 Our speaker tonight to kick off the conference is Dr. Hans Hermann Hoppe. Professor Hoppe is an Austrian economist and a libertarian philosopher in the Rothbard tradition. He is a professor emeritus from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and is the distinguished fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He has been the editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, the quarterly journal of Austrian Economics, and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. His English language books include a theory of socialism and capitalism, economic science and the Austrian method, democracy, the God that failed, and the economics and ethics of private property. Hans is founder and the president of the Property and Freedom Society, and his lecture tonight is entitled, The Science of Human Action. Please help me welcome Hans Hoppe. Thank you, Doug. Thank you, Lou, for having me. Thank you, Mark, for the nice introductions. I want to be a little bit autobiographical tonight. When I moved to the United States in 1985, I moved because I wanted to study with Murray Rothbard. I was not a regular student at the time. In fact, I had already received my PhD. I had written my habilitation thesis, which is an advanced doctoral degree, and I had acquired the academic rank of a privatozent that is the same rank that Mises would ever achieve in Austria. I was a Heisenberg Fellow of the German National Science Foundation, which was the most prestigious grant for people in their mid-career that you could win in Germany. I had read all of the major works of Ludwig von Mises and of Murray Rothbard at the time, and I was a full-blown Austro-libertarian. In my view, Mises was the man. And because Murray Rothbard had extended and brought to completion the Misesian system, he too was the man. Mises had died several years before in 1981, so it was Murray Rothbard with whom I wanted to meet and work when I came to New York City. I wanted to know the master personally and learn from him directly. For a year, I attended all of his classes at Brooklyn Polytechnic, and when he was out of town to lecture, I taught his classes. In the following year, in 1986, we both went to Las Vegas, to UNLV, where we went on as close collaborators and colleagues until his death in 1995. I stayed on for another ten years until I retired from that university. Murray was almost 60 when I first met him, and in fact, he would turn 60 in February of 1986, and the surprise birthday party and conference held in Manhattan to celebrate this occasion was my own first public speaking appearance in the United States. I was some 20 years younger, I had just turned 36 at the time, but for Murray, I was just one of his kids. In fact, many of the elder gentlemen that you will see around here this week were his kids. Walter Block and Ralph Reiko, who were older than myself, were his kids, and so was David Gordon and Joe Salerno and Roger Garrison. Peter Klein and Mark Sorenten, they were just babies at the time. Lou was something different. I'm not quite sure if you refer to him as a kid or a baby. He will have to tell you about this himself. I'm sure that if Murray would still be alive today, I would still be one of his kids, even though I'm older now than Murray was when I first met him. Well, at the beginning of my active involvement in the Austro-libertarian intellectual movement, I was one of the youngest players, one of the stormtroopers, so to speak. Now I'm obviously one of the movement's old guards, and for me, you are now the kids and the babies. And as a member of the old guard, who has actively participated practically from its very beginning in the Mises Institute's effort of building an Austro-libertarian intellectual movement, as an old guard, I may be excused to use this opportunity to be a bit anecdotal and say a few things about my own intellectual autobiography or to be more precise to tell you a bit about how I came to find Ludwig von Mises and learn about the science of human action that Mises, and further on, Murray Rothbard had explained and developed. I grew up during the student rebellion during the late 1960s. I was then a lefty myself, and I was interested mostly in the social sciences and political science, sociology, economics, and law. Yet when I had to decide what to choose as my major during my university studies, I decided on philosophy rather than all these other fields because of all of the social sciences, I considered philosophy to be the most serious, the most rigorous, and the most demanding field. And within the field of philosophy, again, I decided to concentrate on the area that I regarded as the most fundamental and decisive, namely on epistemology, that is the theory of knowledge. And in this field of epistemology, the central theme was the seemingly permanent debate between the rationalists on the one hand, from Plato on onward, on the one hand, and the skeptics on the other hand. And in modern times, and in particular in Germany, this debate was essentially a debate between Kant and various variants of Kantianism on the one hand, and on the other hand, between the empiricists of David Hume and various variants of Jungian philosophy that meant at my time, in particular, Carl Popper as one of the leading modern followers of David Hume. Very simplified, the central tenets of Humean empiricism are four interrelated claims. First, all knowledge is knowledge of facts and what the facts are we learn from sensations given by our sense organs. It is all experience, all knowledge is derived from what they call experiences. And there is nothing necessary about these facts or how one fact is related to another fact. Second, whether or not a statement is true or false must ultimately be decided by sense experiences, by sense data. The third tenet was that all statements that claim to say something that is necessarily true rather than something that happens to be true are words that are only contingent truths. All statements that are claimed to be necessary truths are not statements about the nature as it is or statements about the real things but they are simply statements about the use of words or about linguistic conventions or about habits of the mind. And the fourth tenet was that statements about value are neither true nor false but only expressions of emotions. Now, as plausible as these views might appear at first glance and obviously these views must still appear plausible to a large number of scientists given the ongoing popularity of this empiricist program. Like most rationalists, I came to the conclusion that this was all wet. First and most fundamentally, the empiricist position was simply self-contradictory and hence I regarded it as some sort of nonsense for what was it that the empiricists told us? Obviously what they told us about our knowledge was supposed to be knowledge itself. It was supposed to be knowledge about knowledge. Yet how do we know and come about this knowledge? How do we know this to be true? Now certainly not about, we do not realize this via sense experiences. Knowledge was about thought or more precisely it was about conscious thought and conscious and meaningful thought and thought whatever it was was certainly not the same thing as that to which thought itself referred. That is what the thought was about. Thinking was in terms and by means of concepts. When I think about a green tree, this does not make my thought green or tree-like with sensible characteristics. To the contrary, knowledge as conscious, meaningful, conceptual knowledge had to be gained through introspection and was something non-observable. It was a mental judgment and it involved some understanding or some grasping. Hence the rationalists always replied to the empiricists claim that all our knowledge derived from sense experience were saying, yes, except that part of it that was the result of reason that came from intellect rather than from sensation. But there were also more specific problems that I realized were involved with the empiricist views. The empiricists claim that all a priori or all necessary knowledge concerns merely linguistic conventions but has nothing to do with reality or the nature of things was anything but convincing. True enough, sensations or sense impressions cannot reveal anything as being necessary or universal. They are of the type I hear and now sense this and that. Nor does one ever see, for instance, causality at work. What can be seen at best are temporal sequences, temporal associations between various sense experiences. But since knowledge is not sensation but sensation plus intellect, this obviously does not rule out the possibility of a priori knowledge of reality. And surely, there exist plenty of such knowledge no matter how hard the empiricists have tried to deny this fact or try to explain it away. Take, for instance, the law of identity and contradiction. Nothing can be a and none a at the same time. Now according to the logical empiricists this was just a convention. But if it is a convention then there must be an alternative to this. But there simply is none. We simply cannot conceive of something that is a and none a at the same time. We cannot adopt the convention that something is green all over and none green all over at the same time. To say or think something means or say or think anything means to say this rather than that. We simply can't think otherwise and giving up these laws of identity and contradiction means not to think anymore at all. Or take this, the world is made up of objects with certain characteristics or properties. True, we learn from experience what objects they are and what their properties are. But we can never have any experiences that are not the experiences of objects and properties. Everything else is simply unthinkable. No experience can refute this knowledge nor can any experience ever refute that all experiences of objects and their properties are experiences that are located in time and in space. Nor can we imagine that it could be different that all objects are perceived and conceived as examples or instances of something of a class. Indeed, we could not say anything meaningful at all about anything without using names or identifying expressions and predicates assigning a universal property to these identified objects. Or take such examples. Two straight lines cannot enclose a space. Or a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Or if A is a part of B and B is a part of C then A is also a part of C. Or if A precedes B in time and B precedes C in time then A precedes C in time. Or no material objects can occupy the same space at the same time. All of these propositions and there are many more are interpreted by empiricists and by logical positivists as saying nothing about reality at all but as being mere conventions about how we use certain words. But then we could choose obviously other conventions but we simply can't. Now I came to regard these empiricist attempts not just as painful and tortured but as plain silly. True enough logic may not tell us much about the world but what little it does is absolutely essential. The logical positivists try to tell us that logic does not say anything at all that is nothing but an assembly of tautologies but in fact as some philosophers have noted it is simply not true that statements that claim something to be necessarily and always and universally true are not saying anything at all. Formal logic is not empty of all content but rather it is the most general branch of ontology dealing with all possible objects and beings. Moreover I came to recognize that much if not all of our knowledge about necessary and universal truths had its ultimate explanation in the undeniable fact that we are actors and that our knowledge was the knowledge of actors having to act in an external world outside and independent of our mind. If we didn't have to act we didn't have to know anything. Stones don't act. Stones behave in certain ways but they don't act and hence stones don't need to know anything but we do and this, namely that knowledge is a tool of acting explains the fundamental structure of our knowledge. Characteristically my PhD dissertation in philosophy that I wrote 35 years ago was titled Acting and Knowing. Now again just a few remarks on this topic that our most elementary experiences as I have already mentioned are always and invariably of the type this here and now is such and such with an identifying expression a name and a predicate that is a universal property is due to the fact that in acting we must identify a specific situation with such and such objects existing here and now and then characterize these objects as of this kind rather than of another kind otherwise we would be unable to choose one course of rule or one course of action or one rule of action rather than another one. Similarly the meaning of such logical primitives such as is, is not and or as well as of numbers and of counting are not just arbitrarily defined symbols but they have a clear operational constructivist or practical meaning or basis. The meaning of these terms is not something made up not just a convention but it is based on the reality of action of having to choose or of having to combine certain actions in order to reach certain results that is of end of adding certain things of repeating certain things of building up numbers and of counting. Likewise with the category of causality we may not know a priori what is the cause of what but we have to learn this from experience but to say that some event may not have a cause at all or that something happened without a cause for no reason whatsoever strikes us as absurd and it strikes us as absurd and we instead accept it as a necessary truth about reality that whatever happens in the world does have a cause even if we never find out what that cause is this is because every action is aimed at some goal and presupposes that there is something that can be done in order to bring about a certain result so it presupposes there must be causes now so far so good but then another problem still remained in my mind what about the social sciences what do we know and can we know about human action in particular now here again a fundamental split existed between the rationalist camp on the one hand and the empiricist camp on the other the rationalist typically adopted a dualist position that is to say the way they conceived of matters was that there existed a realm of knowledge concerning our own mind and the mind of others that is of objects accessible either through direct introspection or indirect introspection via symbolic interaction and there existed another realm of objects with which we could not communicate the realm of consciousness and of conscious actions was categorized teleologically in terms of motives and reasons which we interpreted as the causes of events these motives and reasons were intelligible and meaningful entities that is they could be understood motives and reasons cannot be observed only behavior can be observed but we can understand motives and reasons and on a more profound level we can understand their actors we can understand their character and we can understand their guiding principles in fact because we have such privileged access to our own mind and the mind of other human actors through understanding we can and we must conceive of each action as a unique non-repeatable event caused by unique individual actors acting at unique points in time and space in distinct contrast the behavior of material objects is for us unintelligible it is what it is without any possibility of understanding why it is that they behave the way they do accordingly we conceive of such objects and their observable behavior always and invariably as examples of a class of objects subject to one and the same universal exceptionalist law of behavior now such knowledge of individual motives and reasons then allows us to predict the actions of our fellow men and it does so reasonably well as everyone can attest from his everyday life it does not guarantee success indeed we frequently fail with our predictions and are surprised by the actual course of human events and not everyone is equally capable of predicting other people's actions some people are better at this than others because they have a better knowledge of other people but there is nothing better available to us except trying to understand and understand again continuously anew in contrast the empiricists were typically monists for them introspection and understanding did not really count as knowledge at all since it was not derived from sense experience at best introspection and understanding had some heuristic value in helping us develop hypothesis remember for empiricists no such thing exists as necessary truths about anything real so understanding and introspection for empiricists were at best a heuristic device to develop hypothesis about the real causes and consequences of human action but introspection and understanding were not science in their mind science required explanations that is formulations of empirically testable hypothetical non-necessary laws in the social sciences just as in the material sciences such as physics or chemistry now in this dispute between the rationalists and the empiricists I again sided largely with the rationalists and I came to the conclusion that the empiricists search for contingent non-necessary laws of human action is misconceived and must fail for an elementary yet fundamental reason we can obviously learn new things we can acquire new knowledge things that were not known to us before empiricists too have to admit this because according to them we continuously make new experiences yet it is impossible for us to predict what these new things that we learn and that we come to know will be until we actually know them otherwise we would already have reached the new knowledge now yet since knowledge guides our conscious actions from the unpredictability of new knowledge follows the unpredictability of action that is something that Mises would say there are no constants in human action but this result then that is that there cannot be any contingent observable laws in the realm of human action it did not mean that there are no necessary non-empirical laws of human action to use an analogy just as a fact that we cannot scientifically predict all the propositions ever made by future speakers does not mean or does not imply there is no such thing as propositional logic that is something that is necessarily true of all propositions now and forever so the fact that we cannot scientifically predict human actions does not imply that there are no laws that are true of any and all actions and I thought that I had found quite a few examples of such necessary laws in the field especially of economics for instance that you cannot eat your cake and have it too that you cannot get richer by consuming everything you produce that if you spend more of a given income on A you must spend less on B or that money prices will rise if the quantity of money is increased while the quantity of non-money goods remains the same but when I looked around in the then economic current economic textbooks they all seem to contradict this first impression that I had of many important economic propositions they all accepted the empiricist dogma that I described before they all claimed that such laws were either contingent that is non-necessary laws testable laws, falsifiable laws or else they were empirically empty in the meantime politically I had moved increasingly to the right or rather in the direction of classical liberalism from my erstwhile leftism but when I looked at then famous right-wing economists the result was just the same Hayek had won the Nobel Prize in 1974 and Friedman in 1976 reading Friedman and Hayek had actually strengthened my conviction that economics had something to say that was necessarily true about something real but Friedman too explicitly and wholeheartedly accepted the empiricist line that this was not the case and I noted also that Friedman had actually played a major role in persuading the economics profession of this empiricist view in making all textbooks by and large except the same line and Hayek simply appeared to me to be muddled and confused on the entire issue but somewhere in a footnote of one of Hayek's work I discovered a reference to a guy named Mises and his outdated and strange a priorism so I took up Mises' human action human action was my first book that I read of Mises and there to migrate intellectual relief I found exactly what I had been looking for what I had myself concluded too and much more not just confirmation of my own conclusion but a completely worked out and integrated system of a priori statements beginning with the axiom of actions that humans act they pursue goals with means in order to improve their own living or their own well-being statements that were obviously statements about real things namely human actions and had developed what he called economics as praxeology the logic of action within three or four days I devoured human action and I had become a Misesian from the discovery of Mises to the discovery of Rospart was then only a minor step that followed almost immediately after reading Man, Economy and State I became an anarchist or as I prefer to say nowadays a proponent of a pure private law society and as a final step in my intellectual development spurred on by reading Rospart's Essex of Liberty I was also ready to give up on the last empiricist dogma that even an arch rationalist such as Mises shared namely the conviction that there existed no such thing as a rational Essex that is the claim that normative propositions were nothing but expressions of emotions I realised that this claim was ultimately self-contradictory because in trying to defend the claim that there is no rational Essex in the course of an argumentation and obviously you cannot defend this claim except in the course of an argumentation I had discovered something that some philosophers have called the a priori of argumentation very much like the a priori of action that Mises had made the cornerstone of his system in realising this that you have to defend the empiricist's thesis in the form of an argumentation you already have to presuppose an Essex namely that every person is the exclusive owner of his own physical body in order to be able to make an argument and listen to somebody else using his body to reply to the argument and thus prove his thesis and thereby you had justified the claim that every person is the just owner of his own physical body now for me all of this was an arduous long and difficult way to find the literature and to get my hands on the books that expounded on the thesis especially if you lived outside of the United States for you, thanks to the Mises Institute all of this is now easy as pie but I hope and in fact I am confident that you will find the same intellectual satisfaction and relief and experience the same intellectual excitement with the discovery of Austro-libertarianism that I did about 35 years ago thank you very much