I am delighted to see a Portuguese translation of my Democracy: The God That Failed in print.
Of all my books, Democracy has been by far the most
successful. From its original publication in 2001 until today, the book
has been vociferously both condemned and hailed. In some intellectual
circles, it has made me a persona non grata, an “unwanted” person — not just with the dominant leftish and relativist mainstream intelligentsia,
but also among many self-styled classical liberals and libertarians.
Yet at the same time the book has also become a source of inspiration to
many independent and self-thinking people and helped in the formation
of a steadily growing international network of intellectual friends,
allies, students, and affiliates.
The book is an intellectual assault on democracy. It explains and
elucidates democracy as a machinery of wealth destruction, of economic
waste and impoverishment; and it identifies and explains democracy as a
systematic cause of moral corruption and degeneration. In short:
democracy is revealed as a “mild,” and especially insidious form of
communism. At the same time, the book presents a rigorous defense of the
institution of private property as a necessary requirement for any
lasting peace and prosperity.
It favorably contrasts traditional, pre-constitutional monarchies and
kings to modern democracies and prime ministers or presidents — a
thesis that likely appears only slightly less alien to contemporary
Brazilian or Portuguese ears than it does to US-Americans’. But the book
is not a defense of monarchy. Rather, it advocates a “withering away”
of the state altogether, whether monarchic or democratic, and its
successive replacement by a private law society, a “natural order.” And
as suitable means to this end it advocates decentralization and secession
— highly contentious issues in the history especially also of Brazil.
It advocates the progressive de-composition of the contemporary world — of large central states subject to even more centralized controls by
three superpowers, in particular the US as the world’s dominant military
and financial center, and exercised through a number of international
organizations set up for this very purpose (UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.) — into a progressively increasing number of its constituent parts — of
independent regions, cantons, cities, communities, and ultimately
individual households and their voluntary associations — all connected
through an inter-local network of free trade, and yet separate,
distinct, and diverse in their local culture, norms, standards, and
traditions.
Instead of promoting forced integration and cultural uni-formation
and homogenization — euphemistically called “multiculturalism” and
“non-discrimination” — as all political centralization and centralizers
do, the book argues to the contrary in favor of a great and increasing
multitude and variety of different cultures and norms, and of different
standards and criteria of discrimination, inclusion and exclusion at different places, and it at the
same time opposes, as incompatible with peace and prosperity, all
attempts of creating, by means of central-state-legislation, some
elusive “non-discriminating” “sameness” or “equality” and cultural
uniformity and homogeneity everywhere and at all places.
Not least, then, the book also presents a “revisionist” — and
politically highly “incorrect” — account of modern history that stands
in radical opposition to the “orthodox” view of history propagandized
throughout the world by the world’s supreme imperial power, the US, and
its ruling elites and their armies of hired intellectual bodyguards: of
the US as an “exceptional nation,” as the beacon of freedom and
civilization, and as destined to create, under its forceful missionary
guidance and direction, a New Democratic World Order, as mankind’s final
destination and the “End of History.”
The book also makes clear that this view of history is just
intellectual rubbish — and dangerous, destructive, or even deadly
rubbish at that.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Istanbul, May 2014
Nota: as visões expressas no artigo não são necessariamente aquelas do Instituto Mises Brasil.
