The (Sick) Mind of Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I never realized until recently that there is a sub-culture of libertarian "philosophers" and scholars that have their own "institutes" and meet regularly at conferences around the world to discuss the dangers of "fractional reserve banking", the need to return to the gold standard, the principles of Austrian Economics, etc.  This alternate universe is comprised principally of economists and scholars from third-rate colleges and state universities whose "theories" were generally ignored - until recently, that is.  With the rise of the Tea Party movement in the US, some of their ideas are entering the political mainstream.

The foremost authority of Austrian Economics in the US (despite its name, this is primarily an American school) is a German-American professor, Hans-Hermann Hoppe.  An interview with Professor Hoppe - The Mind of Hans-Hermann Hoppe - was recently published on the Web site of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.  In the interview, Hoppe discusses his core beliefs -which are evidently the foundation of the Austrian school:  the evils of democracy and superiority of monarchy, the cult of private property, the need for the gold standard.  Egalitarian thinking is the greatest evil of modern society; tribal structures and clans such as existed in the Dark Ages are to be emulated and supported as much as possible:

HOPPE: I don't think that we, in the Western world, can go back to clans and tribes. The modern, democratic state has destroyed clans and tribes and their hierarchical structures, because they stood in the way of the state's drive toward absolute power. With clans and tribes gone, we must try it with the model of a private law-society that I have described. But wherever traditional, hierarchical clan and tribe structures still exist, they should be supported; and attempts to "modernize" "archaic" justice systems along Western lines should be viewed with utmost suspicion.

In another interview - this one in German published in the Schweizer Monatshefte - Professor Hoppe elaborates on his antipathy towards democracy:

Hoppe:  Ja, natürlich ist die Demokratie, ob direkt oder indirekt,  eine Form des Kommunismus. Eine Mehrheit entscheidet darüber was dir und mir gehört und was ich und du tun dürfen oder nicht. Das hat mit Privat-Eigentum nichts zu tun, sehr viel aber mit der Relativierung von Eigentum, also mit Gemeineigentum, also mit Kommunismus.

(Yes, of couse democracy is directly or indirectly a form of communism.  A majority decides what belongs to you or to me, what you and I may or may not do.  That has nothing to do with private property, but a great deal to do with the relativization of property, that is with common property, in other words communism;)

In the interview Hoppe goes on to praise Switzerland for being less democratic than other European countries and for its efforts to exclude non-Swiss from its soil  He also praises the right-wing extremist politician and millionaire Christoph Blocher for his anti-immigrant policies, lamenting that "we could never have a politician like Blocher in the US. "

But, as Hoppe has written elsewhere, he is all in favor of immigration - as long as the immigrants are (white) Europeans with superior intelligence and education: 

More specifically, it means distinguishing strictly between "citizens" (naturalized immigrants) and "resident aliens" and excluding the latter from all welfare entitlements. It means requiring as necessary, for resident alien status as well as for citizenship, the personal sponsorship by a resident citizen and his assumption of liability for all property damage caused by the immigrant. It implies requiring an existing employment contract with a resident citizen; moreover, for both categories but especially that of citizenship, it implies that all immigrants must demonstrate through tests not only (English) language proficiency, but all-around superior (above-average) intellectual performance and character structure as well as a compatible system of values – with the predictable result of a systematic pro-European immigration bias;

So, in his Liberatarian order, Hoppe would exclude the non-Europeans, since they can never be part of what he labels "the natural elite" - whose innate superiority is passed along genetically from generation to generaion:

In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families. It is to the heads of these families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct that men turn with their conflicts and complaints against each other.

We know who these Herrenmenschen are. They are the rightful property owners in Hoppe's Libertarian order.  There can be no room for those of inferior genes - or, "sexual deviants", homosexuals, etc:

There can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They-the advocates of alternative, non-family-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.

Once we have rounded up the hippies and the gays, there is one more group that Hoppe would eliminate, since he despises them most of all:

"There can be no tolerance toward democrats ... in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society."

 All of this would be laughable - after all, the anarchist and anti-statist Hoppe is an employee of the state of Nevada, and he able to publish whatever he wishes thanks to the freedoms offered by the federally enshrined US constitution he hates - but increasingly we see these ideas expressed in mainsstream politics.  We see Hoppe's racist and anti-immigrant ideas in the rhetoric of the Tea Party.  We see his concept of the "natural elites" expressed in the policies of the Republican party - which has renamed them "job creators" who must not be taxed or restricted in any way in their dirve to accumulate wealth.  And we see it in the general ridicule of the concept of the common good, which leads to drive to wreck or privatize all public institutions.  Hans-Hermann Hoppe can watch with some satisfaction as the democratic experiment in America slowly collapses. 

Comments

[David]

Better pack your bags, my friend. The November 2018 election will be a Democratic sweep.

[John Titor]

I like how this is written to make me dislike Hoppe and I just ended up liking his ideas even more.

[Minsky]

"Hoppe, as Libertarian, as private property proponent would not want you around. Yet, Hoppe, as private property proponent, would not exclude you from setting up your own enclave full of various parasites and perverts. All of us would revel in the idea, that you would quickly fall by the wayside, as your lack of understanding of economics would quickly lead you to consume the entirety of the capital stock you had - assuming you had any base to begin with."

Actually, it seems it is you that has misunderstood Hoppe here. This is actually the opposite of what he is saying.

Hoppe is arguing in 'Democracy: The God That Failed' that there is a 'natural order' to society--he further claims, based on the logic of argumentation ethics, that this 'natural order' is a 'libertarian social order', and that *other forms of social order should not be tolerated*. He says tolerance of these other forms is the major source of society's problems:

"Rather than having all habitual democrats, communists, and alternative lifestylists quickly isolated, excluded and expelled from civilization in accordance with the principles of the covenant, they were tolerated by society. Yet this toleration only encouraged and promoted even more egalitarian and relativistic sentiments and attitudes, until at last the point was reached where the authority of excluding anyone for anything had effectively evaporated"

So he is actually *not* saying that he would "not exclude you from setting up your own enclave full of various parasites and perverts." He is saying that, a priori, such enclaves are *not valid forms of society*, and thus *must not be tolerated*.

This undeniably implies that, under this rubric, Hoppe would be entirely justified in destroying any "enclave of parasites and perverts" that would set up shop anywhere--indeed, Hoppe is actually inferring that *libertarians have a duty to do so*, because allowing the enclave to continue to exist is precisely the form of 'tolerance' he says is unacceptable.

Ultimately, what Hoppe is attempting to do is to justify a fascist form of society using libertarian principles. He is not unlike many of the key luminaries of Austrian Economics in this sense; the whole school is a response to the spread of democracy to the Habsburg Empire. This was Carl Menger's #1 fear when he wrote his treatises on political economy, and it was likewise the motivation for Mises and Hayek's support of fascism over democratic movements. At the heart of it is the notion that authoritarian rule over the masses by elites is the best way to organize society, and that democracy is an illegitimate deviation from this. The only real difference between old-school Italian fascism and the philosophy of the Austrian economists is that the latter just try to silence the implicit militarism of this authoritarian rule by dressing it up and justifying with specialized definitions of 'liberty'.

[Charles Tuffin]

In what world are Republicans acting in the interest of the Austrian School? They are democrats at heart, and will have to be physically removed too, so to speak. References aside, when was the last time the Republicans have seriously proposed cutting regulations to below the levels from a decade or two earlier? When have they last proposed getting your troops home, and letting them stay home, and when have they called a stop to the many wars that America is waging abroad? When have they called for an absolute end to eminent domain, for overall taxation levels to be reduced to below 15% across the board, and for an end to all economic subsidies? Sure, some Republicans no doubt have plans to this end, but they are neither the mainstream nor even a sizable minority. Even Rand Paul or Gary Johnson fell far flat of the Austrian ideal.

[BN]

And off course the 'Nazis were socialists' morons found their way to this article to defend their cult leader Hoppe