism
When Jesus returns, the millennium before the millennium establishes a lot of problems,
a lot of hectic, seven years of hectic stuff going down, wars and all sorts of things, conflicts.
So the pre-millennials usually look for signs of this developing.
Usually in times of turmoil, wars suffer.
They will pop up and say, aha, the millennium is, Jesus is about to return.
During the Reformation, the 17th century wars, the French Revolution, the outcroppings of the pre-millennialists.
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.
Who the beast is is for exegesis for people more murdered than I am in these matters.
But the problem, the thing is that all these people are committed to certain dates.
There's the timetable of prophecy.
Sir Isaac Newton, for example, thought that physics was relatively unimportant.
is real contribution trying to figure out how old the world is and when it will come to an end by biblical exegesis.
They're looking for signs and usually picking specific dates, the most famous of which were the Millerites,
who were very popular in England in the 1840s, and one historian speculates that this influence marks,
and I'm not sure there's no evidence for that, but certainly around at the time.
In other words, the Millerites said that Jesus will return on October 22nd, 1844, period.
The problem with specific predictions of the story is very much like economic forecasting.
What do you do when October 23rd comes around and there ain't no second advent?
That's the big problem with the prophecy of the story.
So, Millarism became discredited.
Usually what they do is they say, oh, sorry, my calculations are slightly off.
It's really 1864, something like that.
But basically, the Millarites went and had it, and it was succeeded by a new theory,
which established essentially current fundamentalism now, premillennial fundamentalism, the theory
of dispensationalism invented by John Milton Darby, the English premill, which is that,
see, the thing is you can't have this timetable. The timetable stops when the Christian church
is established. The Christian church, as they call it, is a big parenthesis, and so the
prophecies of the timetable stops and only resumes at some date which might be soon but
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.
Key difference. In other words, this is essentially, here you don't worry about the millennium, the young millennialists.
Here you get Jesus establishing, although you have various assistants for a cadre.
As a matter of fact, in the dominant view of the pre-trib, the question is, when does the trib come?
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.
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.
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.
This places on man a heavy of a theological responsibility.
And almost always, not in every case, but in most cases historically, pre-Mills have been raging status because the government has a shortcut.
In other words, if Jesus comes and brings on Armageddon, then the bad guys will slaughter Armageddon.
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,
by slaughtering the bad guys, or gradually by the government sort of spifling them in another version.
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.
This is where it becomes extremely important.
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.
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,
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.
If you bring it down to earth, you immanentize it, make it immanent within the earth, within human affairs, within human history,
and you have all sorts of problems. You have people who kind of stamp out sin like fire and limestone, etc., etc.
And that, I think, is an important insight by Vogel, in spite of its sort of jargon formulation.
Thank you very much.