Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Habermas' Wayward Student

  Jiirgen Habermas is known around the world as the philosopher of radical discursive democracy, but one of his students, Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is a leading advocate of a libertarian philosophy which can only be described as "anarcho-fascism".  On his Web site, Hoppe states that he earned his Ph.D. (Philosophy, 1974) and his “Habilitation” (Sociology and Economics, 1981), both from the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. His thesis advisor was Jiirgen Habermas.  Some where along the way Hoppe became disenchanted with pluralistic democracy but he emigrated to epicenter of modern democracy - America - and managed to get a tenured teaching position at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

While for Habermas reason is the foundation of modern democratic society, for Hoppe private property is the foundation of "natural law" and he founded The Property and Freedom Society which is devoted to the cult of private property. 

Most of Professor Hoppe's ideas on the evils of democracy can be found in his book Democracy: The God that Failed , large chunks of which can be accessed via Google Books.  Democracy starts out with a revisionist analysis of World War I. If only, Hoppe writes, the United States had not entered the war the European monarchies would have been preserved. As mentioned earlier, Hoppe is an anarcho-fascist where the ideal system would be a confederation of small privately-owned units controlled by "natural elites" - i.e. Herrenmenschen.  But until anarchy is possible, a monarchy is far superior to a democracy:

"A king owned the territory and could hand it on to his son, and thus tried to preserve its value. A democratic ruler was and is a temporary caretaker and thus tries to maximize current government income of all sorts at the expense of capital values, and thus wastes.

Here are some of the consequences: during the monarchical age before World War I, government expenditure as a percent of GNP was rarely higher than 5%. Since then it has typically risen to around 50%. Prior to World War I, government employment was typically less than 3% of total employment. Since then it has increased to between 15 and 20%. The monarchical age was characterized by a commodity money (gold) and the purchasing power of money gradually increased. In contrast, the democratic age is the age of paper money whose purchasing power has permanently decreased."  (Natural Elites, Intellectuals and the State)

Democracy, Professor Hoppe tells his readers (and presumably his students at UNLV) is nothing more than mob-rule, and has resulted in a serious decline in civilization:

"The mass of people, as La Boetie and Mises recognised, always and everywhere consists of "brutes", "dullards", and "fools", 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." (Democracy: The God that Failed) 

Even worse than the statist capitalism of the United States is European social democracy and its myriad social programs.  Universal health care, for example, is especially evil according to Professor Hoppe:

"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." (Democracy: The God that Failed)

Democrats, in this radical libertarian philosophy, are no better than communists, since democrats rely on statist solutions that are antithetical to the "natural order" and the cult of private property. So Professor Hoppe has the following words of advice for the "natural elites", the Herrenmenschen, who would build his anarcho-fascist utopia: 

"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-centred 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." (Democracy: The God that Failed)

Of course, the  "advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centred lifestyles" would include gays and lesbians - who would not find a place in Professor Hoppe's new order, and the professor did encounter difficulties at the university where he teaches with gay students who took offense at his blatant homophobia.  But, in the end, the university didn't have the guts to even censure him. 

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a frequent contributor to the German neo-fascist weekly Junge Freiheit, where his anti-democratic tirades resonate with readers.  In an interview there Hoppe heaps scorn on both Germany and his new home, the United States, which grants him the constitutional protection to continue his work of undermining democracy.

Hoppe: Die meisten Personen, immer und überall, sind töricht und dumm. Und der sogenannte Wohlfahrtsstaat und das "öffentliche" Bildungswesen trägt dazu bei, die Bevölkerung noch weiter zu verdummen. Sie denken nicht selbst, sondern beten das nach, was ihnen von den Eliten erzählt wird. Und die Eliten haben nur allzu oft ein Interesse daran, die Massen dumm zu halten, da sie selbst von dieser Dummheit profitieren.

(Most people, everywhere and always, are foolish and stupid. And the so-called welfare state and "public" education system serve only to make the populace more stupid. They don't think for themselves, but only blindly follow what the elites tell them. And all too often the elites have a self-interest in keeping the masses stupid, since they profit from this stupidity.) 

I wonder if Professor Hoppe's students have an inkling of his contempt for them.  Most are products of the "democratic" public education system he despises. 

Comments

[hattie]

I hope the taxpayers of Nevada don't mind paying the salary of this fool.
Maybe a high colonic enema would help him deal with his inner congestion.
He certainly is full of **it.

[Bushama Hussein]

Why, the "libertarian" weirdos are as us-american as hubris. This guy certainly has some german traits but these views are pretty common in "America".

I think it's also great that you refer to your country as the "epicenter of modern democracy". You don't even have real political parties and your politicians are paid by the military and heavy industries, thats in no way democratic.

As well, classical history teaches that democracies cease when they go to make offensive wars. In your case that would be the mobster takeover by Kennedy and his assassisns, and completed by the 9/11 coup d'etat.

And these perpetrators certainly do think like this mad professor.

[David]

Bushama - Re: "9/11 coup d'etat"

I'm not surprised that a Leninist loser would also be a 9/11 "Truther".

You have never been to the US, and are obviously too much of a coward to visit - just as you are too cowardly to comment under your real name.

[Bushama Hussein]

I'm just too disgusted to visit my friend ;)

I actually work in the tourism business and in recent years us-american tourists appear more and more like 'from the moon', somewhat similar to what the former communist inmates appeared in the early nineties.

Ok, apart from that nothing but ad-hom from your side, nothing new in the west then...

[hattie]

Bushama: Perhaps you live in a country that does not attract the best people.

[Bushama Hussein]

Hattie, what a coward you are not posting under your real name :)

I don't really understand the part about the 'best people', one of my lessons from travelling was that they are the same everywhere.

Well, and it's clear that the USA have always been taking the various misfits from us, like the mad professor. It's the sort of "best people" that are attracted by the US-american system of violent proto-fascism.

[hattie]

My real name is Marianna Scheffer. As if anyone cared!
German snobbery is such a laugh.

[lobomalo]

The premier anti-democracy blogger in the US:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/07/race-modest-proposal.html

[lobomalo]

Here's a better essay:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/05/ol7-ugly-truth-about-government.html

[Vincent Jappi]

All you can do is name-calling.

The prohibition of theft, which each and everyone of us recognizes as the essence of natural justice in our everyday dealings, you describe as a "cult".
The defence of non-violent, by definition productive and artistic "elites" you compare to Nazism.

And in the name of what?
Implicitly in the name of elected and non-elected predators, and of the postulate of universal slavery, which is implied by unlimited majority rule.

YOU are the fascist and the social Nazi.

[David]

We already have laws protecting private property under the system that Hoppe despises. And what prohibits the "natural elite" from amassing vast fortunes? Hoppe hates the fact that a tiny fraction of these fortunes are diverted by the state into public education and infrastructure that benefits the sub-human riffraff (i.e. blacks and non-European immigrants).

Hoppe believes that feudal monarchies are superior to democracies by virtue of longer-term "time preference". Looking around the globe, then, the one example that most closely matches his ideal would be Saudi Arabia. Do you want to live there? I admit that the Saudi royal family has a "time preference" to preserve power for decades and centuries to come.

Our imperfect democracy allows Hoppe to publish and promote his anti-democratic drivel. Hoppe has made it clear that under his system, individuals like myself who harbor democratic ideals would be expelled, detained or worse.

[Vincent Jappi]

The contemporary regimes of Pseudo-Democratic Socialism do NOT respect property rights but violate them massively, and at the limit, where they are stopped in their increased plunder by the extent of the attendant destruction --as they "run out of Other People's Money", steal 60 percent of their half-slaves' income, for no one's actual benefit.
This kind of creeping civil war, where everyone must be a predator, a prey or both at the same time, has always brought the downfall of the societies which practiced it.
Pr Hoppe would be wrong if it were possible to have a democracy where everyone who lives off the public trough was banned from voting, but there is no example of that in history, and you would probably call "fascist" such an elementary precaution against the establishment, over masses of half-slaves, of parasitic castes of crony businessmen, unaccountable bureaucrats and permanent dependents.

Dr Hoppe is quite right in pointing out that people have more control over their own affairs when governments steal 15 percent of their income than when they steal half of it.
If "democracy" were a system where peoples control their own destiny, monarchies would HAVE to be more "democratic" than any of our current so-called "representative" systems.
But of course you must believe the foundational lie behind Pseudo-Democratic Socialism, which is that citizens have more power when they vote than when they spend their own money: an obvious, blatant, and on its face ridiculous denial of reality.
"Democracy", as presently observed, and as defined by such thinkers as Pr Hoppe and Anthony de Jasay, is designed to increase the arbitrary power of governments and PREVENT their subjects from controlling their own lives.

[David]

Sounds like the masturbatory musings of a crazed Ayn Rand fan...

[bs]

It is rich that you are trying to smear him with "Fascism" title.

[Charles Tuffin]

The Fascists were radical progressives. If you read Mussolinis actual writings, you can come to no other conclusion, and add to that that he patronized the Futurists, who prided themselves with how much they wanted to destroy museums and libraries.

[David]

"he patronized the Futurists".

Interesting. Some of the key Nazis - esp. Goebbels- embraced modernist art early on. I guess that Hitler rejected Expressionist art as "entartet" (degenerate) because many of the artists were Jewish. So the Nazis embraced a bombastic art that idealized the Nordic racial ideal - in execution that that was not much different from Stalin's "socialist realism".

See my review of "Artists Under Hitler:
https://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2015/03/review-artists-under-hitler-by-jonathan-petropoulos.html