Recently, I noticed that Lew’s 2014 book Against the State was not available among our many free books at mises.org. The book has always been available as a hard copy for purchase in the bookstore, but oddly, this one title by Lew hadn’t found its way into the free online library. Part of the reason is that Lew wrote the book largely for his LewRockwell.com audience, and it was not published by the Mises Institute. But, I wanted to make sure we had it in our archives. Unfortunately, Lew also told me he didn’t have an electronic copy handy, which meant we’d have to scan the book and digitize it. That’s not as labor intensive as it used to be, but still requires proofreading, etc. Fortunately, we were saved the trouble when Brandon our bookstore manager found an electronic copy in his files. It is now available here as a PDF and EPUB.
What is Against the State? This is Lew’s short (i.e., 190 pages) summary of anarcho-capitalism and related topics in which Lew, drawing largely upon the work of Murray Rothbard, takes a careful look at the nature of the state and just how dangerous it is. Or, as Lew puts it:
Murray Rothbard called his political philosophy anarcho-capitalism to differentiate it from the far more common “communist anarchism.” Or, rather, it was more common then.
Today, Murray’s vision of the free society without the oppressive, bloodthirsty, predatory State, and buttressed by private property, laissez-faire, and non-aggression, has relegated the bad guy anarchists to a particularly dusty corner of the history of thought.
Never, ever, has there been so much interest in a truly libertarian society. Young people in this country and all over the world are flocking to the Rothbardian banner. No coincidence, at the same time, media attacks on us have never been so intense or so frequent. Politicians, who you might think would be content with their looting and killing, are vociferously denouncing anarcho-capitalists, because we worry them.
This is all great news, and why I want to tell you about my new book, Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto. In it, I seek not only to tell the truth, but to refute the lies. Best of all, I think Murray—to whom I’ve dedicated the book–would be saying, Attaboy!
In this work, I talk about why I am an anarcho-capitalist, and the evils of the State, from the war system to the war on drugs, from the assault on our civil liberties to the damage the bankers’ Fed does.
Why not “limited government”? The idea, I show, is as meaningless as the phrase. I also talk about how anarchy would work in a practical sense.
Is it ever morally justified to initiate violence or the threat of violence against the innocent? Of course, not, yet that is the State’s daily bread.
There are many great scholarly works on anarcho-capitalism, but I had something else in mind: a book of fewer than 200 pages that can serve as an introduction, and as a guide to further reading, in the freedom philosophy
