Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe was born on 2 September 1949 in Peine, West Germany. He studied philosophy, sociology, history and economics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, at Goethe University Frankfurt and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. From Goethe University he received a doctorate in philosophy (1974), with Jürgen Habermas as his teacher and supervisor, and his habilitation in sociology and economics (1981).

He taught at several German universities and at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced International Studies in Bologna. In 1986 he moved to the United States to study with Murray N. Rothbard, and remained a close associate of his until Rothbard’s death in January 1995. Until 2008 he taught economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he is professor emeritus. For many years he was a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute and editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. In 2006 he founded the Property and Freedom Society, of which he is president and which holds its annual meetings in Bodrum, Turkey. His honors include the Gary G. Schlarbaum Award (2006) and the Murray N. Rothbard Medal of Freedom (2015). He lives in Istanbul with his wife, the economist A. Gülçin Imre Hoppe.

His first books were written in German: Handeln und Erkennen (1976), Kritik der kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung (1983) and Eigentum, Anarchie und Staat (1987). In 1988 he formulated argumentation ethics: the thesis that anyone who argues already accepts certain norms, among them the prohibition of initiating violence, and therefore cannot deny libertarian rights without contradiction. A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989), The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993) and Economic Science and the Austrian Method (1995), in which he defends Mises’ a priori method, followed. In Democracy: The God That Failed (2001) he compares monarchy and democracy by the criterion of time preference and proposes a private-law society as the alternative. His later works include The Great Fiction (2012) and A Short History of Man (2015).

Both his personal website and the Mises Institute describe him as an Austrian School economist and a philosopher of anarcho-capitalism. His work combines Austrian economic theory, in the praxeological form Mises gave it, with the libertarian philosophy of property in the line of Rothbard.

Sources: HansHoppe.com — About · Mises Institute — Hans-Hermann Hoppe · Property and Freedom Society — History and Principles · HansHoppe.com — Habermas, Hoppe’s Teacher and PhD Advisor (Stephan Kinsella) · Wikipedia — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

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