Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy. From 1986 until 2008 he was professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank. In 2006 he emigrated to Turkey and founded the Property and Freedom Society. Some of the speakers at the organization's conferences in Turkey have been white nationalists.
Hoppe has written extensively in opposition to democracy, notably in his 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed. The book favors exclusionary "covenant communities" that are "founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin". A section of the book favoring exclusion of democrats and homosexuals from society helped popularize Hoppe on the far-right.
Hoppe was a protégé of Murray Rothbard, who established him at UNLV, where Hoppe taught from 1986 to 2008. In 2004, a student's complaint about Hoppe's lecture comments regarding homosexuals and time preference led to an investigation and non-disciplinary letter to Hoppe by UNLV, which was subsequently withdrawn after a controversy over academic freedom.
Early life and education
Hoppe was born in 1949 in Peine, West Germany. His parents had settled there in 1946 after fleeing from East Elbia, which after WW2 came under Soviet occupation. He has stated the expropriation of his mother’s family who were East Elbean Junkers has been a lasting trauma, and that he was raised with a Protestant ethic.Hoppe completed his undergraduate studies at Saarland University and received his MA and PhD degrees in Philosophy from Goethe University Frankfurt. He studied under Jürgen Habermas, a leading German intellectual of the post-WWII era, but came to reject Habermas's ideas and European leftism generally.
He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, from 1976 to 1978 and earned his habilitation in Foundations of Sociology and Economics from the University of Frankfurt in 1981.
Career
From 1981-1985 he taught in West Germany and Italy.In 1986 Hoppe came to the United States through Murray Rothbard on a scholarship from the Center for Libertarian Studies, and Rothbard also established Hoppe at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. From 1986 until his retirement in 2008, Hoppe was a professor in the School of Business at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank that is publisher of much of his work, and was editor of various Mises Institute periodicals.
Hoppe has said that Rothbard was his "principal teacher, mentor and master". Hoppe said he was "working and living side-by-side with him, in constant and immediate personal contact," and said that from 1985 until Rothbard's 1995 death, he considered Rothbard his "dearest fatherly friend".
Mises Institute and John Randolph Club
The Mises Institute was founded in 1982 by Lew Rockwell, Burton Blumert, and Murray Rothbard, following a split between the Cato Institute and Rothbard, who had been one of the founders of the Cato Institute. After Rothbard's death in 1996, Hoppe was a leading anarcho-capitalist figure at the Mises Institute.Hoppe was active in the John Randolph Club, a far-right alliance of paleolibertarians and paleoconservatives that was organized by Rothbard and associated with the Rockford Institute. The club was known for promoting secessionist and neo-Confederate views in the 1990s.
Property and Freedom Society
In 2006, Hoppe founded The Property and Freedom Society, with annual conferences in Bodrum, Turkey. It and the Mises Institute represent a paleolibertarian challenge to the Mont Pelerin Society and Atlas Network of think tanks. Figures of the European New Right and the American alt-right have attended PFS conferences. Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe describe Hoppe as a "racialist right-wing libertarian", and Slobodian writes that the conferences have included members of the former John Randolph Club along with "new advocates of stateless libertarianism and racial secession".In 2011, on the fifth anniversary of PFS, Hoppe reflected on its goals: "On the one hand, positively, it was to explain and elucidate the legal, economic, cognitive and cultural requirements and features of a free, state-less natural order. On the other hand, negatively, it was to unmask the State and showcase it for what it really is: an institution run by gangs of murderers, plunderers and thieves, surrounded by willing executioners, propagandists, sycophants, crooks, liars, clowns, charlatans, dupes and useful idiots – an institution that dirties and taints everything it touches."
In 2016, Hoppe was criticized for inviting white nationalist speakers such as Jared Taylor and neo-Nazi Richard B. Spencer to speak at the PFS, where also venture capitalist Peter Thiel spoke. Describing the PFS, the Southern Poverty Law Center said in 2016 that "in Hoppe one can see the connection between the ultra-Libertarians and white nationalists". Intelligencer in 2017 described the annual PFS meeting as "Davos, but for racists". Slobodian wrote in 2023 that "prophets of racial and social breakdown share the stage with investment advisors and financial consultants" at the conferences.
Views
On democracy
Hoppe's book Democracy: The God That Failed, published in 2001, argues that democracy is a cause of civilizational decline. Passages in the book oppose universal suffrage and favor "natural elites". In the book, Hoppe blames democratic forms of government for various social and economic problems, and attributes democracy's failures to pressure groups which seek to increase government expenditures and regulations. Hoppe proposes alternatives and remedies, including secession, decentralization of government, and "complete freedom of contract, occupation, trade and migration". Hoppe argues that monarchy would preserve individual liberty more effectively than democracy. The book helped popularize Hoppe in the far-right, particularly a section of the book that called for the exclusion of political rivals.Janek Wasserman writes that Hoppe "reimagined the Austrian legacy as one of authoritarianism, conservatism, antidemocracy, and anti-Enlightenment". Steven Horwitz called the approaches of Hoppe and his Mises Institute colleague Joseph Salerno "a fascist fist in a libertarian glove". The political scientist George Hawley writes that Hoppe "may be the most important bridge between libertarianism and the Alt-Right". Hawley notes that Hoppe has argued that "libertarians must actually be radical conservatives", and that libertarians must favor a right to discrimination, including on the basis of race.
In Hoppe's view, Wasserman writes, "the successes of the fin-de-siecle age—and the Austrian school—were not the product of liberal predominance or cosmopolitan virtues but of the ancien régime and its restrictive social order". Regarding democracy and the arts, Hoppe argued in 2013 that "democracy leads to the subversion and ultimately disappearance of the notion of beauty and universal standards of beauty. Beauty is swamped and submerged by so-called 'modern art'."
Reviewing Democracy: The God That Failed, Walter Block, a colleague of Hoppe's at the Mises Institute, wrote that Hoppe's arguments shed light "on historical occurrences, from wars to poverty to inflation to interest rates to crime". While Hoppe concedes that 21st-century democracies are more prosperous than the monarchies of old, Hoppe argues that if nobles and kings replaced today's political leaders, their ability to take a long-term view of a country's well-being would "improve matters", Block wrote. Block shared what he called minor criticisms of Hoppe's theses regarding time preferences, immigration and the gap between libertarianism and conservatism.
Alberto Benegas-Lynch Jr., a professor of economics at the University of Buenos Aires who is associated with the libertarian Cato Institute, criticized Hoppe's thesis that monarchy is preferable to democracy. Benegas-Lynch provided evidence that modern monarchies tend to be far poorer than modern democracies. In response, Hoppe argued that comparing mostly African monarchies with mostly European democracies led to a distortion.
Asked by The Intercept in 2021 about his incorporation into far-right internet memes celebrating political murder, Hoppe responded that the question was ignorant, writing, "I have been an intellectual champion of private property right, free markets, freedom of contract and association, and peace", and, "What do I know? There are lots of crazy people out there!"
Covenant communities and discrimination
In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe argues in favor of property owners' right to establish communities with exclusive criteria for admission and acceptance. Hoppe describes a society of "covenant communities" made up of residents who have signed an agreement defining the nature of that community. Hoppe believes that these covenant communities should have the right to certain forms of discrimination, including the physical separation of people whose lifestyle is deemed incompatible with the norms of that community. He writes that "There would be little or no 'tolerance' and 'openmindedness' so dear to left-libertarians. Instead, one would be on the right path toward restoring the freedom of association and exclusion implied in the institution of private property".Hoppe writes: "In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free speech exists,... naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order."
Commenting on this passage, Martin Snyder of the American Association of University Professors said Hoppe's words will disturb "hose with a better memory than Hoppe for segregation, apartheid, internment facilities and concentration camps, for yellow stars and pink triangles". Walter Block describes Hoppe as calling for homosexuals and others to be banned from polite society, and says of Hoppe's statement: "it is stark, it is well written, it is radical...it is still exceedingly difficult to reconcile with libertarianism."
Critics such as Phillip Magness have argued that Hoppe's cultural conservative views were not derived from Mises's Austrian economics, but rather from outside philosophical traditions such as other right-wing political thought and the Frankfurt School.