Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (/ˈhɒpə/; German: [ˈhɔpə]; born 2 September 1949) is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy. From 1986 until 2008 he was professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank. In 2006 he emigrated to Turkey and founded the Property and Freedom Society. some of the speakers at the organization's conferences in Turkey have been white nationalists.

Hoppe has written extensively in opposition to democracy, notably in his 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed. The book favors exclusionary "covenant communities" that are "founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin". A section of the book favoring exclusion of democrats and homosexuals from society helped popularize Hoppe on the far-right.

Hoppe was a protégé of Murray Rothbard, who established him at UNLV, where Hoppe taught from 1986 to 2008. In 2004, a student's complaint about Hoppe's lecture comments regarding homosexuals and time preference led to an investigation and non-disciplinary letter to Hoppe by UNLV, which was subsequently withdrawn after a controversy over academic freedom.

Hoppe was born in 1949 in Peine, West Germany. His parents had settled there in 1946 after fleeing from East Elbia, which after WW2 came under Soviet occupation. He has stated the expropriation of his mother’s family who were East Elbean Junkers has been a lasting trauma, and that he was raised with a Protestant ethic.

Hoppe completed his undergraduate studies at Saarland University and received his MA and PhD degrees in Philosophy from Goethe University Frankfurt. He studied under Jürgen Habermas, a leading German intellectual of the post-WWII era, but came to reject Habermas's ideas and European leftism generally.

He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, from 1976 to 1978 and earned his habilitation in Foundations of Sociology and Economics from the University of Frankfurt in 1981.

From 1981-1985 he taught in West Germany and Italy. In 1986 Hoppe came to the United States through Murray Rothbard on a scholarship from the Center for Libertarian Studies, and Rothbard also established Hoppe at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. From 1986 until his retirement in 2008, Hoppe was a professor in the School of Business at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank that is publisher of much of his work, and was editor of various Mises Institute periodicals.

Hoppe has said that Rothbard was his "principal teacher, mentor and master". Hoppe said he was "working and living side-by-side with him, in constant and immediate personal contact," and said that from 1985 until Rothbard's 1995 death, he considered Rothbard his "dearest fatherly friend".