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I’m just leaving the 7th Annual Meeting of the PFS—a day early, unfortunately. Held, as always, in Bodrum, Turkey, this is my favorite PFS conference that I’ve attended yet—in part because my good friend Jeff Tucker attended, and in part because this time I brought my 9 year old son with me. While he was here, Jeff posted this sparkling account of his initial impressions of the conference on the Laissez-Faire Books site. It’s reprinted below. For other accounts of previous Annual Meetings of the PFS, see our Press page.
Update: See also Interview with Jeffrey Tucker and Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe – PFS 2012 and Jeffrey A. Tucker, “The Joys of Fresh Whole Fish,” Epoch Times (Nov. 20, 2024).
The Center of the Conspiracy
Jeffrey A. Tucker
September 29, 2012
I’ve found it: the organizing cell of what must be the world’s most dangerous intellectuals. It is right in this room where 100 people now sit, listening and discussing. But instead of heated and sweaty plotting, what we find instead is the atmosphere is of a 19th-century salon: polite, smart, fun. It’s the ambition and dream that is delightfully dangerous: to upend and overturn the oppression that most people in all nations suffer and figure there is little they can do about it.
The cause is liberty, property, and anti-imperialism — same as that which inspired the American Revolution. But the place this time is Bodrum, Turkey — a place that seems to have been founded at the beginning of time — at the beautiful hotel called Karia Princess. It’s in a land I’ve never visited before and couldn’t even imagine before seeing its terrain out of the airplane window.
Yes, I’m a typical American who has a hard time imaging the existence of vibrant, thriving, beautiful worlds outside the nation-state I know best. The farther reaches of Europe’s oldest civilization are precisely this, and filled with surprises around every corner.
The commercial district is teeming with modern energy, with all the newest stuff. But just a few feet away, fishermen sell their catches straight from the boat at the wharf, like a scene from a Renaissance painting. The old and new mix in a symphonic way, and to the same degree that multifarious languages and cultures live side by side in peace.
The meeting is the annual gathering of the Property and Freedom Society, as founded and headed by the famed radical intellectual Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a man who has become a legend in his own time. He makes his home in Istanbul, but comes here once a year to run this little adventure. His newest book, The Great Fiction, has been published by Laissez Faire Books. The book is on display here and is the talk of the conference.
The book takes on the idea of the nation-state most directly. Nations are real, he argues, insofar as we think of them as distinct groups of people with particular cultures and religions. States are something else entirely — gangs of elites who bamboozle the population with ideology into giving up property, freedom, and power that should naturally belong to the people. The answer to the future in the Hoppean view: Embrace society and abolish the state. [continue reading…]
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