Already several times as an argument against “anarcho-capitalism,” I heard something like this: “You refer to Mises and Hayek, but they were not anarchists”. After that, sometimes quotes are quoted in which Mises or Hayek speak about the benefits of the state..

There are two errors in this argument.. The first is obvious - Mises and Hayek do not have to be “anarcho-capitalists” in order for “anarcho-capitalists” to refer to them.. Someone Marx, for example, refers in his works to Ricardo and Smith, which does not make Ricardo and Smith communists and even socialists. The number of aspects in the answer to the question “what is human society and how is it arranged” is very large. Therefore, coincidence on a fairly wide range of issues makes the points of view close.

The second mistake is that the correct conclusions can be made from false premises.. Carnot and the concept of caloric - the classic. Thermodynamics does not become a mistake because Carnot relied on the erroneous idea of ??caloric.

This could be limited to, if Mises, Hayek and other representatives of the “Austrian school” were just some scientists whose ideas turned out to be useful for arguing in favor of a certain ideology.. However, in our case, this is not the case.. The social theories of the Austrian school can be considered the theoretical basis of modern libertarianism, and, accordingly, Mises and Hayek, as the two most famous and prominent representatives of it, can be counted among its “founding fathers”.

Therefore, we need a more detailed answer than a simple indication of errors in the question. We must find out, firstly, what exactly makes Mises and Hayek "founding fathers of libertarianism" and, secondly, why they admitted statements that can be interpreted as being made "in favor of the state".

So, Mises and Hayek are the creators of two very fruitful concepts that explain the foundations of the functioning of society. Mises is the creator of praxeology, which gives us an understanding of the universal laws of human activity.. Hayek is the author of the idea of ??social spontaneous order and the theory of the evolution of society. Hayek's ideas give us an understanding of how conditions arise for the interaction of people and an idea of ??how they change over time.. Nowhere in these concepts is there anything resembling a state, and there is nothing from which the need for it would follow.. It is these ideas of Mises and Hayek that make them "founding fathers".

What, then, do Mises and Hayek talk about when they talk about the state? They talk about institutions. A developed society is distinguished by the existence of institutions that protect property rights.. These institutions Hayek and Mises are called "the state". The identification of social institutions with the state is a typical delusion, to which, in our case, great people have also succumbed.

However, in their case, this error is completely forgivable and there are several reasons for this.. The first is that neither Mises nor Hayek investigated the nature and origin of the state. Generally speaking, it can only be argued that “Mises and Hayek advocated the state” if they specifically studied the issue of the state’s origin and proved that there are separate social institutions that do not arise naturally, but are created artificially and who for their functioning need organized power coercion of people in a certain territory. But Mises and Hayek didn't do anything like that..

Despite the fact that Hayek and Mises constantly criticized the state, and Mises wrote several papers on the activities of the bureaucracy (“Planned chaos” and “Almighty Government”), they never consider the origin of the state anywhere, at Mises I only once met a brief retelling of the old (disproved by Oppenheimer) "elite" theory. Best of all, the fact that the nature and origin of the state were not part of their research program illustrates the simple fact that Mises did not apply his praxeological analysis to the state. Mises’s state is “given”, it exists as some externally defined conditions in which people act. The origin of these conditions and their functioning from a praxeological point of view, it does not consider. For the first time, it was not the Austrians who tried to analyze the state, not as external circumstances, but as a group of people who were guided by their “public” interests ascribed to them by “public” interests, but Buchainen’s institutionalists. However, in spite of the fact that the school of public choice made a great contribution to the understanding of the state, the restrictions it initially adopted brought this direction to a standstill. An academic praxeological study of the state still does not exist, nor does such a study exist within the framework of the concept of spontaneous orders.

The second reason is that in the days of Mises and Hayek, anarchism was predominantly left-wing, that is, internally contradictory and destructive concept. Mises, it seems, was not at all very interested in historical studies, Hayek periodically turned to the history of socialism ("Counter-revolution of science", "Pernicious self-reliance", etc.. ) in order to prove his thesis that "socialism was an intellectual error". Therefore, for Hayek, anarchism remains solely a left-wing idea, I did not find traces of the fact that he was familiar with the American individualistic tradition.. Of course, both Mises and Hayek perceived anarchism as a crazy idea, since left anarchism opposes “power” in general, meaning power and “market power”, that is, opposing property rights and, accordingly, institutions Hayek and Mises.

In fact, the main question of anarchism is not reduced to some mythical “anarchy”, which excludes “market power”, but to whether “state functions” can ensure institutions that exist without monopolistic organized forceful coercion of people in a certain territory.. Such a formulation of the question appeared relatively recently - in the 70s of the 20th century, and for some time was quite marginal.. The idea of ??"private police" and even worse "private army" was wild for academic scientists. Those who read Hayek’s Private Money book will agree with me. The idea that money can be private was strange and unusual, not only for the readers of this book, but, above all, for its author, which is well felt in the text. And this is despite the fact that none other than Hayek constantly said that money is an evolving spontaneous order and that it was not created by the government..

Finally, the third reason is that Hayek and Mises simply did not know that other methods of functioning of institutions than monopolistic coercion are possible, and that there are historical examples of such functioning.. The general opinion, dating back to Caesar's Notes on the Gallic War, at that time was that the state is the “next stage” after the “tribal system” and that a developed community is impossible without a state. Neither Hayek nor Mises had any idea, say, of studies by historians like Owen MacNeil and linguists like Daniel Binchey, who showed that medieval Ireland was not "just some clans and tribes", but a developed community (Corpus Iuris Hibernici - texts of Irish legal treatises with parallel translation were completed only in 1976). In the 70s, there was interest in medieval Iceland, which also felt fine without a state..

Generally speaking, academic interest in whether a developed community without a state can exist that spilled, including in the study of historical and anthropological data, appeared only in the 1970s (Mises died in 1973). As a result, on this field today we have a completely different picture than the one that existed during the times of the active work of Mises and Hayek. The results of the work of various scientists - economists, lawyers, historians and anthropologists say that people do very well without the state in most of their activities and are able to quickly create institutions where state institutions categorically interfere with their activities or where the state’s hand reached out.

Thus, since the study of the essence and origin of the state was not part of the research program of Mises and Hayek, when it came to his role they simply repeated the thesis adopted at that time among liberals about the need for a minimum state. Mises and Hayek identified the state and institutions, the question of whether private enterprises could perform the same functions was probably not familiar to them or was not considered seriously.. They have identified the denial of the state with left anarchism, which in practice was just another version of socialism..

And last. This whole dispute over Mises and Hayek is in fact being conducted in order to “rely on authority” in the question of whether the state is necessary or not.. However, Mises and Hayek cannot help in answering this question, since he was not the subject of their activities.. But they can help in answering much more important questions, for example, how to reduce and eventually get rid of the state. Restricting the state and getting rid of it can only be based on the correct understanding of how society works in the most basic forms, and this understanding is provided by the reading of Mises and Hayek. This understanding provides the means to achieve these goals.. After all, the main political problem is always exactly in accordance with the means for the stated purpose..

For example, minarists are bad not because they want to “abolish” the state gradually, not immediately, but because their methods (elections and. ) are not suitable for achieving their stated goal. Similarly, there are probably people who consider themselves ankapami and who believe that it is possible to destroy or abolish the state, seizing for this purpose the government. For me, such ankapy are no different from minarists, because their means will never lead them to the goal either..