My intention, therefore, was to deal with the difficult questions the libertarian political philosophy is confronted with, not to give an introduction or to try to "convert" outsiders. By the way, I think the best "advertising" for libertarianism is to get our theory straight. If we want to convince others we must be sure ourselves.
Despite the fact that my speeches cover a wide rage of subjects from psychology to economics, education, history, and the law, they center around the search of a libertarian sociology. Although one of the founders of modern libertarianism, Paul Goodman, can be considered a sociologist, libertarianism today rarely is used to formulate a "theory of society." Most libertarians are either involved in economics or concentrate on pragmatic questions of defendig civil liberties.
But of course you cannot find a pragmatic strategy to change the trend back to authoritarian government without understandig the mechanisms by with this trend is created. And you cannot isolate questions of economic welfare from the rest of society.
To the credit of libertarian economics I must admit that they often enlarge the field of economics to be more or less a sociology. They deal with the "economics of resistance", with the "economics of voting", even with the "economics of marriage" and so forth. But this leads to another problem. Although the findings of these socio-economic studies often are extremely useful they represent but a part of what is humane. They tend to reduce man to a machine maximizing monetary and psychological profit.
As you will notice, English is not my mother-language. Several people helped with editing my Germanisms and I want to thank them: Chris Tame, Jan Smid, Hubert Jongen, Isabell Döring, Sam Konkin III. But still the awful phrases are all but my fault. If notwithstanding I have the nerve to publish these essays, it's because I am sure that they contribute some important thoughts not to be found even in the elaborate libertarian writings of Paul Goodman or Murray Rothbard.
I hope you find the thoughts I am presenting here useful for you own understanding of the world and of libertarianism, or at least some of them.
To start these lectures I want to quote a definition of justice made by the American libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy, a definition which expresses in four sentences everything libertarianism means to me:
"Libertarians insist that the freely chosen actions of individuals be respected. This concept of justice is means-oriented. As long as a given social state results from the voluntary interactions of everyone involved, it is just. Justice, therefore, refers not to a specific end state such as equality, but to the process by which the end state is achieved. If no rights are violated, justice is achieved."
&emdash; Wendy McElroy