To be upfront: I held off on reading Hans Hermann Hoppe for years largely because his arguments, as I sporadically encountered them, never quite passed the smell test. Libertarianism has a long intellectual tradition. Its not uncommon for new libertarians to encounter an argument they like and then go research its originator.
I, for instance, saw a persuasive Milton Friedman interview clip and therefore decided to pick up his “Capitalism and Freedom” book. I stumbled across then delved into works by Thomas Sowell, Robert Nozick, and Murray Rothbard in a similar fashion.
Whenever I encounter Hoppean arguments, however, I tend to walk away from the interaction unsatisfied. As if there were a gigantic section of the subject at hand that went unaddressed or avoided. I am by no means an Hoppe scholar. I’ve read some of his books & articles online, listened to speeches, and listened to people like Stephan Kinsella defend and dress up his arguments.
In my readings of Hoppe I come away with the sense that he’s selecting a libertarian (or conservative) conclusion and working his way backward to justify said conclusions. In attempting to justify that position he often conflates definitions, devises weird dichotomies, and declares these justifications to be the most important insights ever conveyed on the topic. Now, its okay to reason back from a desired conclusion. Its okay to pat yourself on the back for articulating positions that you feel are right and good. But one should always remain rigorous. Hoppe’s arguments often depend on you, the reader, wanting him to be right.
To illustrate this, let’s look at four topics Hoppe focuses on: Argumentation Ethics, Immigration, Democracy, Leftism vs Rightism.
Argumentation Ethics
Murray Rothbard LOVED this argument by Hoppe. Rothbard believed that Hoppe had solved for all time the Truth of libertarian ethics. Hoppe as recently as 2014 wrote that his formulation was one of - if not THE - greatest achievement of social thought.
A brief summary of Hoppe’s argument:
For argumentation to occur, the participants are agreeing to respect each other’s rights. Though it may not be stated explicitly, the participants believe they own their own minds and can change the other person’s mind (through non-coercive persuasion) because that person owns their mind.
If that ethic underpins all persuasive non-coercive argumentation, then that puts any argument that seeks to advance socialism in a bind. Its contradictory to assume some form of self-ownership, to engage in argumentation, in order to advance anti-ownership claims.
Every non-coercive ethical claim has to be advanced through persuasion & argumentation and therefore rely on the anarcho-libertarian ethic.
This, of course, is not his complete argument. I won’t be recreating all of his arguments in this article, but I will link to them. I will remind you, dear reader, that he does consider his full argument to be an ironclad justification of libertarian ethics.
Other libertarians have pointed out problems with Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics over the years. Roderick Long doesn’t think that any of Hoppe’s premises work. Robert Murphy and Gene Callaghan point out, among other things, that Hoppe may be conflating ‘control’ with ownership. David Friedman feels like Hoppe would have to skip a lot of steps to arrive at his preferred form of libertarianism being justified. Jason Brennan points out that Hoppe is conflating a permission (or liberty) right with a claim right.
That many libertarian economists and philosophers found problems with the “greatest achievement in social thought” should demonstrate something. That something was made clear to me after watching Stephan Kinsella and Robert Murphy re-debate this topic. In that episode of The Bob Murphy Show Kinsella says that the point of the AE’s are not to be persuasive. Meaning its not something that you can demonstrate to a socialist and get them to renounce their ways. Instead the ethics are for us to know we’re right.
This is a dangerous place to go intellectually.
Imagine a preacher made a big fuss declaring he has proof of God’s existence and the big reveal that he presents is: ‘…the Bible tells us so’.
That argument may work for believers, but its useless for anyone else.
Arguments that only ‘work’ in front of other libertarians, to me, seem intellectually masturbatory and pointless. This is why I held off on reading Hoppe for so long despite the praise he receives from one side of the libertarian world (not to mention the ire from the other side). It would be really nice if engaging in argumentation presupposed libertarianism, but it doesn’t. To stipulate that it does, for decades, strikes me as juvenile.
Immigration
A lot could be said about Hoppes immigration views. I’m mainly going to focus on his forced integration concept. But I will just briefly mention Hoppe’s explicit rejection of Ludwig Von Mises’ immigration views and embrace of racial theorists. I’ll link to the paper by Phil Magness that discusses this more.
Hoppe believes that most immigration that we’ve had in this country, particularly since the 60’s, can actually be considered “forced integration”. Forced because the Government owns the public square, then it allows people into the country through the immigration system, and compels businesses to not discriminate. Again, you can follow this section’s link to see his arguments in full.
Pro-immigration proponents have an array of deontological and consequentialist arguments to bolster their stance. Hoppe actually agrees with their economic case and admits that its sound. But he avoids entirely the moral case —that immigration restrictions are equivalent to placing armed guards around a marketplace thereby interrupting the voluntary exchange and association rights of both citizens and foreign immigrants.
As I’ve alleged, Hoppe has made up his mind already and is working backwards to justify his preferred conclusion of immigration restrictions. So his detour into government ownership of public lands should strike everyone as bizarre. He is bunting. Despite being Mr. Anti-State, he is in favor of strident state immigration restrictions. So he must concoct his argument as if Ancapistan suddenly got captured by the US Government who start waving in a bunch of unwanted immigrants. Notice that this the only situation where Hoppeans believe libertarians can either ignore or endorse the State’s rights violations of property owners.
I will note that he does concede that immigration would likely occur and be a good thing if its by “invitation only”. But I ask the reader to consider whether they’ve known any newly-minted immigrants personally. Were they “invited” to your country? If that immigrant worked, paid their rent, and provided for their family, then why exactly would an “invitation” even matter?
Democracy vs Monarchy
My senior seminar (Political Science major here) was a course on Democracy. We spent a semester reading various democratic theorists and their dreams of how democracy will ennoble us and make us more deliberative/harmonious. I wanted to make my final paper for the course a massive critic of these theorists who, it seemed to me, were locked into an eternal struggle to extract from Democracy something it could never give them.
A book called Democracy: The God that Failed sounded like exactly what I needed. I knew of the book decided against reading it at that time because I wasn’t interested in Monarchy as an alternative worth exploring in my paper. I instead picked up Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter.
A few years later I read Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy and decided to finally circle back around to reading Hoppe’s D:TGTF. My criticism of Hoppe here stems, in large part, from my reading those two books first.
Lets just suppose that Hoppe was sitting around one day and thought to himself the following:
Gee, I really love property rights. Everything good about social cohesion depends on them. The more we respect them, the better off we are.
I bet societies where king and queens essentially had a property right over the society were better off than societies where the ‘demos’ or ‘the public’ owns things communally. I should explore this more…
He then proceeds to marshal arguments that will bolster his argument and publishes Democracy: The God that Failed. Among those arguments is the kind of classic tragedy of the commons argument: things are better taken care of when they are privately held vs publicly held. He argues that we’ve seen massive increase in the size of wars since we’ve seen the rise of western democracies. Remember that all of the largest empires have all had some sort of parliamentary, senatorial, or representative system. Moreover, Monarchies probably face more favorable incentives when it comes to investing in the long term health of a society than do Democracies who have short term, cyclical leadership.
You can find his arguments better articulated elsewhere. I’ve only barely recreated his arguments here because there’s a fatal flaw with this argument that doesn’t really require me to go into its particulars.
ASIDE: I could point out that his points about the time preference incentives doesn’t fully take into account that political parties essentially behave like dynastic kingdoms. Parties may not stay in power, but they are incentivized to have you vote for them again in the future. Bill Clinton’s entire job since leaving office is to show up every four years and remind you of how good the Democrats “rule” was. The Left tends to be perturbed with Barack Obama because of how timid they felt he was (policy wise) despite how much power he had with a Democratic (filibuster-proof) super-majority in Congress. The assumption being that what prevented him from passing the democratic agenda with no minority input was the inevitable future backlash.
It occurred to me that his point about the size and scope of wars since the rise of democracies strike me as …easy… because his argument can just stipulate and thereby define negative things out of his ideal.
This brings me to the fatal flaw of his argument: smaller consent based governments are better than massive states. This has long been a libertarian conclusion and, frankly, all libertarian arguments support it.
Hoppe’s Monarchy stuff is a distraction, because ANY hypothetical regime (direct democracy, oligarchy, commune, monarchy, or representative democracy) that is small and based on consent, is better than real world behemoth liberal democracies as they currently exist.
All of his supporting arguments can be adopted in favor of any other hypothetical regime. Somewhere in the multiverse there might be a variant Hoppe arguing that a hypothetical technocratic regime is more preferable than actual real world democracies. That twin-Hoppe might be just as right as our Hoppe.
Hoppe also benefits here from the allure of Forbidden Knowledge. I mentioned that I read two other books critiquing democracy before I read Hoppe’s. Those books were empirical, written by Anarcho-Capitalists, and they engaged with current and long-standing arguments of actual democratic theorists. Whereas Hoppe’s felt like he had an insular ideological point to promote no matter what.
Yes we live in a world that uncritically fetishizes ‘Democracy’ as an ideal. (I sat through and entire college semester of that.) But it is possible to soundly rebut that notion without becoming an edge-lord.
Leftism vs. Rightism
Follow this link for a display of everything I find off-putting by Hoppe. His argument is largely adopted and used by right leaning libertarians. I made a video critique of a Mises Institute guy who was using his formulation.
The argument is that the Right fundamentally accepts human (particularly mental) difference and assumes hierarchy & diversity to be natural. The Left fundamentally (and tragically) reject such differences, fatally trying to establish a state of human equality. All good libertarians must reject the Left.
Imagine, for a second, if Cornel West published a piece claiming that all good people must reject and oppose the Right. In that piece he argues the following:
The chief social achievement of the enlightened West was the embrace and respect given to the inherent moral equality of each other as human beings. For thousands of years your life could be arbitrarily thrown away because a King demanded it. But you have inalienable rights that are God given, or innate to your humanity. Respecting those rights regardless of a person’s religion, sex, or race is radical egalitarian insight. You are free to go live your life in a manner you deem fit. Your place in life is not locked in. You are not essentially a plowman. You can be a lawyer even if your father was a plumber. It is the Left wing ethic of egalitarianism and anti-essentialism that allows for that. Moreover, this ethic is rooted in Christianity and has been passed down through that tradition.
The Right on the other hand believe that hierarchy and human difference really matter. They want to abandon the noble western achievements and abandon this Christian tradition in favor of tribal separatism.
Now I imagine that West would receive some pushback:
How dare he try to exclude the Right from the Christian and enlightened belief in moral equality?
How dare he try to exclude the Right from Anti-Essentialism as an ideal?
Why does he pretend that hierarchy is an ethic that unites the right’s various different figures (think: Thomas Sowell, Pat Buchanan, Candace Owens, Dinesh D’Souza, Ron Paul, Barry Goldwater, and Ben Shapiro)?
One might allege that West had devised this biased and sloppy dichotomy in order to define the Right out of acceptability. They’d be right.
Conclusion
Hoppe is a culture war partisan.
Even if he has conclusions you agree with, the arguments for those conclusions shouldn’t be filled with question begging premises. Hoppe is routinely claiming to deliver the final word on certain libertarian arguments. However his proofs are, at best, esoteric & insular. At worst, they fail outright and lead libertarian intellectual capacity down a road to nowhere (or perhaps worse than nowhere).
Rothbard went to his grave praising Hoppe as the heir apparent who had put the final nail in the coffin of collectivism. I think there are a lot of libertarians (and libertarian podcasters) who, out of a sense of loyalty, are not engaging Hoppe’s work with the right amount of scrutiny. As I stated before this is a bad place to be intellectually. If Hoppe is taking a bunch of conclusions you already agree with and depending on you to want him to be right, then is he being an intellectual or a cult leader?