PFS 2025 review

 PFS and the Course of History and Ideas

 

This year’s talks were of course very good, with some of them excellent (the heavy hitters, if I may say, and of which I would love to listen to two talks per year whenever I can attend). 

Key Themes

• Radical property rights, freedom of contract, and freedom of association―core to the PFS mission.
• Critiques of the state, war, democracy, and education/re-education. For example: Hans‑Hermann Hoppe’s talk “Democratic Peace and Re-Education: The German Experience” deals with how democratic states wage war and use re-education.
• Historical and off-beat libertarian angles: topics ranged from Roman slavery, Swiss anarchism, to pirates and the American Revolution.
• Monetary theory and digital money/bitcoin from an Austrian School perspective – e.g., talk on “Bitcoin from the Viewpoint of the Austrian School.”
• The role of universities and the state (how education institutions are complicit in statist agendas)—one talk by Guido Hülsmann.
• Media, persuasion, ideological warfare – for instance, Jeff Deist on “Post-Persuasion America.”

Some Representative Talks

• Sean Gabb: “Roman Law and Contractual Slavery”
• Stephan Kinsella: “Where the Common Law Goes Wrong”
• Alessandro Fusillo: “The Pirates of the Caribbean as Forebears of the Libertarians and of the American Revolution”
• Saifedean Ammous: “Property Rights: The Root Cause of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict”
• Hoppe again: “Democratic Peace and Re-Education: The German Experience”

Additionally, one of the evenings, the Douglas E.  French book on movements that become rackets was launched in absentia (wishing him good health). And what a great cover that book has (wink wink).

To read the whole review, see: https://propertyandfreedom.org/2025/10/pfs-2025-cozy-inspiring-invigorating/