 Hello everybody, I'm going to be talking today about political philosophy of Hans Hoppe. As you will remember from my last lecture, I don't speak very loudly, so in case you're not hearing what I'm saying, please put up your hand and let me know. I hope people heard that because otherwise we're going to have a problem. This is the first time I've lectured on Hans Hoppe. I've spoken very briefly about him at another conference and I've written reviews of a number of his books, but I've never given a lecture on him before. I hope it doesn't go too badly because I wouldn't want to be physically removed from the Mises Institute. What I want to do, I'll first give a little background on Hans. I've been friends with Hans for around 35 years, so I'm very glad to be able to talk about him. Hans was born in West Germany and he did his graduate work at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. This university was founded in the Weimar Republic and it's really the progressive university, as again say the older institutions, it was explicitly founded as a more progressive institution that identified with the Weimar Republic whereas in the 1920s in many of the older German universities, the large parts of the faculty were unsympathetic to the Weimar Republic and hoped that it would be overthrown. In fact, Hans did his doctoral work with Jürgen Habermas, who's a leading member of the Frankfurt School. Some of you may have heard of them. Frankfurt School was founded, the Institute for Social Research, given its formal name, was founded in the 1920s and after a couple of initial directions, the direction became Max Horkeimer, who was a very influential person who led the school and Theodor Adorno, a well-known philosopher, was associated with him. Habermas, who was Hans's teacher, studied under both of them. So we have a bit of a paradox in that Hans Hoppe, who's a very strong libertarian, started out as a student of a Marxist. And I should say just as a digression, there is a bit of a connection between the Institute of Social Research and Ludwig von Mises, surprising as it may seem, one of the early directors of the Institute for Social Research was Carl Grunberg, who had earlier been a professor at the University of Vienna. Mises, as an undergraduate, was a student in Grunberg's seminar and his first academic publication, which was on relations between lords and peasants in Galicia, came up as a product of Grunberg's seminar and was published in 1902. So that is one connection of Mises with that institution. But to one point that when Hans studied with Habermas, although Habermas was a Marxist, Hans's, I think, politics at that time were quite moderate, because of a conventional social democrat. And what he got from Habermas, which he retained throughout his career, was a criticism of positivism. The Frankfurt School was very critical of the logical positivists in Vienna Circle, because particularly their assimilation of the social sciences to physics and the natural sciences, and also their claim that value judgments were purely subjective, that this the Frankfurt School repudiated and Hans's kept those attitudes throughout his career. And in fact, Hans's earliest publications when he studied with Habermas were in the field of philosophy of science. But while he was studying, he became very interested in the free market ideas. And he read Le Grun Mises and Murray Rothbard, and he became converted to their point of view. In fact, he was so impressed with Rothbard that he came to the United States to study with Murray Rothbard. And Rothbard thought very highly of him. I remember very well when Murray told me how excited he was that someone had come over from Germany, a very promising academic and who was sitting in on his classes and he was delighted that Hans was interested in his thought. And then in 1986, when Rothbard moved to the UNLV University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hans Hoppe followed soon thereafter that Murray really got him the job. And they established really at the time the most important center for the study of Austrian economics that there were, both of them were there and they had classes and seminars for a number of years until then after Murray's untimely death in 1990, beginning in 1995, Hans continued as a professor for a few more years at the UNLV and then he retired and he since moved to Turkey where he and his wife live and he's continued writing and he's established. He has an organization called the Property and Freedom Society which holds annual conferences. Now, I would say Hans Hoppe is the leading successor to Murray Rothbard in political philosophy and he's made major contributions in a number of areas. And what I'm going to do in this talk is discuss three of these areas, argumentation ethics, the criticism of democracy and the theory of social evolution. And one point I like to make before attempting to do this is that, and this is one point I made at the, when I was talking about during the Rothbard graduate seminar when I was talking about Mises, when we're dealing with any significant thinker, sometimes when we read him will be inclined to criticize or think, oh, well, this doesn't sound right or I don't agree with this. But I think it's important before we criticize a significant thinker to first understand what the person is saying. So what I'm going to be doing or trying to do in what follows is to give an exposition of what Hans is saying rather than try to come between Hans and you and try to give a critical point. And I'm just going to be explaining as best I can what his views are. Now, one of the, I think one of the most valuable areas in which Hans has made a contribution is what he says is the starting point of political philosophy. He says that conflicts between people arise because of scarcity. Imagine that all goods that people wanted were super abundant, everyone could have as much of any good as he wanted. Then there wouldn't be any occasions for conflicts people could just have what they wanted wouldn't no one else would be disturbed by that. But we of course live in a world of scarcity and people want to use the same resource. So in order to resolve conflicts about the use of resources, we need rules that assign control of each resource to one person. So it doesn't have to be that say if you take all the resources that now exist, we don't have to have a rule that assigns each resource to each person. We could have rules for say there are some resources that are present, not owned by anybody, but we would have rules on how those resources can be appropriated. So this is a way to resolve. So again, Hans's view is we start off because we start political philosophy starts from conflict over resources, goods and services, and we need to specify how these goods and services are owned so that we can resolve conflicts. Now, to fully to understand Hans's thought here, we have to add another premise which here, Hans follows Murray Rothbard as he so frequently did that. According to Murray Rothbard, followed by Hans Hoppe, all rights are property rights. For example, supposing say we have a conflict over free speech for Rothbard, the way to solve that conflict would be say whose property is it. If it's once you settle that, then that person would have the right to determine what the rules for proper speech appropriate speech in his property are so all rights are property rights. So if we add that all rights are property rights to the point that we have dispute disputes over resources to be settled by assigning the property rights to people. Then we have in principle way of solving all conflicts in society since all rights are property rights, and we've specified the property rights, though that enables us to resolve all disputes. So now we have to get some way of assigning the property rights, how is that to be done. Here we get to perhaps the most famous of Hans's contributions, argumentation ethics, and here Hans developed argumentation ethics from the work of his teacher, Juergen Habermas, and another philosopher, Carl Otto Appel, actually he was more influenced by Appel. Appel wasn't very interested in politics, I think he had was a social democrat, but he was more of a pure philosopher. Hans has an extremely high opinion of Appel, and he cites him in various of his works. So what the way argumentation ethics proceeds is that if you make a claim to truth, if I say something is true, and say someone questions that and says, well, what is the basis for that, that the claim that I've made that something is true has to be supported by argument, any truth claim has to be supported by argument, and Hans says this can't be denied if someone says no, it doesn't have to be supported by argument. Hans says no, that's wrong. Hans says you can't argue that you can't argue. Well, I'm not going to argue about it then. So what the Habermas and Appel said and followed by Hans Hoppe is, so we then have to say in order to engage in argument, we then have to ask what are the conditions under which we can engage in argument, this is something both Habermas and Appel asked. They say what are the conditions for rational discussion if we have people trying to establish the truth? What are the conditions for rational discussion? And on that basis, I'm trying to find out what the conditions are for rational discussion, then they get rights from that. So you can see one criticism sometimes people make of argumentation ethics we can see isn't right. Some people will say, well, supposing we establish, say that certain conditions are needed for rational discussion, that would just show people have those rights during the rational discussion, but that doesn't show they have rights outside that process of discussion. But that isn't a good criticism because remember the way the argument goes is that the conditions for rational discussion establish what the rights people have are it isn't that the rights that you you're trying to figure out what you're limiting the rights people have to actual instances of rational discussion it's trying to figure out what these rights are required for rational discussion is gives you the rights that people have if the theory is correct. So the innovation Hans has in argumentation ethics that Habermas and Appel didn't have is that he answers the question of what rights people have in a different way from Habermas and Appel. So the key step is that Hans says, in order to argue, you must own yourself, taking that in the libertarian way each person is a self owner. And to deny this is what he calls a performative or pragmatic contradiction. In order to understand what this means I want to say a bit about what we mean by a performative contradiction. Now, there are some. Sometimes we have statements that are logically contradictory say someone says, I'm both lecturing in this room. And it's not the case that I'm lecturing in this room that would be a logical contradiction, but we can have other sorts of besides logical contradictions. There are other sorts of difficulties that we can have it with various assertions or propositions or judgments. One is that the one that Hans is concerned with here is what this something that if I say something my very saying that shows that the argument is false. Suppose I say I've never I suppose I say in English, I've never in my life uttered an English sentence. My saying that would show I, I wouldn't be able to make say that I've never uttered an English sentence. I would my saying that I'm saying that in English, I wouldn't be able to say that in English, without speaking an English sentence. So my very saying that shows that the statement is false. So this is a very good way of showing that something is wrong to show that it's it falls victim to this sort of pragmatic contradiction. Now there are many interesting issues one could talk about on the scope and limits of this kind of performative contradiction, but we can it's we can see examples of similar type. It's supposed somebody said, I know that no one knows anything. Well, if it's true that no one knows anything then the person doesn't know that he's saying, I know that no one knows anything is generate trouble to say the least. So, Hans says that suppose someone said, I don't own myself. Someone denies that each person owns himself so I don't own myself. So he could only say that if he did own himself. So this is an example of a performative contradiction. And Hans says this shows that people do own themselves. But he says this is continuing his innovation in the what in the argumentation ethics of Habermas and Apple. He says owning yourself isn't enough to engage in argument. You also have to own physical resources, because you wouldn't be able to argue if you didn't just were a kind of a body with no place to stand you have to have physical resources. So then this raises the question, how are these resources to be acquired. And he says that only a first user rule can avoid conflict. That's say the first one to use a resources resource acquires it because if say you had another rule say say I acquired something I say I take an apple from a tree. So if that doesn't give me ownership someone else could come along and say no, I want that apple and then there'd be a conflict, there'd be a fight about it which I'd be likely to lose. But so only a first users rule can avert conflict and Hans also has a further argument for this first user rule. He says that there. If we want a rule of property acquisition, then we have there only two way to possibilities. One is this first user rule or that we appropriate something by just the first one to use it or the other alternative is that you could own something just by claiming it you could just say I own this this is my without using it but he says well if we had that rule, then you could acquire people just by claiming to own them and this wouldn't would be in conflict with the with the self ownership principle, which remember is one that generates a pragmatic contradiction if it's denied so he says that only this first user rule is the one that will be acceptable and will avoid conflict and will be we can be shown to be a consequence of the self ownership principle and one point Hans makes in his consideration of ethics. And this would reply to an object and suppose you say well maybe this establishes that each person owns himself but what about other people. Maybe I own myself but why do I have to recognize that. You own yourself. What one answer would be remember we're trying to engage in figure out what are the conditions for rational discussion and we wouldn't be able to have a rational discussion. Unless each person owned himself so in Hans's view and here he's quite in accord with standard views and ethics ethical principles have to be universal. So now I want to go on to the second theme of that I want to talk about which is Hans is criticism of democracy. Now it seems at least to many people that democracy is obviously a good thing in people who have this view would say well isn't it better that people rule themselves rather than be subjects in a dictatorship. Say we wouldn't like to live in countries where there is this say people don't have the right to vote and there's a single ruler who is in charge of everything. This would seem at least very undesirable state of affairs. And even if we don't have a dictatorship isn't it better to decide conflicts by accepting who wins in a fairer election. Of course we see in the recent presidential election what's a fairer election can be a matter of quite a bit of dispute. And there are criticisms what could make from within the perspective of democracy of rule by majority for say but sort raised by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock that for example there are various ways of consider what is a majority is it a straight majority or do you require more than a majority or their various voting rules that will generate different results. So it's not clear what rule by majority really means but Hans's objection to democracy is a deeper one than the criticism say from the public public choice going Hans rejects these pro democracy arguments. He does this in a book with the title democracy that God that failed at this book comes from a famous collection of essays that was published in 1949 edited by the British socialist RHS Crossman. And in this collection there were a number of writers who were either former members of the Communist Party or sympathizers some of them were I think there was Arthur Kessler it was one. Louis Fisher was a Steven Spender Andre Gide and Ignacio Silone were contributors to this and they it was a very well known book during the Cold War so what Hans is entitling his book democracy the God that failed is suggesting that just as we recognize today that communism was a false God even though at the time in the 1930s and 40s there were many people in the West who took it quite seriously Hans is suggesting that democracy is a God false God just like communism. Now, his fundamental objection to democracy is one that we can see already from what has gone before that democracy is the objection is that democracy ignores rights in what sense does it do that. Well, if people have rights in the way Hans hop is argued for remember he said all people have property rights in each person has property right owns himself and then can acquire resources all rights or property rights and then we have rules for how resources can be acquired. So there's no further room for disputes we have the way to resolve disputes so anyone who interferes with your property rights is guilty of aggression, including majority voters. So, even if the majority and say we stipulate that there's been a free election, there's no disputes about the, how the votes are to be counted. Say majority votes that there's going should be taxes on wealthy people. That's still aggression because it's interfering with people's rights. So the majority can't tell you how to use your property. So that's his basic criticism of democracy. Now he goes further that this point I've made it can be the anti democracy argument that democracy interferes with your rights can be used to support anarchism libertarian anarchism anarcho capitalism. His argument here is that one right that stems from self ownership is your right to self defense. And he says that supposing someone as some libertarians do such as Robert Nozick in his famous book Anarchy State in Utopia 1974 are used for a minimal state, which is very minimal. It's just supposed to protect rights and it doesn't have the power of taxation. But Han says well if people surrender their rights to the to the state, even a very limited state, then there's really no stopping at the right to defend themselves to the minimal state say they've surrendered all their weapons to the state. Then there's really no stopping the state. The state can really do anything. So if once you've given up your rights, your arms to the state, then the state can just do whatever it wants. So the notion of a minimal state in which people surrender their rights to the to defend themselves to the state is one that's inherently unstable. Now you can see here a major difference between Hans Hoppe and Ludwig von Mises. Hans, as I mentioned was greatly influenced by Mises, but here there's an important distinction. Mises had a very different view of democracy from Hans Hoppe. And according to Mises, the advantage, one of the main advantages of a free market is that it's more democratic than political democracy. Say in a political democracy, you're voting for a party, a particular party or person, and then that person will have a certain platform or even if the one you voted for wins, he's probably not going to put into effect all the policies you want. And then the losers really don't get what they want at all. But in the free market, according to Mises, the consumers are really running things. And what he calls the producers, the the mandatory of the, I mean, the producers of the mandatory of the consumers, the consumers are really in control as he often says, capitalism is mass production for the masses. So according to Mises, the property owners, at least the owners, the means of production really are just not the real owner is at least that it's really the consumers are in control. So you can see, it's a very different view of democracy from Hans Hoppe's radical rejection of the whole idea. Now, Hans makes a very well, an argument that's attracted a great deal of attention is that he says, Democratic politicians need to get majority support to gain power and stay in office. So what counts for them is what will get people to support them now. And they'll make promises that can't be fulfilled because the long run doesn't matter to them. Once people find out that by time people find out that not all the promises can be fulfilled. They're probably they they'll be out of office anyway so it really doesn't matter what counts is that they just want to get elected now. And by contrast, monarchies tend to adopt a long run perspective. The king, if a king expects his family will be around for a long time so he'll try to run his state in an economically efficient way. So, I've given so far the discussion of argumentation ethics and Hans's Christmas of democracy. And he uses the two parts of his views that I've discussed so far to develop a theory of social evolution, especially social evolution is applied to European history. So in doing this he's engaging in a, I think a very significant project one could call conjectural history. That's to say, he's using social theory to account, kind of offer a rational reconstruction of history. And we could give an example of this that you will have heard about in various lectures earlier is the way that the origin of money was explained by Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, how money originates from a commodity that has non monetary uses. So what Menger and Mises were doing is on the basis of theory, they were showing how one could rationally account for the origin of money. So what Hans is doing is trying to come up with a rational reconstruction of history. Now, the usual account of European history is emphasized as progress. History started say in a kind of primitive times with a war of all against all people to say, you can imagine primitive tribes were fighting with each other. But absolute rule put an end to this. And then, eventually, this was replaced by democracy. So in the usual view, which I think even today most historians hold, there's been a progress throughout European history from the kind of a struggle, which was continued of conflicting forces continued under feudalism, then was replaced by absolutism and then we get democracy after that. So, Hans rejects this entire myth, what he calls a myth of progress. He acknowledges though that there has been progress and there has been an economic take off after the Industrial Revolution, but he rejects this notion of historical progress. So, what his contention is, he denies that history started off as a war of all against all. He says, this is a falsehood defended by pro state intellectuals. And instead, in, say, initial state, people wouldn't naturally accept the self ownership and first appropriator accounts of rights that the these aren't made up theories. These ones that say people such as Hans Hopper, Murray Rothbard have come up with these are actually the rules that people would in practice adopt. So in settling disputes on these principles, people would tend to gravitate to natural leaders or aristocrats and feudalism developed from this. But over time, one aristocrat would tend to become stronger than others and become the king, but the king's power was strictly limited by other nobles. But as the feudalism developed and came to an end, the king undermined the other nobles by allying with the people and promised them relief from their feudal duties if the people would support him. And in doing this, he was helped by court intellectuals, which phrase Hans takes over from Murray Rothbard and also Harry on the Barnes. And the court intellectuals wanted to gain power and influence, so they defended absolute monarchy by the myth of the need for a monarchy to rescue people from the war of all against all. But after the absolute monarchy developed, the court intellectuals thought they could gain even more power by abandoning the monarch and appealing to the people through pro-democracy arguments. And this is what happened during the French Revolution. I think here Hans is relying on accounts of the influence of the intellectuals, as we find in the book by Augustine Coshan on the societies of thought before the French Revolution or the books by the British historian Nesta Webster. So I've covered only a few main themes in Hans Hoppe's political philosophy, but I hope I've shown how central his account of rights is in his thinking. So thank you.