John Locke

RNH Academic Director Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, was interviewed in Gisli Freyr Valdorsson’s popular podcast on Wednesday 27 August 2025. They discussed how classical liberalism could be defined and defended. Gissurarson pointed out that this was traditionally regarded as a set of political ideas developed by John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith, but he added that in fact the roots of classical liberalism were much older, derived from the old Germanic ideas of government by consent and right of rebellion, described by Snorri Sturluson in Heimskringla. Government provided three indispensable services, to keep law and order, to defend people against internal and external threats, and to ensure a decent life for those unable to provide for themselves, in other words a safety net. Probably government only needed about 15 per cent of GDP, Gross Domestic Product, to finance the provision of these three kinds of services. Gissurarson recalled the old adage, No taxation without representation. This implied, for example, that corporations should not pay taxes because they had no right to vote. Again, taxes should only paid on income, either as a value-added tax or as a flat personal income tax. It was unfair to tax income from capital gains because then those who had saved were punished whereas those who had consumed all their income were spared and thus rewarded. It was double taxation.

Gissurarson recalled the story of King Eric of Pomerania. He had in 1429 introduced the Sound Dues on ships crossing the Sound between Denmark and Sweden. Later, when he had been deposed, he became a pirate on Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea. The interesting question was whether there was any moral difference between the income he exacted as king from ships crossing the Sound and the income he derived as pirate from robbing ships crossing the Baltic. Was the former not taxation without representation and therefore theft by taxation, and the latter plain and simple theft? Gissurarson also recalled that the well-known philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe had taught that the main task of political philosophy was to distinguish the state from the mafia, both entities promising protection for a fee.

Gissurarson said that the main difference between economic liberalism and socialism was shown in their approaches to poverty. The liberals sought to enable people to get out of poverty, whereas the socialists wanted to help people remain poor, by making poverty more tolerable. What was essential for the liberals was help to self-help, making people independent and prosperous. Gissurarson added that the two main arguments for private property were that what everybody owned, nobody cared for, and that good fences made good neighbours. He was in favour of private property rights to natural resources, but the private property right which was most important was the right people had in their own persons, their abilities and skills.

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland, was the guest of journalist Hermann Nokkvi Gunnarsson in Dagmal, the television part of Morgunbladid, on 22 August 2025. He criticised the non-action of the University of Iceland about an incident on 6 August when a research institute at the University had planned a lecture by Israeli Professor Gil Epstein on Artificial Intelligence and future pension arrangements. About fifteen Hamas supporters turned up, some of them employees of the University, and did not allow the chair, Professor Gylfi Zoega, or the lecturer to talk, shouting them down for twenty minutes, until the meeting was cancelled. Gissurarson pointed out that the uninvited guests were not protesting, as they had the full right to do: they were hindering a scholar in using his freedom of speech and also hindering the people attending the lecture with the aim of discussing the issue with him afterwards from exercising their academic freedom of freely discussing issues. Academic freedom was not only freedom from the undue interference of authorities but also freedom from thugs, as in this example, and from special interests.  Gissurarson expressed the view that the so-called protesters were not really concerned about humanitarian issues. There was a much worse humanitarian crisis in Sudan where eleven million people were refugees inside the country, while four million had fled from it, and where the rebel force in the ongoing civil war was trying to commit a genocide on the Alasites in a western corner of the country. Instead, the hooligans at the University were motivated by hatred of Western values—such as equal freedom of all, the free market system, appointments on merit and not membership of any groups, and science as the free competition of ideas—and Israel was simply the only Western country in the Middle East.

In this wide-ranging interview Gissurarson emphasised that of course he supported the free immigration of individuals who wanted to contribute and were willing to follow the law of the land. But Europe had recently experienced the mass immigration of people who did not share Western values: they did not accept equal rights for women and sexual minorities, they considered work-shirking entirely appropriate, and they had grown up in a culture of violence. The European voters did not want such immigrants to take over their countries or parts of them, and if the political parties did not listen to the people about this, they would simply be voted out of office. Gissurarson pointed out that the last general elections in Iceland were seminal in that the radical left which had been represented in Parliament since 1937, and often enjoyed the support of 10–20 per cent of the votes, had not got even one member elected. He also pointed out that in the past the Independence Party had largely unified the right in Iceland, but that now there were four parties more or less playing the same role, the much-reduced old party itself, the Centre Party, the Reform Party, and the People’s Party.

Gissurarson said that he was at present completing an assignment for the Brussels think tank New Direction: an anthology of conservative-liberal political thought in the Nordic countries from 946 to 1945, selected, edited and introduced by him. It had been two years in the workings.

Professor Emeritus Hannes H. Gissurarson, RNH research director, published an article in Nordisk Tidskrift, No. 2 2025, on the recent entry of Finland and Sweden into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO. He argued that all five Nordic countries had in the past pursued policies that were based on their real interests. States have interests, not friends. Finland had to reconcile herself to the fact that she had a powerful and brutal neighbour and no real allies in the world. Sweden could because of her location and strong defence stay out of wars since 1814. Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, all occupied in the Second World War, realised that they needed the security guarantee offered after the War by the United States. But the belligerence of Russia which invade Ukraine for the second time in 2022 brought about a change of policies in Finland and Sweden. These countries realised that neutrality was no longer a feasible alternative. NATO had to be strong enough that Russia would not attack any NATO country. In the background, China was looming. She was spending more on her military than the European members of NATO combined. The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO was historic, Gissurarson observed. This was the first time the five Nordic countries aligned themselves to one another geopolitically since the dissolution of the Kalmar Union in 1523. Gissurarson’s article is here:

Gissurarson Article in Nordisk Tidskrift

Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Iceland and RNH Academic Director, gave a talk at the Summer University organised by Brussels think tank New Direction and French think tank ISSEP at Chateau de Thorens in France on 30 June to 4 July 2025. His subject was the root of conservative-liberal thought. Gissurarson pointed out that a distinction could be made between southern liberalism, originating in Roman law and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, and northern liberalism, originating in the customary law of the Germanic tribes and their self-government, described by Tacitus and applauded by Montesquieu (who exclaimed that European freedom was born in the forests of Germany).

This northern liberalism was articulated in the works of Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) who described the conflict between the Norwegian (and Swedish) kings and their subjects who insisted on the two ancient principles of government by consent and the right of rebellion. Later John Locke was to build a whole system upon those two principles, in his justification of the 1688 Revolution in Britain which was made in order to defend ancient liberties against a king who craved absolutism. This system was further elaborated by David Hume with his conception of justice, spontaneously developed as a response to limited altruism and natural scarcity, by Adam Smith with his case for free trade, and by Edmund Burke with his polemic against attempts at destroying all ancient institutions instead of reforming then gradually.

Gissurarson recalled that eleven years before Smith published his great treatise on the Wealth of Nations, a Finnish pastor, Anders Chydenius (1729–803], as a member of the Swedish Parliament, Diet of the Four Estates, in 1765 had published a tract with essentially the same arguments for free trade. Chydenius had also been instrumental in abolishing censorship and introducing freedom of religion in Sweden. In the nineteenth century, Swedish liberals deposed a king in 1809 and wrote a relatively liberal constitution the same year. They reinforced the rule of law, abolished the guilds and most restrictions on trade, and in 1866 replaced the Diet of the Four Estates with a Parliament. Sweden, between 1870 and 1970, experienced a high and sustained rate of economic growth and became one of the richest countries in the world.

In the nineteenth century, the third great liberal appeared, the Danish poet, pastor and statesman Nikolai Frederik S. Grundtvig (1783–1872). When the Danish king in 1848 transferred his absolute power to the people, Grundtvig saw it as a necessary task to educate the people in so-called People’s High Schools so they could become responsible citizens. He was a nationalist, but a non-aggressive one. For example, he thought that only the Danish-speaking part of the contested Schleswig should belong to Denmark. Nationality had to be chosen, not imposed. Grundtvig’s nationalism was about respecting and developing the national heritage, the history, language, literature, folk songs and folkways, of one’s own country. When Denmark had lost Norway, in 1814, and Schleswig and Holstein, in 1864, he emphasised that she should grow within her own borders, as a nation proud of her identity and achievements.

Gissurarson emphasised that conservative liberalism was not only the product of individual writers, but that it was also embodied in Nordic practices, first and foremost the rule of law, and a strong civil society, full of voluntary associations and local communities. The Royal charters of the late Middle Ages also acted as constraints on arbitrary power. It showed how strong was the conservative-liberal tradition of liberty under the law that it was able to withstand both the seventeenth century assault of the kings, claiming power by the grace of God, and the twentieth century assault by Social Democrats, claiming power by the will of the people. Today, the Nordic nations are some of the freest nations economically in the world, and the happiest ones as well. They have cast off the yoke of Social democracy in the same way as they cast off the yoke of absolutism and in the same way as the English, gradually from Magna Carta in 1215 to the 1688 Revolution, cast off the Norman yoke and returned to their Saxon freedom, a part of the Germanic heritage of all Northern peoples.

Other speakers at the summer school included Hungarian professor Ferenc Hörcher who defended moderate conservatism in the spirit of Roger Scruton, Croatian MEP Stepan Bartulica who criticised the centralisation in the European Union, New Direction Senior Adviser Robert Tyler who described the conservative views on the nation state, French professor Jean Luc Coronel de Boissezon who presented the conservatism of Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, Swedish Oikos adviser Arvid Hallén who argued for an alliance between right-wing liberals and conservatives, English Professor James Orr who gave a defence of conservative values, and Mateusz Morawiecki, former Prime Minister of Poland, who discussed the current state of affairs in Europe. Many lecturers expressed worries about asylum seekers in Europe who refused to follow the laws and conventions of their host countries. This might even lead to local soft civil wars. They emphasised the conservative support for the family, church, and nation. Fifty students attended the school, while many more had applied.

As a parlour game, the lecturers were asked to name seven books that they would recommend. Gissurarson mentioned Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke (1790),  Socialism by Ludwig von Mises (1922), The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. von Hayek (1944), The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl R. Popper (1945), Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957), The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1974), and Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick (1974). Both teachers and students at the summer school agreed that the venue, Chateau de Thorens, was superb.

The 2025 general meeting of the Public Book Club, Almenna bokafelagid, AB, was held on 17 May. Jonas Sigurgeirsson, AB Executive Director, presented the 2024 accounts which showed the best-ever performance, not least because of sales to foreign tourists. Other shareholders are Kjartan Gunnarsson, Baldur Gudlaugsson, and Armann Thorvaldsson. AB celebrates its 7oth anniversary this year. It was founded on 17 June 1955 at the initiative of Bjarni Benediktsson, then Minister of Education and Vice-Chairman of the Independence Party, and the poets Gunnar Gunnarsson, Tomas Gudmundsson, Gudmundur G. Hagalin, and Kristmann Gudmundsson. The objective of AB was to present an alternative to the communist publishing house, Mal og menning, supported lavishly by Kremlin. In recent years, AB has published three novels by Ayn Rand, We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, books by Hannes H. Gissurarson, Professor Emeritus, and by Matt Ridley and Johan Norberg, and reprints of anti-communist books of the Cold War, including Essays on Communism by Bertrand Russell, El campesino by Valentín González, Baltic Eclipse by Aants Oras, and I Chose Freedom by Victor Kravchenko.

RNH Academic Director, Professor Emeritus Hannes H. Gissurarson, was one of the speakers at the Budapest meeting on 13 May 2025 of the Free Market Road Show, organised by the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, in cooperation with the Danube Institute in Budapest, and the Hungarian-American Chamber of Commerce, New York. Gissurarson participated with Dr. Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute in a panel about trade and tariffs, moderated by Philip Pilkington. Dr. Barbara Kolm of the Austrian Economics Center and Dr. Daniel Mitchell of the Freedom and Prosperity Institute participated in another panel on the dollar and gold. Her Excellency María Lorena Capra, Ambassador of Argentina to Hungary, also gave a talk at the meeting on the liberal reforms of Argentinian President Javier Milei.

In the beginning of his remarks Gissurarson recalled that in the 1970s at the end of his anti-communist speeches—when communism was still an issue—he used to recite a stanza by Hungarian poet Sàndor Petöfi:

Talpra magyar, hí a haza!
Itt az idő, most vagy soha!
Rabok legyünk, vagy szabadok?
Ez a kérdés, válasszatok!

In English this has been translated:

On your feet now, Hungary calls you!
Now is the moment, nothing stalls you,
Shall we be slaves or men set free
That is the question, answer me!

In the nineteenth century, the Icelanders followed with sympathy the Hungarian struggle for independence, as they were themselves demanding home rule from Denmark.

Gissurarson said that the two main arguments for international free trade were prosperity and peace. God has created individuals and countries with different resources and capabilities and thus He has directed them towards trading with one another. If you have what I lack, and I have what you lack, then we both benefit by trade, and the division of labour. The second argument for international free trade is that if you see a potential customer in me, then your propensity to shoot at me diminishes. Gissurarson welcomed Elon Musk’s proposal that North America and Europe should become one huge free-trade area, without any tariffs, but he added that China was a problem for free traders because of her unfair trade practices, the annexation of Tibet, threats against Taiwan and aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea. Communist China could not be regarded as yet another ordinary business partner. Nor could the other three Axis powers, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

The Head of the Danube Institute, John O’Sullivan, and his wife Melissa gave a dinner for the speakers after the conference. From left: Eamonn Butler, John O’Sullivan, Daniel Mitchell, Christine Blundell, and Hannes H. Gissurarson.