Hans-Hermann Hoppe promises liberty, but delivers feudalism. His ideas explain why some libertarians drift rightward into ethnic nationalism – and why ethnic nationalists have learnt to talk like libertarians.
There is a puzzle that has long troubled me: why do so many self-proclaimed libertarians, who profess to value individual liberty above all, end up in the company of white nationalists, ethnic separatists and assorted authoritarians of the alt-right?
And the converse puzzle: why do right-wing ethnic nationalists, who never cared about anyone’s liberty except their own, so fluently deploy the language of property rights, free association, decentralisation and secession?
The answer, in both cases, has a name: Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Hoppe is a German-born economist of the Austrian school, a student of the anarchist Murray Rothbard, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute (until he was ousted earlier this year, for obscure reasons). He is the author of many books, among which is Democracy: The God That Failed, published in 2001.
He is the intellectual bridge across which libertarians march into the alt-right, and across which the alt-right marches to raid libertarianism for respectable-sounding arguments.
The valid kernel
Hoppe’s appeal is not built on nothing. Hoppe argues, rightly, that democracy contains structural incentives for plunder.
Politicians who do not own the state, and enjoy only temporary custody of it, have every reason to consume its capital – to tax, borrow, redistribute and regulate for short-term electoral gain, leaving the bill to future generations. Majorities can, and do, vote themselves the property of minorities. Anti-capitalism is popular.
This is true, and it is not news. The American founders feared the tyranny of the majority. Alexis de Tocqueville warned of it. Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan and the entire public choice school built careers analysing it.
It is why classical liberals insist on constitutionalism: a liberal constitution exists precisely to protect the rights of individuals against the passions of majorities. Unrestrained majoritarianism is indeed corrosive of liberty.
On this, Hoppe and I agree.
Anti-democracy
But Hoppe’s objection to democracy goes much further, and here we part ways. His complaint is not merely that democracy enables plunder. It is that democracy imposes “egalitarianism”, against what he calls the “natural order”.
He objects, at root, to the idea that people are equals before the law at all.
Equality before the law is not some socialist barnacle upon libertarianism. It is the foundation of libertarian individualism.
Each individual possesses the same rights, and the same freedom, limited only by the identical rights and freedoms of everyone else. The universal franchise is an extension of this principle: if the state is to exist and exercise coercive power, every adult subject to that power has an equal claim to a say in its exercise.
One may argue for constitutional limits on what the vote can do. One may not, as a libertarian, argue that some people are naturally entitled to rule and others naturally destined to obey.
“Natural order”
Hoppe argues exactly that. He writes approvingly of “natural elites” and “natural social hierarchy”, arising, in his telling, from selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, by which superior wealth, wisdom and authority come to be concentrated in a few noble families.
This is not a caricature by his critics. They are his own words, his own account of the “natural order” that democracy supposedly ruined, and it is why he judges monarchy – a privately owned state – to be superior to democracy.
Selective breeding, hereditary nobility, natural hierarchy. Whatever this is, it is not a philosophy of liberty. It is a philosophy of aristocracy, of feudalism, dressed in the hand-me-down clothes of Austrian economics.
The right to exclude
Hoppe’s positive programme is the “covenant community”: a society in which all land, including every road, is privately owned, and in which a proprietor or association of proprietors leases the right to live in the community to tenants, subject to whatever rules the owner cares to impose.
What sort of rules? Hoppe is refreshingly candid. In a society where “the right to exclusion is fully restored to owners of private property”, he writes, towns would – as they once did, he avers – post entrance requirements and requirements for entering specific pieces of property: “no beggars, bums, or homeless, but also no homosexuals, drug users, Jews, Moslems, Germans, or Zulus”.
Those who did not meet the entrance requirements “would be kicked out as trespassers”.
Such a society, he cheerfully concedes, would be “profoundly inegalitarian, intolerant, and discriminatory”, and that is precisely its virtue: “almost instantly, cultural and moral normalcy would reassert itself.”
Nor is exclusion reserved for those who look or love or pray differently. Ideological dissent, too, must be purged.
“There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order,” Hoppe writes. “They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.”
The same fate awaits “the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism”. They “will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.”
RIP, free speech
So, Hoppe’s so-called “libertarian” order is one in which advocating democracy gets you physically expelled. It is a “libertarian” order maintained by purging homosexuals and environmentalists.
“In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property,” Hoppe explains, “no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism.”
Every authoritarian regime in history has permitted speech that does not threaten its purposes, and prohibited speech that does.
The bridge
This, then, is the bridge. To the libertarian, Hoppe offers a property-rights syllogism: an owner may exclude anyone from his property for any reason; a community is just an aggregation of property; therefore, a community – and by easy extension, a nation – may exclude anyone for any reason. The familiar sign on the restaurant door, “right of admission reserved”, is inflated to cover towns, regions and countries.
To the white nationalist, Hoppe offers the same syllogism in reverse: your desire for an ethnically pure homeland is not bigotry; it is merely the exercise of property rights and freedom of association. Racial exclusion is laundered into a defensible libertarian position.
That is why Hoppe is cited with equal enthusiasm in anarcho-capitalist forums and on white nationalist websites, and why the meme-makers of the alt-right adopted him as a mascot.
Private coercion is still coercion
The syllogism fails, and it is worth being precise about why.
The libertarian case for the right to exclude rests on individual self-ownership and the individual’s dominion over his own property. My house is mine; I may invite or disinvite whom I please.
But Hoppe transfers this right from the individual to the community proprietor, and thereby transforms every other member of the community from a free individual into a tenant, a subject, whose continued presence in his own home, whose speech, whose associations, whose very lifestyle, exist at the pleasure of the lord of the manor.
That is not a free society. It is feudalism. It is private monarchy.
The covenant community’s proprietor is an authoritarian ruler with absolute power to admit and evict, distinguishable from a state only by the geographical extent of their power.
Hoppe and I agree that the state has no business imposing cultural, moral or religious conformity upon individuals; state-enforced conformity is a violation of individual liberty, full stop.
But Hoppe does not propose to abolish enforced conformity. He proposes to privatise it. The individual dissident, the nonconformist, the homosexual, the freethinker, is exactly as unfree under the proprietor’s covenant as under the commissar’s decree.
Coercion does not become liberty because the coercer holds a title deed rather than a public office.
Reductio ad absurdum
The practical implications expose the absurdity. If every road is privately owned and every owner enjoys an unlimited right of exclusion, then the owner of the roads surrounding your property may lawfully imprison you in your own home.
He may render your property worthless by denying you access to it.
He may stand between your child and the hospital, your business and its customers, your family and its church, and demand any price – or no price, merely obedience.
Roads are networks, not parcels; whoever controls the chokepoints controls the people who depend on them. “Voluntary exclusion” becomes arbitrary domination the moment one party controls the only viable route.
A theory that permits a landowner to starve a neighbour into submission without ever “aggressing” against him has not abolished coercion. It has merely redefined it.
Contrast this with John Rawls, a liberal but no libertarian, whose neutral state at least grasps the problem Hoppe waves away. Rawls held that coercive institutions must be justifiable to all citizens, whatever their conception of the good life, and must therefore remain impartial among religions, cultures and moralities.
One need not accept Rawls’s egalitarian economics to see that he and the classical liberals share a premise Hoppe rejects: that no person and no doctrine has a natural title to rule others.
Hoppe’s private order fails this test spectacularly. It is a patchwork of petty sovereignties, exclusionary enclaves and tinpot dictatorships, each free to impose a comprehensive moral doctrine on its tenants, with exit as the only remedy – exit past privately owned roads, into other enclaves with their own entrance requirements.
Rawls sought to make coercion answerable. Hoppe seeks to make it unanswerable, by calling all land property.
The South African echo
If you think this is an American curiosity, listen to the rhetoric of South Africa’s ethnic nationalists, and of the self-described communitarians and conservatives who travel with them.
When AfriForum’s ideologues attack liberal democracy and “disengaged individualism” in favour of communities ordered around God, nation and family; when Orania is defended not as the constitutional anomaly it is but as a model of “self-determination” for cultural communities; when secessionists and enclave-builders speak of “cultural communities” with rights of their own, superior to the rights of their individual members; when communitarians argue that groups, not individuals, are the bearers of rights – they are walking across Hoppe’s bridge, whether they have read him or not.
Many have. Many use his exact phrasing. Hoppe’s covenant communities are the theoretical blueprint for the volkstaat, renovated with a libertarian coat of paint.
Charles Simkins observed that apartheid itself could never have been imposed in a country where communal identities were not strong, and that the ideology gave an account of itself in the language of community values.
Group rights, cultural sovereignty, the community’s power to decide who belongs: we have run this experiment. The right of a “community” to exclude, when the community is defined by race and the exclusion is enforced on the ground, was called the Group Areas Act.
Its authors, too, insisted they were merely protecting the moral character and culture of communities.
Communities vs fiefdoms
Communitarianism, as Nicholas Woode-Smith has argued, is not decentralised freedom; it is an ideology of cultural elites, who acquire the power to oppress their own members in the name of the collective.
The individual is the essential component of any community, and communities should exist for the betterment of individuals, not the reverse. A community with voluntary membership is a free community. A community that owns and controls its members is not a community; it is a fiefdom.
The same is true, of course, for African communitarianism, which asserts the primacy of the community or tribe over the individual, with a chief as the feudal ruler of the fiefdom, and ubuntu as the overriding basis for social organisation.
Ubuntu, or more fully “umuntu ngamuntu ngabantu”, means (roughly speaking) “a person is a person through other people”, or “I am because you are; you are because we are”.
Like the white right’s community-mindedness, expresses a pleasant sentiment. It’s colloquial use to mean simply “humanity towards others” is certainly a laudable value, that should motivate any right-thinking, moral person.
However, it cannot be a basis for a just political dispensation, because it subjects the rights of the individual to the collective interests of their community, tribe or nation. That relationship should only ever be voluntary, and not enforced by law or custom.
Collectivist of the right
Hoppe’s admirers call him the most rigorous libertarian of his generation.
He is nothing of the sort. He is a collectivist of the right, who has substituted a volk-proprietor (or tribal chief) for the socialist state, and “natural” hierarchy for equality.
He retains collectivism’s essential feature: the subordination of the individual to an entity that claims to own the social order. His system is feudalism with modern characteristics, and it is no better – no freer, no more voluntary, no less coercive – than the communist collectivism he decries.
In its enthusiastic catalogue of the excludable – the beggars and bums, the homosexuals and Jews, the Muslims and Zulus – it is something worse: an explicit endorsement of the intolerance, discrimination and white supremacy that the classical liberals of the Institute of Race Relations have spent almost a century fighting, whether it wears an oranje-blanje-blou party rosette, a leopard skin, or a title deed.
The enemy of my socialist, collectivist, statist enemy is not necessarily my friend.
Libertarians who cross Hoppe’s bridge should be honest about where it leads. Classical liberals who remain behind should be clear about what their former allies have become.
[Image: Hoppe.webp]
[Caption: A Warholesque pop-art collage of a young Hans-Hermann Hoppe. (Image by Stephan Kinsella from HansHoppe.com, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.)]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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