Peter J Preusse

Just Not State! Peter J Preusse

"Dr Preusse is to be congratulated for attempting to do in the first part of his compact book, Just not State!, what, to my knowledge, has never been done and that is to provide a coherent and plausible account of the foundations of praxeology as articulated in the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Antony de Jasay. This is a project I once thought of attempting myself and I made some small beginnings in that direction but, in the end, I was not able to see my way through the thickets of complications. I cannot say that Dr Preusse has succeeded-in the end, it may not be possible to reconcile the accounts of these thinkers-but I can say that he has made the most comprehensive effort that I know of so to do. Apart from his pioneering work on this most difficult, if somewhat recondite, of topics, Dr Preusse develops the notions of ownership and self-ownership as a replacement for the much-abused notion of freedom and provides a schema for a constitution for a private law society."Gerard Casey, Professor emeritus, Philosophy, Dublin, Ireland In this concise work of social philosophy, the author not only argues that, according to the well-established School of Austrian Economics and Ethics, any form of domination and coercive rule is illegitimate; he also consolidates and restates ethics of self-ownership and ownership by introducing something so far neglected: an explicit axiom of the 'equal human rank' as a valuator. Furthermore, he enables confidence in the feasibility of a peaceful, lasting and flourishing stateless society by introducing a novel concept for a draft constitution, which combines all legitimate aspects of equality and full sovereignty of the individual's encompassing property rights. The key issue here is the constitutional preclusion of any permanent and autonomous public sector.