How Does Walter Block’s Defense of the Undefendable Relate to John Paul Sartre’s Recognition that Hell Is Other People?
How Does Walter Block’s Defense of the Undefendable Relate to John Paul Sartre’s Recognition that Hell Is Other People?

Author(s): Richard E. Wagner
Subject(s): Economy, Political Philosophy, French Literature
Published by: Addleton Academic Publishers
Keywords: Walter Block; Defending the Undefendable; Sartre No Exit; Voluntary Exchange; Private vs Public Ordering;
Summary/Abstract: This essay is my contribution to a Festschrift in honor of Walter Block. I focus this essay on Block’s book from 1976, Defending the Undefendable. Among the 32 characters Block defends are pimps, prostitutes, scabs, and slumlords. After describing the book’s contents, the remainder of this essay refracts Block’s book through John Paul Sartre’s play from 1947, No Exit. Toward the end of that play, Sartre has his character Garcin exclaim that “Hell is other people!” This outburst occurs within a play with only three characters, though a valet also appears early in the play, never to be seen again after introducing the three main characters. Why I conjoin Sartre and Block resides in my recognition (Wagner 2023) that the proper subject of economic theory is society approached through the universality of economizing action and not the focus on resource administration that was set in motion in 1871 with the marginal revolution.

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