Democracy: The God That Failed

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Democracy: The God That Failed
Democracy, the God that Failed.jpg
Cover of the first edition
AuthorHans-Hermann Hoppe
SubjectDemocracy
Publication date
2001
Media typePrint (hardcover and paperback)
Pages304
ISBN978-0765808684
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Democracy: The God That Failed is a 2001 book by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, containing a series of thirteen essays on the subject of democracy. The book "examines modern democracies in the light of various evident failures" which, in Hoppe's view, include rising unemployment rates, expanding public debt, and insolvent social security systems. He attributes democracy's failures to pressure groups seeking increased government expenditures, regulations and taxation and a lack of counter-measures to them. He discusses as solutions secession, "shifting of control over the nationalised wealth from a larger, central government to a smaller, regional one" and "complete freedom of contract, occupation, trade and migration introduced".[1] It concludes that democracy is the primary cause of the decivilization sweeping the world since World War I, and that it must be delegitimized.[citation needed]

Hoppe characterizes democracy as "publicly owned government", which he compares to monarchy—"privately owned government"—to conclude that the latter is preferable; however, Hoppe aims to show that both monarchy and democracy are deficient systems compared to his preferred structure to advance civilization—what he calls the natural order, a system free of both taxation and coercive monopoly in which jurisdictions freely compete for adherents. In his Introduction, he lists other names used elsewhere to refer to the same thing, including "ordered anarchy", "private property anarchism", "anarcho-capitalism", "autogovernment", "private law society", and "pure capitalism".[2]

The title of the work is an allusion to The God that Failed, a 1949 work in which six authors who were former communists (or former communist sympathizers) describe their experience of and disillusion with communism.

Reception[]

Walter Block gave the book a generally favorable review. He concludes, "This book will take by storm the field of political economy, and no one interested in these topics can afford to be without it."[3]

Publishing history[]

English

German: Demokratie: Der Gott, der keiner ist.

  • Manuscriptum [Leipzig, Germany]
    • Afterword by Lorenz Jäger.
    • Hardcover. ISBN 3933497868.
    • Preface. (Vorwort zur deutschen Ausgabe).

Italian: Democrazia: il dio che ha fallito.

  • Cloth. ISBN 8885140777.

Korean

Spanish: Monarquia, Democracia y Orden Natural: Una Vision Austriaca de la era Americana.

  • Ludwig von Mises Institute
    • Translated by Prof. Jeronimo Molina.
    • Presented by Jesús Huerta de Soto.
    • Foreword by Jerónimo Malina.
    • Cloth. ISBN 8493377406.

Polish: Demokracja bog, ktory zawiodl.

  • Fijorr [Warsaw, Poland] (January 2006)
    • Paperback. ISBN 978-8389812216.

Portuguese: Democracia: O Deus que Falhou.

  • Instituto Ludwig von Mises Brasil [São Paulo, Brazil] (2014)


References[]

  1. ^ R.M. Pearce, National Observer (Australia), No. 56, Autumn 2003.
  2. ^ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Introduction to Democracy, The God That Failed, reprinted at Ludwig von Mises Institute website.
  3. ^ Block, Walter E. (2002). "Democracy: The God that Failed: A Review". American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 61. SSRN 1946360. American Journal of Economics and Sociology No. 3.

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