Dear All,

Every September since 2006 the Property and Freedom Society has gathered in Bodrum, Turkey, for a week of lectures, debates, and conversations. The Society, founded by Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe, brings together speakers from across the world of libertarian, conservative, and Austrian thought.

What follows are reports from this year’s conference. These are not transcripts of the original speeches, but faithful summaries of what was said, written in the style of reportage. They aim to capture both the content and the atmosphere of the Bodrum meetings.

Sean
Javier Milei and the Austrian School – A Critique from Bodrum 2025
Javier Milei presents himself as an Austrian economist, even brandishing Rothbard in public. At Bodrum, Kristoffer Mousten Hansen challenged this reputation. He argued that Milei’s policies rest on neoclassical growth models, real-bills style monetary doctrine, and IMF-style structural reforms. His flagship idea of dollarisation is not the free-market adoption of sound money but the replacement of one fiat currency with another by decree. For Hansen, this is neoliberal technocracy disguised as Rothbardian revolution. Argentina’s money supply continues to inflate, debt mounts, and the state grows stronger. The danger, Hansen warned, is that Milei’s failure will be treated as a failure of Austrian economics itself. His lecture was a call to defend intellectual clarity against political co-option.
👉 Read the full report Saifedean Ammous on Property Rights and the Palestinian–Israeli Conflict
Known worldwide for The Bitcoin Standard, Saifedean Ammous spoke here in a more personal voice. He argued that the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is at root a question of property rights. In 1948, long-standing systems of ownership were destroyed and replaced by laws assigning land on the basis of ethnicity. Palestinians were expelled, their property seized, and state land handed to the Israel Land Authority, which leased it only to Jews. Subsequent decades, Ammous said, reinforced this pattern through settlements, military courts, and the denial of permits. He quoted Mises: “Private property is inextricably linked with civilisation.” Where property is destroyed, peace is impossible. Zionism, in his view, survives only by foreign subsidy, draining resources from abroad. His calm, data-driven lecture framed the conflict as a modern dispossession, not an eternal feud.
👉 Read the full report Tom DiLorenzo on “Virtuous” War Crimes – The American and Israeli Traditions
Tom DiLorenzo, now President of the Mises Institute, is famous for tearing Lincoln from his pedestal. In Bodrum he expanded this critique to America’s wider imperial history. Drawing on Mises, he argued that American wars have long been justified by a supposed “Treasury of Virtue” – the belief that past righteousness absolves all present crimes. Sherman’s campaign against the Native Americans, the Philippine massacres, Hawaii’s annexation, and later firebombings in Europe and Japan were each justified as liberation. Today, DiLorenzo argued, American support for Israel continues this tradition: dehumanisation of enemies and sanctification of conquest. He also exposed the dispensationalist theology that links U.S. evangelicals to unconditional support for Israel. His talk was fierce, arguing that the rhetoric of virtue has been America’s most effective weapon of empire.
👉 Read the full report Hans-Hermann Hoppe on Democratic Peace and Re-Education
Hans-Hermann Hoppe dissected the myth of “democratic peace.” Monarchs, he argued, once fought limited wars over succession and land, paying soldiers out of their own pockets. Democracies, by contrast, mobilise entire populations, turning conflicts into ideological crusades. Germany provides the proof. Versailles was not a settlement but vindictive punishment; 1945 brought not only defeat but permanent re-education. Democracies insist their wars are just, and their peace benevolent, but the record is brutality followed by ideological remoulding. Germany was transformed into a ward of the American empire, defined by guilt and dependency. Hoppe concluded that genuine peace requires decentralisation, voluntary communities, and the end of democratic myth-making. His Bodrum lecture was an uncompromising reminder that democracy, far from securing peace, has made war total and its aftermath vindictive.
👉 Read the full report Alessandro Fusillo on Pirates, Liberty, and Revolution
Italian lawyer Alessandro Fusillo offered a romantic history of piracy. Far from mindless brigands, the pirates of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries created ships governed by elected captains, quartermasters with powers of veto, and constitutions that bound officers and crew. They even tried oppressive officers and hanged them if guilty. Fusillo contrasted this with the enclosures, impressment, and dispossession that drove many into piracy. Some pirates, like Olivier Misson, even established short-lived libertarian communities. At times, pirates targeted slave ships and welcomed freed slaves into their ranks. Suppressed by 1726, they nevertheless represented a libertarian alternative to the statist order. Fusillo’s argument was that the pirates prefigured both the American Revolution and modern libertarianism: rebels against empire, seeking liberty on the seas.
👉 Read the full report David Dürr on Swiss Anarchism
Swiss jurist David Dürr gave a deliberately provocative talk: “Switzerland is the cradle of anarchism.” He traced traditions of decentralisation from the Helvetii tribes through medieval defence pacts, to the cantons and communes that resisted Habsburg domination. Even after the 1848 constitution imposed a centralised federation, Swiss political life retained strong anarchic instincts: communal autonomy, multiple languages, competing religions, overlapping traditions. Dürr insisted there is no “nation of will,” only contracts and associations. Switzerland has survived by disunity, not unity. In his conclusion he predicted that by 2048 Switzerland could and should liquidate its federal state, restoring its true anarchic heritage while keeping external independence. The talk was untidy but challenging, and it pressed the question of whether the Swiss example proves that liberty lies in dispersion rather than consolidation.
👉 Read the full report Jeff Deist on Post-Persuasion America
Jeff Deist began with a provocation: America is not on the edge of civil war. Its population is too elderly, obese, and geographically diverse for such conflict. Yet it is on the edge of disintegration. After 250 years, “American identity” is incoherent, as much an economic arrangement as a nation. The post-war liberal consensus is dead; persuasion has given way to mobilisation. Fusionism and Cold War justifications for empire are bankrupt; the Soviet Union was never an existential threat. American hegemony produced a hollowed-out economy and a bloated military-industrial complex. Deist urged radical decentralisation and subsidiarity. Mobilisation, not persuasion, must be the strategy in a post-persuasion age. His speech captured both the decay of American legitimacy and the possibilities for populism grounded in real communities rather than Washington’s hegemony.
👉 Read the full report Guido Hülsmann on Universities and the State
Guido Hülsmann, Austrian economist and historian of money, turned his fire on modern universities. Once havens of learning, they have become creatures of the state, funded by subsidies, bound by bureaucracies, and devoted to producing compliant elites. The corruption, Hülsmann argued, is not incidental but structural: when universities are financed by public money, they serve the interests of the state. Academic fashions and ideological orthodoxies follow funding streams, not truth. He contrasted this with the older European model of independent, competitive universities that thrived on patronage, reputation, and voluntary association. His conclusion was stark: genuine scholarship requires withdrawal from the state’s embrace. Otherwise, universities will remain the intellectual bodyguards of Leviathan. The lecture was a sombre reminder that higher education is not neutral, but already part of the centralised state machine.
👉 Read the full report Thorsten Polleit on Social Sciences as Sorcery
Thorsten Polleit revisited Stanislav Andreski’s classic Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972). Andreski argued that the social sciences were corrupted by ideological bias, jargon, and sycophancy. Half a century later, Polleit showed, the problem endures. Economics in particular has adopted the methods of natural science – empiricism, positivism, falsificationism – which are ill-suited to human action. The result is a Trojan horse: false theories can never be falsified, and politicians can always find cover for intervention. The “scientific” economist becomes the state’s bodyguard. Polleit stressed the Austrian alternative: economics as an a priori science of human action, yielding truths about exchange, money, and interest that do not depend on statistical tests. His lecture exposed how errors and deceptions persist in academia, and why Austrian clarity remains indispensable.
👉 Read the full report Sean Gabb on Roman Slavery: Horror and Paradox
Sean Gabb gave a nuanced lecture on Roman slavery. He began by acknowledging its horrors: field gangs in mines and quarries, early deaths, brutal punishments. He quoted Galen on household cruelty, recalled Vedius Pollio’s pond of flesh-eating fish, and Hostius Quadra’s infamous debauchery. Yet he also showed another side. Romans freed slaves at unusually high rates; freedmen became prominent in business, even marrying into their masters’ families. Some slaves appear to have entered service voluntarily, using slavery as a contract for resettlement, training, or even a path to citizenship. The procurator Felix, once a slave, became a governor of Judaea. Gabb’s point was not to excuse slavery, but to show its paradoxes and continuities. Roman art, literature, and architecture cannot be understood without acknowledging both the cruelty and the unexpected avenues of social mobility that slavery created.
👉 Read the full report

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