Even Disgraceful and Disgusting Characters Shouldn’t Be Censored

How one would answer the following question has long been considered a test of one’s commitment to certain principles of free and open discussion: would you defend even those whom you loathe, and who have maligned you, from others who would shut them up?

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Hans-Hermann Hoppe

The quite distasteful and bigoted Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a poor excuse for a professor, is under investigation for allegedly making a slur on gay people in one of his classes. Information is available on the History News Network “Liberty & Power Blog.” (I added my own comments to the Liberty & Power blog in defense of the kooky professor [apologies for the somewhat garbled grammar], which occasioned an unpleasant exchange from someone who had posted distasteful comments of a sexual nature on my website in the past; judge for yourself whether his denial is persuasive.)

For those academics who can hold their noses to do so, a letter to the UNLV president in defense of respecting the contract between the University and Hoppe would be in order.

Addendum: I have sent a letter to the president of the university encouraging her not to punish Hoppe or to abrogate his contractual rights in any way.



61 Responses to “Even Disgraceful and Disgusting Characters Shouldn’t Be Censored”

  1. This all comes from Euler’s formula, of course: e^i*theta = cos(theta) + i*sin(theta)
    so if theta = 2*pi, then the sin of 2*pi is 0, and cos 2p is 1, therefore, e^i*2*pi = cos(2*pi) + i*sin(2*pi) = 1 + i*0 = 1.

    That’s sort of the prequel to the first step of the above “proof”.

  2. Heinrich says “He didn’t say it, and if he did, so what? It was all a joke. Ha ha ha ha.” LOL. Where I come from, we call that a weak defense. Epstein says he “strongly agrees” with Hoppe, but gives no evidence for it. If he agrees with something because….”Rothbard himself said it,” then it looks like he agrees with Hoppe because Hoppe himself said it. Kinda circular. Kinsella says he’s a lawyer (it’s on his website), but he acts like he’s in junio high school. Calling Indians and Guatemalans “stupid” isn’t a particularly smart defense against bigotry, and then showing off that he can do some math is juvenile. Not impressive. Maybe just pathetic. If that’s the best that Hoppe can do for defenders, he’s got problems. Anyway, when you check around you find tons of evidence that Hoppe’s a scary guy. Let him have his say. But why worship a first-class dork like that?

  3. Arch (so-called) says:

    “Kinsella says he’s a lawyer (it’s on his website),”

    It’s just amazing, and amusing, all these people want to make it about me. Dude, I’m not some celebrity. But unfortunately, you people can’t rattle me, you are picking on the wrong person for that. My bio even has links to some of my bar affiliations. Sheesh. http://www.kinsellalaw.com/bio

    ” but he acts like he’s in junio high school.”

    Man I have no idea why I would descend to such a level, and not treat you people as if you are serious, mature, fair-minded people. I have no idea why.

    “Calling Indians and Guatemalans “stupid” isn’t a particularly smart defense against bigotry,”

    But it’s fricking funny, and sometimes only way to deal with gnats is to swat them away.

    ” and then showing off that he can do some math is juvenile. Not impressive. Maybe just pathetic.”

    Oh,I think it’s a little impressive. What are you, some liberal arts major? I didn’t mean to scare you with a few equations.

    “If that’s the best that Hoppe can do for defenders, he’s got problems. Anyway, when you check around you find tons of evidence that Hoppe’s a scary guy.”

    Your post here alone is evidence you are a scary person.

    ” Let him have his say. But why worship a first-class dork like that?”

    Read his book A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. It’s free, online, at his site: http://www.HansHoppe.com. Then after you get some larnin’, come talk to me.

  4. Eli Feigenbaum

    One issue that has not been raised so far on this blog (or on others discussing Hoppe’s situation — and also Ward Churchill’s) is tenure. The discussion has simply been about whether Hoppe’s (and Churchill’s) rights are in danger of being violated. Given their current contractual arrangements with the universities where they teach, it seems fairly clear that they are. But one easily can imagine a non-tenure based regime in which this would not be the case — where university faculty would not enjoy virtually limitless freedom to say or do (or more accurately, not do, in the case of many tenured faculty who have become deadwood) whatever they wish. There are surely downsides to such a system — among them, I think that many conservatives and libertarians would feel uncomfortable stating their views for fear that they would fall in disfavor with their colleagues and risk losing their jobs. But there are also a lot of potential benefits as well, a point that most libertarians would acknowledge, given the frequency with which the abolition of tenure has been advocated by libertarian-oriented economists. The current system of higher education has been so vastly distorted by government interference, that it’s difficult to determine how to (realistically) move the system in a more market-oriented direction. Abolishing tenure — and replacing it with time-limited contracts containing varying protections for standard notions of academic freedom — seems to me a good step.

  5. Another issue not brought up is why can’t UNLV terminate Hoppe’s contract for whatever reason they want? According to libertarians, can’t a contract can be canceled by either party? True, UNLV should have top ay HHH some bucks for breaking the contract. But freedom of association means freedom of diassociation.

    But nobody at Mises seems to want to have these interesting discussions. Instead they seem more interested in purging unbelievers and rallying around “solidarity.”

  6. Tizziny Tizzim– My GUESS is that if UNLV were to approach The Hoppe and offer to “buy him out” of his contract with UNLV just to disassociate with him, there would not be the same outrage. Who knows, he might even take it.

    None of this is relevant. If you want to have an academic discussion of the nature of contract law as it pertains to academics, uhmmm, okay. Go ahead. But this whole issue arose when there was an attempt by un-libertarian, PC egalitarians to harm a friend, ally, professor, and signficant libertarian–and for merely stating something emprical and probably true! Given this, many libertarians and supporters of academic freedom are trying to voice their disapproval. None of this is changed by the fact that in an altenrative universe you might be able to buy a teacher out of his contract. What has that to do with anything? And please don’t bring up Euler’s formula again. I think we’ve kicked that dead dog to death.

  7. Eli Feigenbaum

    I agree that the statement which has gotten Hoppe into trouble with UNLV is largely true (there may be some problems with causality, as other posters have noted) and I don’t think that he should be penalized for uttering it. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable or irrelevant (as Kinsella implies) to consider the situation in larger context: How would a more market-oriented system of higher education treat cases like Hoppe’s? I would suggest that the American university system would be better off without tenure — if instead it operated under a regime in which universities could more easily rid themselves of faculty members for a variety of reasons: non-productivity, consistently poor teaching evaluations, and, yes, dissenting opinions. Firing someone for the last offense may be stupid, but hopefully administrators would soon view it as such when they lose productive faculty members to other schools. This is not a pie-in-the-sky idea, even though the AAUP acts as if it is. (In fact, it is the employment policy that independent educational and public-policy groups — including both the Cato Institute and the Mises Institute — basically employs, with some success.)

  8. Tom G. Palmer

    I’m interested in the ideas that Eli Feigenbaum has raised. The tenure system is surely quite flawed and I’d be in favor of abolishing it generally, not on libertarian grounds but on grounds of serving the market more effectively. However, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Ward Church, and Arthur Butz all have tenure; to fire them now would be to break a contract. Further, UNLV is a state university, which raises additional issues of a state institution penalizing someone for what they’ve said. (Let’s assume that in all cases they teach their subjects comptetently, or at least, that that is not the reason that they are under fire.)

    As to what Hoppe actually said, it’s not clear from the one newspaper account I’ve read. I’ve read no first person accounts of what he stated. It sounds like it was muddled and rather dunderheaded and a confusion between sexuality and childlessness. In any case, whatever he did say, it does not seem to rise to the level that should cause the sort of penalties being contemplated. (Had he, on the other hand, belittled a student’s intellect on the grounds of sexuality, race, gender, or some other factor, that would be different, for a professor is supposed to teach all of the students, and not to single out Jews, whites, blacks, Christians, gays, straights, or others and dismiss them. But it seems unlikely that Hoppe has done that in *in the classroom.*)

    Now if Hoppe were himself to deny that he has ever made disparaging remarks about others on the grounds of their race (say, being Indians), sexuality (say, being “Ambassadors”), etc. that would be interesting. I would not hold my breath. (And I should say that showing disgust at the idea of Indians and “white people” eating at the same table is….well, disgusting. Further, the remark that someone is an “Ambassador” for a sexuality is not only a disgraceful example of the fallacy of the argumentum ad hominem, but is also fraught with connotations, all of which insinuate bad conduct.)

    The point of my posting above was rather simple. Hoppe should not be penalized for his remarks. But we need not then conclude that he is simply a swell person whose views have been taken out of context by “PC” people. He has expressed bigoted and hate-filled prejudices on a variety of occasions. He may be a “martyr” to academic freedom, but he is not a decent person who has simply been misunderstood.

    I will simply repeat two points that I made above:

    1. It does not follow that, because one holds bigoted opinions and acts badly, one should lose one’s job or suffer a loss of contractual rights (unless such behavior were specified in one’s contract as grounds for dismissal, which is not the case here).

    2. It does not follow that, because one should not suffer a loss of contractual rights, i.e., that “academic freedom” should be upheld, that one does not hold bigoted opinions or has not acted badly.

    Mr. Kinsella has denied that Hoppe is a bigot. Coming from someone who denies that Sam Francis is a racist (Francis is an intellectual hero over at lewrockwell.com, as well as editor at an openly racist and segregationist, anti-black organization) and that Joe Sobran is an anti-Semite (Sobran writes astonishing screeds about “The Jewish Party” and speaks at the neo-Nazi Institute for Historical Review), such denial has no credibility. Anyone who denies that Francis and Sobran are racists or that the organizations with which they have chosen to affiliate or associate themselves are openly racist simply has no credibility. It’s like denying that World War II ever happened and then asking us to believe propostion X or Y simply on one’s say so. (I should also add that I am sure that I am not the only one who finds Mr. Kinsella’s childishness and his remarkably immature sense of “humor” to be embarrassing — for him.)

    Despite the valiant effort of Eli Feigenbaum and others to get a conversation going about the status of tenure, it seems to me that this comment thread has gone beyond the point of diminishing returns and entered the realm of negative returns, so I’m going to shut it off. If anyone really (really) has an additional point to make, please email me and I’ll post it.

    But I’ll put in the last word, as I put in the first. I have read some of Mr. Hoppe’s work and found it remarkably unscholarly and poorly argued, but we’ve never met. My only interaction with him was many years ago when I attended a lecture he was giving and asked a quite reasonable question about a very strange claim that he had made but not substantiated, viz. that Ludwig von Mises had laid the foundation not only for economics, but for ethics, geometry, and optics. That seemed very strange to me and I asked Hoppe how he could defend that claim, since (setting aside ethics) geometry and optics had been rigorous sciences for thousands of years. His response was to demand to know whether I had been listening, to which I responded that I had. He then insisted that I hadn’t and that he wasn’t going to waste his time with people who were too stupid to understand and who didn’t listen.

    I find Hoppe’s attitudes toward others (“intellectual criminals,” “worse than communists,” “Ambassador of homosexuality,” etc.) to be disgraceful. His “scholarship” doesn’t merit the name. His theories are implausible and unsubstantiated; his claims bizarre; his distortion of libertarianism disturbing (the state is the “owner” of all the land in a country and can exclude those it doesn’t want); and his appalling racism and homophobia a stain on the good name of Ludwig von Mises that he and his booster Lew Rockwell have appropriated. The last point is the saddest of all.

    None of that should deter people from believing that the University of Nevada at Las Vegas shouldn’t punish him or tell him to shut up.