Classic piece from Hoppe, Nationalism and Secession, from the November 1993 Chronicles.
From “Andy” on The Distributed Republic, back in 2004.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: A Unified Theory of Everything
Submitted by Andy on Sun, 2004-07-11 17:57.
I possess three brain cells. One is concerned with food and beer, particularly Sam Adams light, the black stuff from Guinness, and any full strength export lager originating from Sweden. The second brain cell is concerned with personal visions of a possible future in a couple of thousand years. The third brain cell, God bless it, is concerned with music, philosophy, chess, politics, writing, art, fine Pinot Noir wine, provocative Stilton cheese, good conversation, and, when it has the chance, the brown-eyed charms of Penelope Cruz.
I have just read Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. That poor old overloaded third brain cell has just been fried. And it’s going to take more than a Sam Adams to bring it back online again. [continue reading…]
Drudge breathlessly intones: OBAMA OPEN TO NEWSPAPER BAILOUT BILL… Hmm, I wonder which way the newspaper editorials will lean on the wisdom of this idea? And I wonder how it will affect their criticism of other state bailouts?
This is the beginning of the end of freedom of the press.
From a great interview with Hoppe: Economics, Philosophy, and Politics (interviewed by Emrah Akkurt, Turkey-Association for Liberal Thinking; to be published in a forthcoming special issue of the economic journal Piyasa on socialism), Mises.org, February 26, 2004.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Interviewed by Mateusz Machaj, English version of Socjaldemokratyczny Hayek, in Najwyzszy czas, September 2004; also Economics, Philosophy, and Politics (interviewed by Emrah Akkurt, Turkey-Association for Liberal Thinking), Mises.org, February 26, 2004. See also comments to this post, noting: In the PFS “about” page, Hoppe is quoting Mises, not Hayek (the piece quoted is here, and makes it clear Mises disagreed with Hayek). Hoppe is a Misesian. Hayek was good on many issues, especially for his time, and Hoppe thus quotes him favorably on one point, but of course nowhere implies Hayek was completely on board with an agenda as radical even as Mises’s was.
See also:
- “The Hayek Myth” (PFS 2012)
- Why Mises (and not Hayek)? “I venture the guess that there exist no more than 10 people alive today who have studied, from cover to cover, his Pure Theory of Capital.“
- Hoppe, F.A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique (Vol. 7 Num. 1) (also in The Great Fiction)
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Interviewed by Mateusz Machaj
- This lecture is from the 2012 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Germany/Turkey), The Hayek Myth. PFS 2012 Playlist. Loosely based (?) on F.A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique (Vol. 7 Num. 1) (also in The Great Fiction)
- Walter Block, “Hayek’s Road to Serfdom”.
- See also Hoppe’s views critical of Hayek’s “knowledge” paradigm in Kinsella, Knowledge vs. Calculation.
Additional:
From On the Non Liquet in Libertarian Theory and Armchair Theorizing:
Regarding Hayek’s view that laws should be general, predictable, and known in advance, see my chapter “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” [in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)] Part III.B.1, n.34:
The “other” fundamental requisite of law is that law be based on rules of general application, a requisite that special statutes tend to undermine. I am grateful to Leonard Liggio for calling Sartori’s works to my attention. But having statutory, artificial law be predictable, known ahead of time, and of “general applicability” is not sufficient for law to be just. If this is your only criteria, you can support all manner of statist laws, as Hayek does. See Walter E. Block, “Hayek’s Road to Serfdom,” J. Libertarian Stud. 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996), pp. 327–50.
From Kinsella, Review of Anthony de Jasay, Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order, in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023):
In the course of this essay, de Jasay also deflates the myth that Popper was a liberal.[24] Also of interest is de Jasay’s critical treatment of other prominent liberal economists and political theorists, notably James Buchanan, F.A. Hayek, and Robert Nozick. In “Hayek: Some Missing Pieces,”[25] for example, de Jasay argues that Hayek “has no complete theory of the social order to back up his liberal recommendations.”[26] In advocating that government should go beyond the maintenance of law and order to provide amorphous and endless “highly desirable” public goods, Hayek ends up supporting virtually unlimited government. De Jasay will have none of this:
A theory of social order is incomplete if it makes no serious attempt at assessing the long-term forces that make the public sector grow or shrink. This can hardly be done without relying on a defensible theory of public goods. Hayek feels no necessity for one. Strangely, the question seems to have held no interest for him.[27]
In other words, Hayek has not done his homework and his half-baked political theory endangers the very freedom that he is viewed as upholding. (The critiques of Nozick and Buchanan are discussed below in the discussion of Part 2.)
[24] Against Politics, p. 114.
[25] Ibid., chap. 6.
[26] Ibid., p. 120.
[27] Ibid., p. 125. See also Walter Block, “Hayek’s Road to Serfdom,” J. Libertarian Stud. 12, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 327–50.
Walter Block, Review of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (Kluwer, 1993), Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, vol. 7, num 1, Mars. 1996, pp. 161-165.
Classic piece from Hoppe: The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism, Mises.org, March 4, 2005. Regarding conservatism, in his opening address to the PFS in 2006, Hoppe wrote, “As culturally conservative libertarians, we are convinced that the process of de-civilization has again reached a crisis point and that it is our moral and intellectual duty to once again undertake a serious effort to rebuild a free, prosperous, and moral society.” But Hoppe is clearly not a traditional conservative; see, for example, ch. 5 of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, bearing the title “The Socialism of Conservatism.” See also Hoppe’s comments on Marxism in this post.
Great article by Jeff Tucker, from 2003: Five Books That Explain It All, which are: The Costs of War, ed. John Denson; America’s Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War by Ludwig von Mises, Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom edited by John V. Denson; and A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II by Murray N. Rothbard.
See Tucker’s article for elaboration.
This is the practice of doing something your wife will permit, while she’s awake (such as taking a nap), and saving till she’s asleep the things she would bitch about if you were doing while she’s awake (such as surfing the Internet–“why don’t you spend time with me?!”).
This could also be called nap-shifting, or “surfing dogs”. In the nap case, if you take a one hour nap, you can stay awake an extra hour, after the house is quiet. (Of course, she may not let you nap earlier, or will contrive some way wake you early–turning on the vacuum cleaner, claiming she needs you to help her open a jar or lift something heavy, etc. But on occasion she may let you nap.)
Another example: suppose you have an hour’s worth of bills to pay. It’s stupid to do this at night, during your time. If your wife is sauntering around the house and catches you surfing the internet, she is bound to cock her eyes and try to drag you into her activities, even if it’s just abject boredom. But if she catches you sitting at the desk, paying bills, she will leave you alone since you are doing something that needs to be done for the family, something she might otherwise have to do if you don’t. So it’s much more efficient to save your surfing for later and do the wife-approved things while the beast is prowling. When she finally tires out and retires to her lair, then you can do what you want.
From Mises Blog, Sept. 19, 2009:
(Archived comments below; the last comment has a valid point about Murphy & Callahan)
Hoppe: Habermas’s Anarcho-Conservative Student
Just came across an interesting blogpost by one Bary Stocker, a “British philosopher based in Istanbul”. Pasted below (and see also Revisiting Argumentation Ethics; Discourse Ethics entry in Wikipedia (which yours truly started); Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics; my New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory):
Monday, 22 June 2009
Hoppe: Habermas’ Anarcho-Conservative Student
(Primary version of this post, with picture of Hoppe! at Barry Stocker’s Weblog)
Hoppe and Habermas
Hans Hermann-Hoppe is Jürgen Habermas’ most surprising doctoral student, a major figure in the area where anarcho-capitalism and ultra-conservatism cross over. (Click for a very short article by Hoppe which summarises his positon in a discussion of immigration) Hoppe wrote a doctorate with the Frankfurt School Marxist, Habermas in the 1970s. Hoppe is not very forthcoming about this, as can be seen by checking his CV at his own website, but does situate himself in relation to Habermas in his book The Ethics and Economics of Private Property. The startling conjunction of Marxism and Anarcho-Conservatism is a bit lessened if we appreciate Habermas’ position as a bridge between left-liberalism and Marxism, so that he can be better regarded as someone who has domesticated Marx within welfarist or egalitarian liberalism, rather than as an advocate of revolutionary Marxism.
I like this post:
The Property and Freedom Society
And so the journey will shortly begin to the Hotel Karia Princess, to attend the annual conference of the Property and Freedom Society.
This leaves me with a seventh pilgrimage to Auburn to get the full set of:
=> Ayn Rand’s apartment where she wrote Atlas Shrugged
=> Murray Rothbard’s New York apartment
=> The site of Ludwig von Mises’ Vienna home
=> The quadrangle at Vienna University
=> Ludwig von Mises’ New York apartment
=> The annual Property and Freedom Society conference
And don’t give me that ‘You’re simply using Austrianism to fulfil an otherwise empty quasi-religious void in your futile and meaningless life’ stuff. I am well aware of the possibility. But still, there are worse hobbies to have.
Wish me luck.
My friend Rob Wicks said this in an email discussion:
Minarchists, while practically better than socialists, strike me as perhaps more intellectually dishonest. The better socialists don’t believe they are doing evil. Minarchists, it seems to me think that by “properly” doing wrong, you get to lower the overall amount of wrongdoing. They believe in evil management. They make no distinction, essentially between doing evil themselves, or having others do evil. Whichever one seems subjectively better is the one they would support. Minarchists cannot coherently object to black slavery, if it could be shown to lower the overall murder rate, for example.
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