Hoppe: My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher

by Stephan Kinsella on July 27, 2026

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher,” in The Influence and Significance of Human Action After 75 Years, Joseph T. Salerno, ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2025), presented at the Human Action Conference, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, AL, May 16, 2024. Now finally available online. Who knows when Hoppe’s “On War, Democratic Peace, and Reeducation: The “German Experience” in Reactionary Perspective” will ever be published (it was supposed to be forthcoming in a book based on the Mises Institute’s Revisionist History of War Conference, May 15, 2025—May 17, 2025).

The Influence and Significance of Human Action After 75 Years Finally in Print
Stephan Kinsella, “Preface” and^“Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe: An Indispensable Framework,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026)¹

**My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher**

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

May 16, 2024

[Print version: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher,” in The Influence and Significance of Human Action After 75 Years, Joseph T. Salerno, ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2025; pdf), presented at the Human Action Conference, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, AL, May 16, 2024]

I started out in my intellectual development as a leftwinger. I have told the story repeatedly, in more or less detail. I entered the university in 1968, at the height of the anti– Vietnam War protests and the widespread student rebellions all across the US and Europe. As a typical product of the zeitgeist, then, I was one of those youngsters who were later on, and even now, called out as members of the 1968 generation. We are blamed for the successive leftward turn of Germany (and the West, generally), through a “march through the institutions” recommended by the Italian Commie Antonio Gramsci, that is still continuing to this day—but with some hopeful signs appearing on the horizon that the end of the rope may be near. In any case, my leftism at the time was motivated not so much by egalitarian sentiments as by belief in the greater efficiency of some sort of central economic planning (rather than the “anarchy of markets”).

My main field of university study originally was philosophy, and my main teacher at the time was Jürgen Habermas, twenty years older than myself and at that time the young, rising star of the famous Frankfurt School of the so-called critical theory. The other, older big names of the school were Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, both Jewish, who had emigrated to the US during the 1930s and returned to Germany after the war, while young Habermas was a homegrown