Democracy: The God That Failed
Template:Short description Template:Infobox book Template:Anarcho-capitalism sidebar Democracy: The God That Failed is a 2001 book by Hans-Hermann Hoppe containing thirteen essays on democracy. Passages in the book oppose universal suffrage and favor "natural elites".<ref name=":0" /> The book helped popularize Hoppe in far-right discourse.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Hoppe is a German-born economist who was a professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is associated with the Mises Institute, a right-libertarian think tank.<ref name=":0" />
Summary
In the book, Hoppe argues that democracy is a cause of civilizational decline.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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. Potential solutions he discusses include 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".<ref>R.M. Pearce, National Observer (Australia), No. 56, Autumn 2003.</ref>
Hoppe characterizes democracy as "publicly-owned government", and when he compares it with monarchy—"privately-owned government"—he concludes that the latter is preferable; however, Hoppe aims to show that both monarchy and democracy are deficient systems compared to his preferred structure for advancing civilization—something 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 this concept of "natural order", including "ordered anarchy", "private property anarchism", "anarcho-capitalism", "autogovernment", "private law society", and "pure capitalism".<ref>Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Introduction to Democracy, The God That Failed, reprinted at Ludwig von Mises Institute website.</ref>
The title of the work is an allusion to The God that Failed, a 1949 work in which six authors who formerly held communist views describe their experience of, and subsequent disillusion with, communism.
Reception
The book helped popularize Hoppe in the far-right discourse, particularly a section of the book that called for expulsion of political rivals.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=":1" />
Asked by The Intercept in 2021 about his incorporation into far-right internet memes celebrating political violence, Hoppe responded that the question was ignorant, saying, "I have been an intellectual champion of private property right, free markets, freedom of contract and association, and peace", and, "What do I know? There are lots of crazy people out there!"<ref name=":1" />
Walter Block, a colleague of Hoppe's at the Mises Institute, reviewed the book in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology and gave it a generally favorable review, writing, "This book will take by storm the field of political economy, and no one interested in these topics can afford to be without it."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
In a 2017 perspective article in The Washington Post about libertarian connections with the alt-right, John Ganz wrote that Hoppe's book "cites specious scholarship on the IQ differences inherent in race to support his arguments, presents an 'anarcho-capitalist' defense of segregation as the prerogative of property owners, and is so unabashedly anti-egalitarian he doubts the basic humanity of people who don’t fit into his ideological schema."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Ava Kofman credits the book with pushing Curtis Yarvin away from standard libertarian thought and towards more monarchical ideas, contributing to the development of the Dark Enlightenment movement. Authoritarianism scholar Julian Waller noted "it's not copy-and-pasted [from Democracy], but it is such a direct influence that it's kind of obscene".<ref name=":2">Template:Cite magazine</ref>
Publishing history
- Transaction Publishers [New Brunswick, NJ] (2001)
- Routledge (2017)
- Audiobook edition.
- Narrated by Paul Strikwerda.
- Online at SoundCloud