A Life in Liberty Bookstream: Preface — Hülsmann and Kinsella

In 2024, the Property and Freedom Society published A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella, eds. (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2024), on the occasion of Professor Hoppe’s 75th birthday on Sept. 2, 2024.

This liber amicorum was published and presented later that month at a ceremony at the Hotel Karia Princess on the first evening of the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, in Bodrum, Turkey, on Friday, Sept. 21, 2024. (Amazon; Mises Store; pdf; epub; word files)

This book is a sequel to the festschrift prepared for Professor Hoppe’s 60th birthday, Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella, eds. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2009). Like the 2009 festschrift, the 2024 liber amicorum contains contributions both personal and substantive, from 41 family members, friends, colleagues, and supporters, arranged into seven sections, including the initial section containing personal reflections, Grato Animo Beneficiique Memores.

We recently serialized the 2009 collection in a Bookstream, starting with Property, Freedom, and Society Bookstream: Introduction, Hülsmann and Kinsella, PFS Blog (Aug. 3, 2026). We are following that Bookstream with a Bookstream of the chapters in A Life in Liberty. 

The Preface, by editors Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella, is available at the landing page for A Life in Liberty: Liber Amicorum in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe and reprinted below. Starting in two days, we will serialize the remaining chapters here.

Preface

It is our great pleasure to present this book to our dear friend Hans-Hermann Hoppe and to the world at large. It features various texts written in his honor, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, by colleagues, friends, and family members.

It is a longstanding academic custom to publish liberos amicorum (books made by friends for a friend) thereby expressing esteem and reverence for the laureate and publicly highlighting the impact that he has had on others through his ideas and personality. Professor Hoppe’s impact is manifest on each page of this volume. He has devoted his life to scholarship in pursuit of individual liberty. He has greatly distinguished himself as a teacher, as an author, and as a leader. But he has also touched his students and readers as a loyal and loving friend. We have both been blessed with this friendship over many years, and it gives us utmost delight to see how Hoppe the scholar and Hoppe the man have stirred the lives of so many others.

The present liber amicorum follows up on the festschrift that we had brought together in his honor on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. That volume was published in 2009, as Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and presented to Hans on July 29, 2009, at a ceremony in Auburn, Alabama, just before his birthday a month later. Since then, his influence on the academic community has continued to grow, most notably through the annual meetings of the Property and Freedom Society and a number of important new books, articles, speeches, and interviews. These include Economy, Society, and History (2021), Getting Libertarianism Right (2018), A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline (2015), From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy (2014), and The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline (2012), as well as commentaries on Covid policies, the war in Ukraine, updates of his “argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian rights, and others texts. All these works are available at his website www.hanshoppe.com.

This liber amicorum is scheduled to be presented shortly after the good professor’s birthday in September, 2024, at the eighteenth annual meeting of the PFS in Bodrum, Turkey (https://propertyandfreedom.org). Like the 2009 volume, it contains different types of contributions, from personal reflections and well wishes to scholarly papers. Accordingly, we have divided the work into various parts, and the chapters have different citation and reference styles, depending on their character and subject.

We trust that followers and friends of Professor Hoppe’s work, and all other lovers of liberty and scholarship, will enjoy and profit from the present volume.

Jörg Guido Hülsmann
Angers, France

Stephan Kinsella
Houston, Texas

May 2024