When writing Natural Law, I have only four writers in mind Hayek, Popper, Will Durant, Nietzsche.
And so I see my work as largely combining Hayek (content), Popper (analytic argument), and Hoppe (property as system of measure), and Durant(high prose) and Nietzsche(aphorism) in presentation. What results is a bias toward one of those authors.
- Reading Hayek is like listening to my internal voice. And of course, i followed the same evolution in my thought, for the same reasons, and ended up with the law – I just have the benefit of computer science where it came too late – instead of with Babbage with Turing.
- Popper taught me the analytic method – especially tables, lists, parentheticals, and uses of fonts.
- Durant writes in poetic form with a sensual vocabulary, elegant phrasing, in high style of the great european thinkers. His Lessons of History is both simple and elegant – despite his catholic idealism.
- Nietzsche is the master of aphorism, and I know I have finished my work on a subject when I can reduce it to narrative form, natural law form, and an uncompromising aphorism.
I will always owe the most directly to Hoppe, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. And indirectly to Turing and perhaps Minsky. A touch to Mokyr.