The Difference between the Right and the Left Is a Fundamental Disagreement Concerning an EMPIRICAL Question about the Existence of Individual Human MENTAL Differences

This brings me to the topic of “Left ” and “Right.”

The difference between the Right and the Left, as Paul Gottfried has often noted, is a fundamental disagreement concerning an empirical question. The Right recognizes, as a matter of fact, the existence of individual human differences and diversities and accepts them as natural, whereas the Left denies the existence of such differences and diversities or tries to explain them away and in any case regards them as something unnatural that must be rectified to establish a natural state of human equality.

The Right recognizes the existence of individual human differences not just with regard to the physical location and make-up of the human environment and of the individual human body (its height, strength, weight, age, gender, skin- hair- or eye-colour, facial features, etc., etc.). More importantly, the Right also recognizes the existence of differences in the mental make-up of people, i.e., in their cognitive abilities, talents, psychological dispositions, and motivations. It recognizes the existence of bright and dull, smart and dumb, short- and far-sighted, busy and lazy, aggressive and peaceful, docile and inventive, impulsive and patient, scrupulous and careless people, etc., etc. The Right recognizes that these mental differences, resulting from the interaction of the physical environment and the physical human body, are the results of both environmental and physiological and biological factors. The Right further recognizes that people are tied together (or separated) both physically in geographical space and emotionally by blood (biological commonalities and relationships), by language and religion, as well as by customs and traditions. Moreover, the Right not merely recognizes the existence of these differences and diversities. It realizes also that the outcome of input-differences will again be different and result in people with much or little property, in rich and poor, and in people of high or low social status, rank, influence or authority. And it accepts these different outcomes of different inputs as normal and natural.

The Left on the other hand is convinced of the fundamental equality of man, that all men are “created equal.” It does not deny the patently obvious, of course: that there are environmental and physiological differences, i.e., that some people live in the mountains and others on the seaside, or that some men are tall and others short, some white and others black, some male and others female, etc. But the Left does deny the existence of mental differences or, insofar as these are too apparent to be entirely denied, it tries to explain them away as “accidental.” That is, the Left either explains such differences as solely environmentally determined, such that a change in environmental circumstances (moving a person from the mountains to the seaside and vice versa, for instance, or giving each person identical pre- and post-natal attention) would produce an equal outcome, and it denies that these differences are caused (also) by some — comparatively intractable — biological factors. Or else, in those cases where it cannot be denied that biological factors play a causal role in determining success or failure in life (money and fame), such as when a 5 foot tall man cannot win an Olympic gold medal in the 100 meter dash or a fat and ugly girl cannot become Miss Universe, the Left considers these differences as pure luck and the resulting outcome of individual success or failure as undeserved. In any case, whether caused by advantageous or disadvantageous environmental circumstances or biological attributes, all observable individual human differences are to be equalized. And where this cannot be done literally, as we cannot move mountains and seas or make a tall man short or a black man white, the Left insists that the undeservedly “lucky” must compensate the “unlucky” so that every person will be accorded an “equal station in life,” in correspondence with the natural equality of all men.

With this short characterization of the Right and the Left I return to the subject of libertarianism. Is libertarian theory compatible with the worldview of the Right? And: Is libertarianism compatible with leftist views?

--Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Getting Libertarianism Right (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2018), 26-28.

Max Stirner Has Been Called the Father of Anarchism and the Only Writer to develop Fully the Implications of a Total Rejection of External Authority

James Huneker relates the following incident:

One hot August afternoon in the year 1896 at Bayreuth, I was standing in the Marktplatz when a member of the Wagner Theater pointed out to me a house opposite, at the corner of the Maximilian-strasse, and said: "Do you see that house with the double gables? A man was born there whose name will be green when Jean Paul and Richard Wagner are forgotten." It was too large a draught upon my credulity, so I asked the name. "Max Stirner," he replied. 

Thus far, Huneker's informant has proved to be a poor prophet. The philosophy of Max Stirner has been largely ignored since its creation over one hundred years ago. One commentator asserts that "scholars are mostly content to recollect him, if they recollect him at all, by his associations, the tacit assumption being that it is only through these associations that he has any historical significance or contemporary interest."

 Stirner has, indeed, important associations in abundance. He was a student of Hegel, the most extreme member of the school of Young Hegelians who turned their master's method against his conclusions. He then turned his dialectic against his fellow Young Hegelians and became embroiled in controversy with them; one of these was Karl Marx. His associations include membership in several other important intellectual traditions. He has been called "a key figure" in German nineteenth-century romantic individualism, "the one in a line including Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche who went the furthest in exploring a philosophy of the glorification of the ego in the context of political and socio-economic ideas." There is little evidence of a direct influence of Stirner upon Nietzsche, but many striking anticipations of Nietzschean ideas can be found in Stirner: "cleric" and "herd" morality, the "moralizing of ethically neutral words," the death of God, the will to power. There are also many anticipations of Freudian concepts in Stirner, among them projection and unconscious motivation, libidinal repression, and the egoistic character of all human acts. He has also been regarded as a precursor of existentialism.

When Stirner has been considered at all, however, it has usually been as an expounder of anarchism. He has been called "the father of anarchism" and "the only writer to develop fully the implications of a total rejection of external authority."

--Philip Breed Dematteis, Individuality and the Social Organism: The Controversy between Max Stirner and Karl Marx, Men and Movements in  the History and Philosophy of Anarchism (Brooklyn, NY: Revisionist Press, 1976), 1-2.

The Traditional "Dunning School" of Reconstruction Scholarship Has Been Attacked Since the Civil Rights Era by Marxist/Liberal Revisionists Who Label Dunning School Scholars as "Racists"

A great deal of excellent scholarship on Reconstruction was published during the early twentieth century by such historians as Claude Bowers and the Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning and his cadre of graduate students. The historians James Ford Rhodes and James G. Randall painted a picture of Reconstruction as a vindictive, abusive, corrupt, political racket. Dunning, Rhodes, Bowers, and Randall were Northerners who documented in great detail how the Republican Party—which is to say, the federal government, since the party enjoyed a political monopoly—ignored presidential vetoes and federal court rulings, disenfranchised white Southerners while giving the vote to ex-slaves (who were instructed to vote Republican), formed new state puppet governments run by Republican Party political operatives, and used the power gained from this to plunder the taxpayers of the South for more than a decade after the war ended.

Beginning in the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s, a group of “revisionist” historians have come to the forefront to challenge what has come to be known as the “Dunning School” of Reconstruction scholarship. This group of scholars, which, according to Kenneth M. Stampp, includes “Marxists of various degrees of orthodoxy,” rarely disputes the facts that were set out by the Dunning School. They acknowledge that much of what Dunning's disciples have said about Reconstruction is true. Facts are facts. Relying heavily on Marxian class analysis, however, these revisionists have painted a more “enlightened” picture of the era. (The most prominent contemporary historian of Reconstruction is the Marxist Eric Foner, who calls Reconstruction “America's unfinished revolution.”)

These Marxist and “liberal” revisionists argue that Reconstruction wasn't all that bad compared to, say, what happened after the Japanese invaded Nanking in the 1930s, or the Nazi occupation of Europe, or the deeds of the Russian army in Germany at the end of World War II. After all, Kenneth Stampp has argued, there were not even any mass executions of former Confederates after the war. Southerners were indeed “lucky” in this regard, according to the revisionist view.

Because Dunning and his disciples provided accurate descriptions of the ex-slaves and their role in Southern politics shortly after the war, the Marxist/Liberal revisionists have sought to discredit the Dunning School's views by labeling them as racist. Dunning and his students, for example, questioned the wisdom of immediately extending to uneducated and propertyless ex-slaves the right to vote without first providing at least a couple of years of education for them. The revisionist historians have deemed this “racist.” As Kenneth Stampp remarked, “As ideas about race have changed, historians have become increasingly critical of the Dunning interpretation of Reconstruction.”

But the revisionists create a problem when they use this criterion (allegedly racist attitudes) in judging the credibility of Reconstruction scholarship. Every one of the revisionists virtually deifies Lincoln. The problem here is that Lincoln himself was a white supremacist all his life, a man who didn't believe that the two races should even mingle (see chapter 2). In their work, the Dunning School scholars, by contrast, never made the kinds of racially disparaging remarks that Lincoln did. They never proclaimed the white race to be the “superior” race as Lincoln did; they never advocated shipping all blacks back to Africa or to some other foreign land; and they never pontificated in their writing about the alleged evils of interracial marriage, as Lincoln did.

If the revisionists are to dismiss Dunning's interpretation of Reconstruction on the grounds that he and his students were insensitive to blacks, then to be consistent they should be just as skeptical of what has been written about Lincoln over the past 100 years and even reevaluate much of their own scholarship.

--Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 202-204.

The Connection between Violence and Central Planning Is Still Not Understood; the Tendency of Economists to admire Hitler's Economic Program Is a Case in Point

The same could be said about all forms of central planning. It is wrong to attempt to examine the economic policies of any leviathan state apart from the political violence that characterizes all central planning, whether in Germany, the Soviet Union, or the United States. The controversy highlights the ways in which the connection between violence and central planning is still not understood, not even by the ADL [Anti-Defamation League ]. The tendency of economists to admire Hitler’s economic program is a case in point.

In the 1930s, Hitler was widely viewed as just another protectionist central planner who recognized the supposed failure of the free market and the need for nationally guided economic development. Proto-Keynesian socialist economist Joan Robinson wrote that “Hitler found a cure against unemployment before Keynes was finished explaining it.”

What were those economic policies? He suspended the gold standard, embarked on huge public works programs like Autobahns, protected industry from foreign competition, expanded credit, instituted jobs programs, bullied the private sector on prices and production decisions, vastly expanded the military, enforced capital controls, instituted family planning, penalized smoking, brought about national health care and unemployment insurance, imposed education standards, and eventually ran huge deficits. The Nazi interventionist program was essential to the regime’s rejection of the market economy and its embrace of socialism in one country.

Such programs remain widely praised today, even given their failures. They are features of every “capitalist” democracy.

--Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., The Left, the Right, and the State (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 106.