Hans-Hermann Hoppe

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Hans-Hermann Hoppe (2017)

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (born September 2, 1949 in Peine ) is an economist at the Austrian School . He sees himself as a culturally conservative libertarian ( paleolibertarian ) and a representative of anarcho-capitalism .

Life

Hoppe studied philosophy , sociology , history and economics at the Saarland University ( Saarbrücken ), the Goethe University in Frankfurt and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor . He received his doctorate from Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt in 1974 , and completed his habilitation in 1981 .

Hoppe was Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas from 1986 to 2008 and is a Distinguished Fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute ( Auburn / Alabama ). He founded the Property and Freedom Society in May 2006 .

He is a member of the editorial board of the magazine strangely free , for which he also works as an author.

Think

Hoppe is a proponent of natural law , with self-ownership and private property , and in this it mainly follows the anarcho-capitalist school of Murray Rothbard . The justification of his ethics is based on the discourse ethics of the philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, whose student Hoppe was and who also supervised Hoppe's dissertation. His book Democracy. The God who is not is a criticism of democracy and the democratic state. Neither in the family nor in the church, in science or in the economy, there is democracy. Hoppe himself advocates “freedom instead of democracy”.

For Hoppe, the state is not a moral institution. In addition, he sees in democracy a "civilizational decline" compared to the monarchy, even if he does not consider either one or the other or any form of government to be ethically justified. In democracies there is a higher time preference for government spending because legislative periods and changing power structures encourage governments to spend more money in order to implement their goals in good time and to be re-elected. Since monarchs are not under this pressure and can regard their land and their people as property, monarchs were more careful with the scarce resources of their country. For Hoppe, a monarchy is the lesser evil compared to a democracy. In a monarchy, the state is privately owned and the monarch has a personal interest in the well-being of his property, whereas politicians and officials in a democracy do not.

The natural order

In the natural order that Hoppe describes, private property, production and voluntary exchange are the ultimate sources of human civilization. This natural order must be maintained by a natural elite. This elite comes into their position through voluntary recognition of their authority and not through political elections or aristocratic origins. Hoppe believes that because of “superior performance in terms of wealth, wisdom, courage, or a combination thereof”, some individuals in any society acquire 'natural authority' and their opinions and judgments enjoy far-reaching respect. Furthermore, in a natural order, "as a result of selective mating and marital marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, the positions of natural authority would likely be taken by members of less 'noble' families and passed on within those families." In Hoppe's view, the below Anarcho-capitalists is controversial, it is the heads of such families who typically act as judges and peacemakers in an anarcho-capitalist society, “often free of charge, out of a sense of duty demanded and expected by a person of authority, or even out of a principled concern for justice as a privately produced public good '. "

Private property

Hoppe states that if he has to be a slave, he would rather be the slave of a private owner than a publicly owned slave such as the inmates of a gulag . Hoppe leaves no doubt, however, that he is a proponent of some form of anarcho-capitalism and that neither monarchy, democracy nor any other form of government is desirable.

Hoppe also received criticism from libertarian circles for his demand that private owners should have a “right to exclusion, exclusivity, discrimination and banishment”. This thesis was particularly criticized in connection with homosexuality. Hoppe argues that a private army, for example, would of course “discriminate against women and self-confessed homosexuals”, since “the presence of women and openly homosexuals in combat organizations” is counterproductive. Hoppe's critics accuse him that at the end of his social philosophy there would be a formation of small states, with a society for "Catholics with mustache", a homeland for "homosexual abnormal", one for "women who don't like men", one for "Protestant left-handed families" etc. Hoppe counters that "no entrepreneur would offer such a community", "because he would not find any buyers", but "if the Catholic mustache existence actually takes on a vital meaning and enough like-minded people buy a mustache community - why not?" the opinion that in a "natural order" the range of variation in demanded and offered community types is far greater than at present.

About the democratic prejudices

Hoppe is also of the opinion that the French Revolution belongs "in the same category of evil revolutions as the Bolshevik Revolution and the National Socialist Revolution". We owed the French Revolution " regicide , egalitarianism , democracy , socialism , religious hatred , terror , mass looting, rape and murder, general military compulsory obligation and total, ideologically motivated war ".

In the book The Contest of Crooks. On the mischief of democracy and the way out into private law society (2012) Hoppe comes to the view that mass elections favor an institutionalized kleptocracy that has “little or no inhibitions” to “steal other people's property”. The democratic state operates “as the ultimate legal monopoly in a legal vacuum without a treaty”, because a contractual submission of everyone to the state, as Thomas Hobbes proclaimed, never existed. As a result of excessive debt-making at the expense of others, the time of the great democracies is over in the near future. It could end in a new totalitarianism or in a private law society.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Politics: The state as a mere competitor , Focus on August 27, 2012
  2. ↑ Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In: peculiarly free. Archived from the original on July 18, 2013 ; Retrieved July 18, 2013 .
  3. ^ "Despite the comparatively favorable portrait presented of monarchy, I am not a monarchist and the following is not a defense of monarchy." Introduction to Democracy, The God That Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
  4. ^ Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Democracy. The God who is not. (2003) Foreword to the German edition (PDF; 29 kB)
  5. ^ Democracy. The God that Failed, Transaction Publishers, 2001, p. 71.
  6. ↑ Doug French, The Trouble with Democracy: Maslow Meets Hoppe, in: Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, ed. by Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009.
  7. ^ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy. The God Who Isn't, p. 162 f.
  8. ↑ a b c The Anti-Democrat - Interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe , ef-magazin No. 41 (2004) , pp. 38–43.
  9. ^ " Freedom instead of democracy " , interview in Junge Freiheit , June 24, 2005.
  10. ^ Karl-Peter Schwarz: Pay taxes? Anyone could come! , FAZ , May 31, 2012, No. 125, p. 34.

Works

literature

  • Lothar Fritze : illegitimacy of the state? Comments on Hans-Hermann Hoppe's vision of a private property company. Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Volume 46, Number 1 / March, 2005, pp. 144–157, ISSN  0032-3470 (print) ISSN  1862-2860 (online).

Web links

Commons : Hans-Hermann Hoppe  - album with pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Hoppe, Hans-Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German economist
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Torment