Prychitko on Habermas and Austrianism: Where's Hoppe?

September 25, 2009 10:19 AM by Stephan Kinsella (Archive)

Over on The Austrian Economists blog, David Prychitko has a post about Habermas, where he writes:

I spent quite a bit of time reading, and trying to make sense of, Habermas's works. That began in the late 1980s and continued up to a couple years ago. It was a difficult and time-consuming process, but I thought his effort in political economy (backed by his own methodology) was important, as a large cottage industry arose inspired by his work. Looking back, the opportunity cost was too high, but at least it did result in a Cambridge Journal of Economics paper that I and Virgil Storr co-authored. If any of you are interested --and I'm sure most of you are not -- here's a downloadable copy.

The paper is "Communicative action and the radical constitution: the Habermasian challenge to Hayek, Mises and their descendents." Since this paper is by an Austrian, and grapples with Habermas's communicative action ideas and its relation to Austrian praxeology, one would have thought it would least cite, if only to criticize, a fellow Austrian economist, who obtained his PhD under Habermas, and who has written a great deal on Habermas's communicative action theories from a praxeological point of view--namely Hans-Hermann Hoppe. (See Hoppe: Habermas's Anarcho-Conservative Student; Revisiting Argumentation Ethics; Discourse Ethics entry in Wikipedia (which yours truly started, and which has more on Hoppe and Habermas); Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics writings; my New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory; and my collection of Habermas-related material here.)

But Hoppe is nowhere mentioned. Nor is Karl-Otto Apel, for that matter, another German philosopher who "co-developed" "the theory of communicative action and discourse ethics ... with his friend, colleague, and collaborator Jürgen Habermas."