Hoe is HHH libertarier geworden?UIt interview met HHH: How did you come to be a libertarian and which thinkers were most important in shaping your ideas?
Hoppe: As a young man, a ‘Gymnasiast’ in Germany, I was a Marxist. Then, as a student at the University of Frankfurt, I encountered Boehm-Bawerk’s Marx critique, and that finished Marxist economics for me.
Consequently, for a while I became somewhat of a skeptic, attracted to the positivist and especially the falsificationist Popperian methodology and to Popper’s program of piecemeal social engineering. Like Popper himself, at this time I was a right-wing Social democrat.
Then things changed fast. First I encountered Milton Friedman (pretty good), then Hayek (better), then Mises (far better still, because of Mises’s explicit anti-positivist—aprioristic—methodology), and finally, Mises’s most important theoretical successor, Murray N. Rothbard.
