6. A Knight of Anarcho-Capitalism

Yuri N. Maltsev

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is the most ardent advocate of liberty in our time. He has done more to advance our understanding of philosophical, legal, economic, and cultural aspects of liberty and private property than any other living intellectual. A favorite student and close personal friend of Murray and Joey Rothbard, Hoppe developed the anarcho-capitalist tradition of the Austrian school of economics after Murray’s untimely death in January 1995. A prolific writer, great teacher, and very popular public speaker, he has attracted tens of thousands of people in all parts of the world to the ideas of liberty.

Hoppe is not a “secondhand dealer in ideas” (using Hayek’s expression).¹ He is a generator of new knowledge, new ideas, and new interpretations of well established facts, and his understanding of history is second to none. In his books and public appearances, he provides a crystal clear vision of social phenomena and develops his own pioneering theory of history based on the methodology of the Austrian School.

His seminal work, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism,² provides a logical and ethical case for capitalism and against socialism, and shows that no system but capitalism is ethically justifiable. Hans has become the most well-known, living critic of socialism in our time. He stared the beast in the face and called it by its name, providing an unparalleled analysis of the evil nature of socialism; he made an airtight case that “socialism is economically and morally inferior to capitalism.”³

Continuing his analysis of the ethical foundations of capitalism in his The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, he provided a logical and ethical case for a purely private economy based on the absolute right to self-ownership and to private property. The appendix to this book, “Four Critical Replies,” again shows him at his best. Critically engaging Osterfeld, Lomasky, Steele, Rasmussen, Yeager, and Conway, Hoppe gives a brilliant outline of the theory of anarcho-capitalism based on crystal clear definitions of anarchism, natural rights, private property, self-ownership, and many other terms.

The same year as the Economics and Ethics of Private Property was published (1993), he contributed the chapter “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis” to the volume on Marx of which I was the editor.⁴ His twenty-two page contribution is the most devastating critique of the Marxist belief system ever written. He focuses his analysis on the heart of Marxism—the Marxian theory of capitalist exploitation—showing that Marx could “not understand the phenomenon of time preference as a universal category of human action”⁵ and built his whole theory of history underlying his secular religion of “scientific communism” on the wrong premises. Hoppe writes: “If Marx’s theory of capitalist exploitation and his ideas on how to end exploitation and establish universal prosperity are false to the point of being ridiculous, it is clear that any theory of history derived from it must be false, too.”⁶

The goal of social ownership of the means of production is the most important prerequisite of the Marxist plan for socialism, communism, and the withering of the State. Hoppe shows that, if achieved, it will lead to human slavery, misery, and the omnipotent State. He writes:

In fact, social ownership is not only economically inefficient . . . it is incompatible with the idea that the state is “withering away.” For if means of production are owned collectively, and if it is realistically assumed that not everyone’s ideas as to how to employ these means of production happen to coincide (as if by miracle), then it is precisely socially owned factors of production which require continued state actions, i.e., an institution coercively imposing one person’s will on another disagreeing one’s.⁷

He was also the first to systematically demonstrate that democracy inevitably leads to the growth of socialism and the omnipotence of big government. Enemies of freedom understood this nature of democracy and were using democracy for their own evil ends. In the Marxist textbook on revolution, The State and Revolution, published in 1917, Lenin wrote:

Democracy means equality. The great significance of the proletariat’s struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes. But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labor and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing further, from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”⁸

Hoppe shows that socialism’s centralized control over property would require a gargantuan state and oppressive state machinery, and that the history of world communism has been one of individual and collective executions, deaths in concentration camps, mass murder, genocide, government-organized mass starvation, and deportations. These crimes were the direct results of the Marxist theory of capitalist exploitation and its collateral theory of class struggle which justified the need for “elimination” of people who were not considered useful to the construction of a new society.

In terms of numbers of victims, communists outperformed any other mass murderers in human history. Professor R.J. Rummel, the leading authority on genocide and democide, estimated communist crimes have resulted in the loss of 171,035,000 innocent lives.⁹ The victims of communism lived in the squalor of shabby public barracks and collective farms, received pittance wages, and were killed “for trying to leave the country.”¹⁰

I remember a discussion of the fate of freedom in Eastern Europe when Hoppe told me that he detests nationalism as a form of collectivism, but nationalism of the small countries is preferable to that of the modern day empires, as is it is closer to individuals.

He has devoted his life to the search of truth and defense of liberty, to the fight against ideologies of slavery in all their forms and shapes, to “continuous ideological struggle, for if the power of government rests on the widespread acceptance of false indeed absurd and foolish ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and proliferation of true ones.”¹¹

Following the rationalist tradition of the Austrian School, further developed by his mentor and friend Murray N. Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an outspoken rationalist and critic of social relativism in all its forms: empiricism, deconstructionism, historicism, positivism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, anarcho-syndicalism, skepticism, and post-anarchism. Hans developed the theory and practice of epistemological and methodological individualism to its present heights.

Only individuals act; consequently, all social phenomena must be explained—logically reconstructed—as the result of purposeful, individual actions. Every “holistic” or “organicist” explanation must be categorically rejected as an unscientific pseudo-explanation. Likewise, every mechanistic explanation of social phenomena must be discarded as unscientific.¹²

Hans celebrates individualism and opposes all forms of collectivism which makes people

easily deluded and sunk into habitual submission. Thus today, inundated from early childhood with government propaganda in public schools and educational institutions by legions of publicly certified intellectuals, most people mindlessly accept and repeat nonsense such as that democracy is self-rule and government is of, by, and for the people.¹³

Hoppe’s seminal treatise on democracy¹⁴ provides readers with deep insights into the reasons for decivilization that we all witness and experience. Following Mises’s question “Are We Historians of Decline?,” Hans investigated the logical reasons for the deep-rooted sickness of the West, swamped by welfare dependency, family break-up, random violence and crime, drug culture, graffiti, and deteriorating public health. His answer is a revelation for many and it is as true as it is discomforting for the apologists of the State:

As a result of subsidizing the malingerers, the neurotics, the careless, the alcoholics, the drug addicts, the Aids-infected, and the physically and mentally “challenged” through insurance regulation and compulsory health insurance, there will be more illness, malingering, neuroticism, carelessness, alcoholism, drug addiction, Aids infection, and physical and mental retardation.¹⁵

Hoppe provides a clear and humanistic alternative: society based on pure private property, private law, and voluntary exchange. “Instead, the withering away of the state, and with this the end of exploitation and the beginning of liberty and unheard of economic prosperity, means the establishment of a pure, private-property society regulated by nothing but private law.”¹⁶

Born in Peine, a small town between Braunschweig and Hanover in Central Germany, into a loving and intellectually nourishing family, he received his education at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (also known as Frankfurt University). When Hoppe was celebrating his first birthday in 1950, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Friedrich Pollock re-opened the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) which was shut down by the Nazis. The Institute was a home of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist critical theory, social research, and philosophy which attempted to adapt Marxism to the realities of the Twentieth century. Leading German intellectuals—Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Karl Mannheim, and Hans-Georg Gadamer—worked in the Institute, and one of the most interesting and popular ones, Habermas, became Hans’s mentor and Ph.D. advisor. How easy it would be for Hoppe to accept his mentor’s ideas and become another brilliant Frankfurt School disciple! Instead he chose another path—the path of truth and liberty.

His study at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University with Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel was time well spent, however, as it shaped Hoppe as a first class social scientist and helped him to put forth an “argumentation ethics” defense of individual rights, based in part on the discourse ethics theories of the Frankfurt School. His intellectual independence prevented him from accepting his mentors’ apology for socialism and their anti-capitalist mentality. As one reviewer noted, “Hoppe believes his former teacher Habermas’s discourse-ethics theories, while correct at core, are applied incorrectly by Habermas to yield a socialistic ethic; Hoppe feels that Habermas’s theories, if correctly applied (as Hoppe himself does), yield the libertarian non-aggression norm.”¹⁷

It is not a coincidence that popularity of Hoppe’s scientific findings, and his books and lectures, is extremely high in the post-communist world—among people who were used as guinea pigs by their own governments to be experimented on for the sake of a bloody, Marxist utopia. Latvians and Lithuanians, Estonians and Bulgarians, Russians and Armenians, Poles, Germans, Czechs and other victims of communist murder and slavery are a most attentive audience for Dr. Hoppe. Hoppe’s worldwide outreach with lectures and seminars in the United States, Europe, and Asia, his contribution to the intellectual demise of socialism in the post-communist world from Estonia to Georgia, Lithuania to the Czech Republic and Poland, have made him even more famous in Eastern and Central Europe and Asia than he is in the United States and Germany.

At all of the dozens of events that I have heard Hans speak—conferences, seminars, and other intellectual events of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in the United States; conferences overseas, in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Copenhagen, annual meetings of the Property and Freedom Society in Bodrum, Turkey—he was the most thought-provoking, intellectually stimulating, and admired speaker.

His intellectual rigor and austerity peacefully co-exist with his warm and humorous character. I remember well the Southwestern Economics Association Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. After the conference we decided to explore the “Venice of the Southwest” with its well-known River Walk and took a water taxi which brought us to a Brazilian restaurant with the richest choice of tastiest meats that I have ever experienced before (not surprisingly, as I was raised in an almost meatless USSR). Hoppe jumped on the occasion to poke fun at vegetarians and tree huggers, and to stress that our brain needs to be honed and pampered not only by food for thought, but by the nicest delicacies and drinks providing excellent nourishment for great ideas. How true! Moscow bureaucrats with whom I’ve spent most of my life did not have clear thinking with brains on a meager diet of vodka, borscht, and potatoes.

I first met Hoppe in April 1990 at the conference on Economics of Desocialization in Washington D.C. One of my few friends in Washington was Gottfried von Haberler (1901–1995), an eminent economist, active participant in the famous “Mises-Kreis”—Mises’s Viennese seminars—and later professor at Harvard and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. A well-known Austrian economist most of his life, Gottfried followed the widespread fashion for cheap money and abandoned his previous support of the international gold standard. Haberler also abandoned his early Austrian School views on business cycles and became a critic of Misesian theory. Thus, Hoppe was very critical of Haberler’s ideas. Yet, during the conference, he was most cordial and helpful to the frail 89 years old man. He told me that the conference in Washington was a good opportunity for a reconciliation of Dr. Haberler with the modern Austrian school and to inform him of the progress in Austrian economics and the activities of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The conference turned out to be a great success, and Haberler paid a moving tribute to Ludwig von Mises and praised the role of the Institute in the development of the Austrian School of economics.

In 2006, Hans-Hermann Hoppe founded the Property and Freedom Society, the true intellectual alternative to the Mont Pèlerin Society which had become monopolized by neo-conservatives, and organized its first international meeting at the beautiful, Mediterranean resort of Bodrum, Turkey. Together with his wife Guelcin, the most charming economist that I have ever met, they have graciously hosted annual meetings of the Society at the Guelcin’s Mediterranean resort, the Hotel Karia Princess. Each of these meetings has been a true celebration of free thinking and intellectual fellowship, and provided me with enough intellectual oxygen for the whole year.

Calm, logical and focused, Hoppe is a Sherlock Holmes of economics, in constant search for truth, rejecting any compromises and “sweet little lies” of “publicly certified intellectuals,” beltway libertarians, and neo-conservatives. A most learned scholar, he has called upon all advocates of liberty to be “intellectual anti-intellectuals,” as opposed to most “intellectuals” in the West, who have sold out to the state:

The first and foremost task of the intellectual anti-intellectuals, then, is to counter this dogmatic slumber of the masses by offering a precise definition of the state, as I have done at the outset, and then to ask if there is not something truly remarkable, odd, strange, awkward, ridiculous, indeed ludicrous about an institution such as this. I am confident that such simple, definitional work will produce some serious doubt regarding an institution that one previously had been taken for granted.¹⁸

I feel very lucky to have known Hans personally for almost twenty years. I am still amazed by his encyclopedic erudition in history, culture, economics, law, and philosophy, and fascinated by the amount of intellectual energy he generates and radiates to others!

Yuri N. Maltsev (maltsev.yuri@gmail.com) is Professor of Economics at Carthage College and Senior Fellow of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute.

¹F.A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1949), reprinted in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 178.

²Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).

³Ibid., p. 166.

⁴Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis,” in Requiem for Marx, Yuri N. Maltsev, ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1993); first published under the same title in the Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, no. 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 79–93.

⁵Hoppe, “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis,” p. 56.

⁶Ibid., p. 58.

⁷Ibid., pp. 72–73; internal footnotes omitted.

⁸V.I. Lenin, Gosudarstvo I Revolucija (Moskva: Politizdat, 1968), str. 27 (translation by the author).

⁹Calculated by author from data available at <www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM>.

¹⁰Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 221–33, at p. 230.

¹¹Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. 93.

¹²Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Murray N. Rothbard: Economics, Science, and Liberty,” in 15 Great Austrian Economists, Randall G. Holcombe, ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1999), p. 224.

¹³Hoppe, Democracy, p. 92.

¹⁴Ibid.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 99.

¹⁶Hoppe, “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis,” p. 73.

¹⁷Stephan Kinsella, “The Undeniable Morality of Capitalism [review essay of Hoppe’s The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993)],” St. Mary’s Law Journal 25 (1994), p. 1434.

¹⁸Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State,” LewRockwell.com (June 23, 2008).