A Critique of Hans Hermann Hoppe - Private Law Societies
Hans Hermann Hoppe is often cited by the Anarchist and Voluntarist movement as perhaps one of their most important influencers. Whilst no doubt much of what I espouse on this site and LawAndAlchemy.org would be in alignment with many of his philosophies, his ideas on Private Law Societies would not be one of them.
Hoppe is a German-born American academic who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nevada. He is a believer in liberalist and voluntarist philosophies and is associated with the Austrian School of Economics. This would make him a friend of what we are trying to do on CommonLawConstitution.org and LawAndAlchemy.org!
It is regretful that many anarchists hold this blind spot about the English Constitution, and one suspects that he would be no exception in this, although I can’t know for sure as I have sadly not met him.
The misunderstanding in Anarchists is two-fold, it seems. Firstly that they misunderstand that the authentic expression of the English Constitution with Jury Independence does not create the condition of a state or ‘government’, because it is the people that are the final arbiter of law and are self-governing. The second misunderstanding is that, within the context of Natural Law, justice cannot be delivered except through the non-private, shared space of public trials. This does not require, however, the condition of government.
One of our contributors to CommonLawConstitution (LW) has put together a critique (just in note form) of Hoppe’s presentation. This lecture was the second presentation from the Seminar in Sydney in 2011 entitled ‘Society Without State - Private Law Society’.
LW finally dived into this exercise following continued recommendations by anarchists to watch this presentation. She finally did and decided to write notes on it which I think are extremely useful. So here they are.
The video of Hoppe’s presentation is to be found here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBER0noHGC8
And LW’s notes can be downloaded here: