http://files.libertyfund.org/pll/quotes/150.html
Franz Oppenheimer argues that there are two
fundamentally opposed ways of acquiring wealth: the “political means” through
coercion, and the “economic means” through peaceful trade (1922)
About
this Quotation:
Oppenheimer
picks up a theory of the state which was common among early 19th century French
liberals such as Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer,
Frédéric Bastiat,
and Augustin Thierry. As Oppenheimer correctly notes, Karl Marx got himself
horribly confused on this matter, seeing slavery as an economic category and
seeing economics as driven by “force”. We have been paying the price for this
confusion every since.
Other
quotes about Origin Of Government:
· 2010: Sidney argues that a People’s liberty
is a gift of nature and exists prior to any government (1683)
· 2009: John Stuart Mill discusses the
origins of the state whereby the “productive class” seeks protection from one
“member of the predatory class” in order to gain some security of property
(1848)
· 2009: Étienne de la Boétie provides one of the earliest and clearest explanations
of why the suffering majority obeys the minority who rule over them; it is an
example of voluntary servitude (1576)
· 2007: David Hume on the origin of
government in warfare, and the “perpetual struggle” between Liberty and Power
(1777)
· 2007: Tom Paine asks how it is that
established governments came into being, his answer, is "banditti of
ruffians" seized control and turned themselves into monarchs (1792)
· 2006: Frédéric Bastiat, while pondering the nature of war, concluded that
society had always been divided into two classes - those who engaged in
productive work and those who lived off their backs (1850)
·
2005: Herbert Spencer makes a distinction between the “militant
type of society” based upon violence and the “industrial type of society” based
upon peaceful economic activity (1882)
·
2005: David Hume ponders why the many can be governed so easily
by the few and concludes that both force and opinion play a role (1777)
·
2004: David Hume argued that Individual Liberty emerged slowly
out of the “violent system of government” which had earlier prevailed in Europe
(1778)
Franz Oppenheimer, in his analysis of
the origin of the state, argues that there are two fundamentally opposed ways
of acquiring wealth: the “political means” through coercion, and the “economic
means” through peaceful trade:
There are two fundamentally opposed
means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary
means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor
and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others… I propose in the
following discussion to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of
one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the
satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of
others will be called the “political means.”
The full passage from which this
quotation was taken can be be
viewed below (front page quote in bold):
(a) Political and Economic Means
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance,
is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are
work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor
of others. Robbery! Forcible appropriation! These words convey to us
ideas of crime and the penitentiary, since we are the contemporaries of a
developed civilization, specifically based on the inviolability of property.
And this tang is not lost when we are convinced that land and sea robbery is
the primitive relation of life, just as the warriors’ trade—which also for a
long time is only organized mass robbery—constitutes the most respected of
occupations. Both because of this, and also on account of the need of having,
in the further development of this study, terse, clear, sharply opposing terms
for these very important contrasts, I propose in the following discussion to
call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the
labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the
unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political
means.”
The idea is not altogether new; philosophers of history have at all times found
this contradiction and have tried to formulate it. But no one of these formulæ has carried the premise to its complete
logical end. At no place is it clearly shown that the contradiction consists
only in the means by which the identical purpose, the acquisition of economic
objects of consumption, is to be obtained. Yet this is the critical point of
the reasoning. In the case of a thinker of the rank of Karl Marx, one may observe
what confusion is brought about when economic purpose and economic means are
not strictly differentiated. All those errors, which in the end led Marx’s
splendid theory so far away from truth, were grounded in the lack of clear
differentiation between the means of economic satisfaction of needs and its
end. This led him to designate slavery as an “economic category,” and force as
an “economic force”—half truths which are far more dangerous than total
untruths, since their discovery is more difficult, and
false conclusions from them are inevitable.
