A DEFENSE AND EXPANSION OF THE HAYEKIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST ROTHBARD AND HOPPE

Restoring the Complementarity Between Property, Knowledge, and Nomos

I. INTRODUCTION

All genuine intellectual debate rests upon an inescapable premise: engagement. The critic, to merit such a title, must fulfill a primary duty: to identify precisely their opponent’s thesis, to grapple with the conceptual distinctions that underpin it, and only then proceed to demonstrate its internal incoherence or empirical falsity. When a text purporting to be a replication systematically opts to ignore the central theses and fundamental distinctions of the argument it seeks to refute, it ceases to be a refutation. It devolves into a doctrinal reaffirmation that fails to achieve argumentative intersection with the thesis it critiques, inasmuch as it develops within a parallel analytical universe, incapable of touching its adversary’s arguments. By methodological evasion I shall define, with operational precision, the refusal to (i) reconstruct the thesis in its strongest form (the principle of charity), (ii) confront the analytical distinctions that sustain it—herein, Property-Knowledge and Nomos-Thesis—and (iii) show why they fail within the author’s own paradigm, rather than under external criteria.

In the history of twentieth-century liberal thought, the Austrian School stands as a robust defense of the market. However, beneath an apparent unity lies a profound epistemological fracture. The present essay explores this fissure by analyzing the debate between the philosophy of Friedrich A. Hayek and the systematic critique advanced by the line of thought running from Ludwig von Mises to his intellectual heirs, Murray N. Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Although Hayek and Mises shared a lasting friendship and a common enemy in socialism, their methodological paths diverged, laying the foundations for a controversy that endures to this day. This divergence is rooted, fundamentally, in the Hayekian distinction between two types of order: created order or taxis (such as an organization) and spontaneous order or cosmos (such as the market or language). While taxis is the product of deliberate design for known ends, cosmos emerges without a central plan, serving a multiplicity of individual ends (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021). It is the confusion between these two orders that Hayek would identify as the central error of socialism and, as will be argued herein, of certain strands of apriorism.

It is crucial to note, however, that this methodological divergence did not imply, for the original protagonists, a contradiction of ends or conclusions. The narrative of rupture ignores Hayek’s own intellectual avowal, who, far from presenting himself as a subversive of the Misesian edifice, understood himself as a builder arriving at the same results via alternate paths. As Richard Ebeling documents, Hayek explicitly acknowledged that his critical attitude was not an amendment to the truth of Mises’s conclusions, but rather a search for more satisfactory arguments to sustain them:

Though I learned that he [Mises] was usually right in his conclusions, I was not always satisfied with his arguments, and retained to the end a certain critical attitude which sometimes forced me to build different constructions, which however, to my great pleasure, usually led to the same conclusions (Ebeling, 2014, p. 138).

The recent essay “Rebuttal to ‘A Refutation’...” (hereinafter referred to as “the Rebuttal”) by Juan Fernando Carpio, written in response to the initial draft of the present analysis, clearly falls within this latter category. I owe Mr. Carpio sincere acknowledgments: his text is valuable not so much for the strength of its refutation—for I shall contend that it leaves the core of my argument intact—but rather because it functions as a paradigmatic case of the very critical methodology that this essay set out to diagnose and deconstruct.

This does not mean that the Rebuttal is irrelevant or superficial. Carpio engages with several of the central themes—the problem of knowledge, the Mises–Hayek relationship, the definition of coercion—yet he does so from an analytical framework that remains unchanged: Rothbardian–Hoppean apriorism. Precisely therein lies the point: the Rebuttal confirms that the critique of Hayek consists not in “showing internal contradictions within his own system,” but rather in continuously measuring it against an alien methodological standard—one that Hayek himself challenges.

Carpio’s Rebuttal fails in its primary task because, rather than confronting the arguments present in my text, it evades them. Where my essay offered distinctions (such as that between Nomos and Thesis), the Rebuttal offers omission. Where my essay proposed complementarity (Mises and Hayek regarding the problem of knowledge), the Rebuttal insists upon a false dilemma. Carpio’s text ironically becomes “Exhibit A,” validating the central diagnosis of my original essay: that the Rothbardian–Hoppean critique of Hayek is, at its root, a begging of the question (petitio principii). It is a critique that judges an evolutionary system by the metrics of an axiomatic-constructivist system that Hayek himself identified as the error of Cartesian rationalism (Hayek, 1988/1989). It is crucial to note that Hayek was not attacking reason itself, but rather what he coined as “constructivist rationalism”: the belief that institutions are valid only if they are the product of deliberate design. His objective was not to denigrate reason, but to rescue it from this fatal conceit (Hayek, 1964/2014).

The central problem that this essay addresses is that the criticisms of Hoppe, Rothbard, and, by extension, Carpio, are founded upon a series of categorial errors. They interpret Hayek’s evolutionary epistemology as empiricism or relativism, accusing him of substituting logical truth with adaptive success. Carpio’s Rebuttal is explicit:

The problem is not that Hayek described the process of institutional evolution inaccurately. The problem is that he mistook description for defense. The fact that moral rules “evolve” tells us nothing about whether they are just. [...] Survival in history has never been proof of justice (Carpio, 2025, Sec. I).

This critique, however, collapses under the weight of its own methodological inconsistency. By demanding that the justification of a norm stem exclusively from a priori deduction, Carpio’s Rebuttal ignores the fact that Hans-Hermann Hoppe himself abandons this rigid standard and adopts a purely sociological and historical-evolutionary analysis—indistinguishable from Hayek’s—precisely when he must explain the origin of institutions.

Hoppe (1993/2006) draws a clear methodological line, admitting that praxeology is insufficient to explain the genesis of institutions: “With these questions one leaves the realm of economic theory... Why there are taxes is the subject matter of psychology, history, or sociology” (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 49). Even more revealing is his analysis regarding the origin of liberalism. Hoppe does not deduce capitalism from the “action axiom”; he describes it as an emergent process that sprang from the “international anarchy” of feudal Europe (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 57). In this environment, “small centers” of freedom, such as the cities of the Hanseatic League, were able to flourish because “governmental power had been whittled away” (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 58). It was this unprecedented prosperity that functionally validated the “private property ethic” (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 60), not a prior axiomatic deduction.

Therefore, Carpio faces a fatal contradiction: if Hayek’s evolutionary analysis (the historical “is”) is an illegitimate evasion, then Hoppe’s own sociological analysis regarding the origin of liberty is as well. If, on the contrary, historical-evolutionary analysis is a necessary complement to praxeology (as Hoppe demonstrates in practice), then Carpio’s critique of Hayek dissolves completely.

Furthermore, the argument cited previously (Sec. I), which Carpio presents as a refutation, is, in fact, the perfect specimen of the methodological error. The critics demand that Hayek’s system be justified using the very tools of constructivist rationalism that he seeks to refute. They demand an a priori justification for an order that Hayek describes as evolutionary and emergent. Trapped in Cartesian foundationalism, they are unable to process Hayek’s central thesis: that reason itself is a product of cultural evolution. Consequently, they interpret epistemic humility (fallibilism) as relativism and the functional Rule of Law as statism.

This essay refers to this functional Rule of Law using the Hayekian term Nomos, rather than the ambiguous “Rule of Law.” Hayek uses Nomos to refer to law as a norm of just conduct, abstract and arisen spontaneously (e.g., common law), in opposition to Thesis: the law created for the specific ends of an organization (e.g., state legislation). As will be demonstrated, Carpio’s critique systematically collapses these two concepts.

This demand is not only a methodological error, but it also clashes with a demonstrated logical impossibility. Karl Popper, in his refutation of historicism, established that the course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge. Given that we cannot predict, by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our scientific knowledge (for to do so would imply knowing today what we shall only know tomorrow), it follows logically that “we cannot predict the future course of human history” (Popper, 1957/2002, p. xi). Any theoretical system—be it historical materialism or a praxeology purporting to derive all future institutional history from present axioms—that attempts to bypass this logical restriction inevitably falls into the superstition that society must follow a path predetermined by current reason.

In response, this essay advances a double thesis. First, that Hayek’s epistemology not only does not contradict Mises’s methodological individualism; rather, it deepens it and endows it with indispensable cognitive realism. By incorporating the insuperable limits of individual reason and the dispersion of knowledge as the central economic problem, Hayek offers a more robust explanation of how large-scale social coordination is possible. His approach does not deny praxeology; it situates it within the context of an intergenerational learning process. Competition, for Hayek, is valuable precisely because “we do not know in advance the facts that determine the actions of competitors” (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 304). To demand an a priori justification for the results of a process whose value lies in discovering the unknown is, in itself, a constructivist categorial error.

Second, the Hayekian concept of coercion, far from destroying individual liberty, redefines it functionally to make it compatible with the extended order. Liberty in Hayek is not an axiomatic postulate, but a structural condition that emerges within a framework of impersonal and predictable rules (Nomos). Hayek defines coercion precisely, not as just any limitation, but as the subjection of the will of an individual to the ends of another: “when one man’s actions are made to serve another man’s will, not for his own but for the other’s purpose” (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 199). Therefore, his distinction between the impersonal constraints of Nomos (which serve no one’s specific end) and arbitrary coercion is not statism, but a recognition that liberty can only exist and be effective within a normative order that protects it from arbitrariness.

These two theses are intrinsically connected. Only if one understands that the fundamental social problem is radical ignorance (the epistemological problem), can one see that the fundamental solution is a framework of predictability (the juridical solution). Law, then, is not primarily a system of a priori deduced ethical mandates, as the critique pretends, but the principal social instrument for the transmission of knowledge. The Rothbard-Hoppe-Carpio critique of Hayekian coercion fails, as will be demonstrated, because it ignores this epistemological function of law.

II. THE METHODOLOGICAL DEBATE: BEGGING THE QUESTION IN ACTION

A. The Apriorist Core: Mises, Hoppe, and Deductive Certainty

To understand the vehemence of the critique, it is imperative to delineate the methodological paradigm that underpins it: praxeological apriorism. Inherited from Ludwig von Mises, it holds that economics is a purely deductive science (praxeology) that starts from a self-evident axiom: human beings act (Mises, 1949/1998, p. 11). The task of this science, as Hoppe defends, is “to determine the logical consequences that result from the performance of a given action... independently of how realistic the constructions themselves may be” (Hoppe, 1983, p. 53). This approach rejects empiricism, arguing that knowledge requires “aprioristic cognitive schemata”—a “functional a priori”—linked to action (Hoppe, 1976, p. 9) and that the teleology of human action cannot be reduced to the causality of the natural sciences (Mises, 1962/2006, p. 6).

Consequently, economic laws are considered apodictic truths, not empirical hypotheses. Their statements “are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori” (Mises, 1949/1998, p. 32), and, as Mises clarifies, this knowledge is given to us prior to all experience (Mises, 1940, p. 16). Rothbard insists that ignoring the primordial fact of free will is “profoundly and radically unscientific” (Rothbard, 1960/1979, p. 3). Hoppe seals the argument by qualifying any denial of the axiom as a “performative contradiction” (Hoppe, 1995/2007, p. 24). For this school, economic knowledge is deductive, not hypothetical; a priori, not a posteriori.

Now, none of this implies denying the utility or legitimacy of praxeology as an a priori science of action. I follow Mises here in recognizing that certain propositions about action (“individuals act,” “acting implies choosing,” etc.) do not depend on empirical experience for their validity. The point in dispute is not the logical status of those propositions, but the pretension of extending this same type of apodictic certainty to realms where, according to Hayek, it cannot reach: the complete design of institutions, legal codes, and moral norms for a complex society.

Therefore, the minimal sequence that orders the disagreement is: (1) Action (Mises): a priori category that makes economics possible as a logical science. (2) Institutions: coordination requires stable rules of property/contract. (3) Knowledge (Hayek): divided property generates local, tacit, and dispersed knowledge. (4) Prices: aggregate and transmit that knowledge, enabling calculation. Without (1) there is no theory; without (2) there are no incentives; without (3) there are no relevant data; without (4) there is no calculation.

B. Hayek: From Sensory Order to Social Order

Hayek’s response to this paradigm is not found, in the first instance, in his economic writings, but in his work on theoretical psychology, The Sensory Order (1952). This book, conceived in his youth, is the seed of all his subsequent philosophy. In it, Hayek argues that the human mind is neither a passive receptor of stimuli (classical empiricism) nor a logical machine that operates with innate categories (Kantianism), but rather a self-organized complex system.

The mind, for Hayek, is a classification apparatus (Hayek, 1952/2017, p. 280) that learns to group stimuli from the external world into patterns and categories. This mental order is not a faithful copy of a preexisting physical order; it is a structure formed and adapted through experience. Every perception is an act of interpretation: “Every sensation, even the ‘purest,’ must therefore be regarded as an interpretation of an event in the light of the past experience of the individual or of the species” (Hayek, 1952/2017, p. 280).

This conception is fundamental. If the mind itself is an adaptive and evolutionary order, how could reason, which is a product of this classification apparatus, have the capacity to design from scratch or comprehend a priori a system even more complex than itself, such as society (the extended order)?

This difference in epistemological approach can be better understood under the cognitive typology that Hayek himself proposed and that Ebeling recovers to contrast both thinkers: the distinction between the master of his subject and the puzzler. While Mises operated as a master, constructing an integrated and deductive logical system from clear axiomatic principles, Hayek operated as a puzzler, someone who needs to rethink arguments and advances groping his way instead of reasoning from immovable initial premises. Ebeling (2014) observes that while Mises’s system was formed as a coherent whole over two decades, “Hayek never wrote a systematic treatise on economics integrating and formulating his general conception of human choice, the social order, and the economic system” (p. 148).

This stylistic and cognitive distinction is fundamental: what Rothbardian critics interpret as a lack of axiomatic rigor (a deviation), is in reality the manifestation of a distinct mode of intellectual processing that seeks to reformulate problems—especially those of coordination—from an evolutionary perspective, without denying the validity of Misesian conclusions, but rather complementing its deductive architecture with an explanation of learning processes.

Here originates Hayek’s critique of “constructivist rationalism”: the belief that human institutions (language, law, market, morality) are only legitimate if they are the product of deliberate and conscious design. Hayek argues that indispensable institutions are the result of customs that evolved because they allowed the groups that practiced them to be more successful, often without anyone understanding why (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, p. 27).

In his final work, “The Fatal Conceit” (Hayek, 1988/1989), Hayek expounds an evolutionary or critical rationalism, which recognizes that the most important institutions of society were not invented, but rather emerged spontaneously. In “Individualism: True and False”, Hayek contrasts “false individualism” (Cartesian, constructivist) with “true individualism” (British, evolutionary): “The anti-rationalistic approach, which regards man not as a highly rational and intelligent being but as a very irrational and fallible being, whose individual errors are corrected only in the course of a social process... is probably the most characteristic feature of English individualism” (Hayek, 1946/2010, p. 55). The function of reason is not to construct society, but to comprehend and improve the functioning of these inherited traditions and institutions.

C. Begging the Question: The Rebuttal as Exhibit A

Here is where the critique of Hoppe, Rothbard, and, more recently, Carpio, commits its fundamental methodological error. They interpret Hayek’s evolutionary epistemology as a capitulation to empiricism, historicism, or moral relativism. Carpio’s Rebuttal articulates this with admirable clarity, falling directly into the trap that this essay diagnoses. Carpio writes:

The problem is not that Hayek described the process of institutional evolution inaccurately. The problem is that he mistook description for defense. The fact that moral rules “evolve” tells us nothing about whether they are just. [...] Survival in history has never been proof of justice (Carpio, 2025, Sec. I)

The “is” of historical success never entails the “ought” of moral legitimacy. The only path from is to ought passes through reason: the logic of action and the ethics implicit in discourse (Carpio, 2025, Sec. I).

This argument, presented by Carpio as a devastating refutation, constitutes the precise definition of begging the question (petitio principii). Strictly speaking, Hayek’s critics do not commit a trivial logical fallacy, but rather something subtler: they adopt as a methodological axiom the premise that only a propositional justification, deduced a priori, can confer legitimacy upon a norm. From that premise, it is inevitable that they view the evolutionary explanation as “evasion” or “relativism.” My point is not that Hoppe or Rothbard reason poorly within their own system—on the contrary, they are extremely consistent—but rather that they refuse to question the very criterion of justification that Hayek disputes: the notion that individual reason can, ab initio, construct the entire edifice of morality and law.

What my essay argued (and what Carpio evades) is that Hayek and Hoppe are playing different analytical games. Hoppe (and Carpio) demand a propositional and axiomatic justification of morality (an “ought” deduced a priori). Hayek, conversely, offers a functional and systemic justification. Carpio’s critique demands that Hayek’s system be justified using the very tools of constructivist rationalism that Hayek explicitly seeks to refute. It demands an a priori justification and logical deducibility (the “path of reason”) for an order that, by definition, Hayek describes as evolutionary and emergent, the embodied knowledge of which exceeds the capacity of individual reason.

In my essay, I did not defend the idea that “survival equals justice.” I argue that Hayek identified a process of evolutionary discovery of rules that enable social coordination and prosperity (the “Extended Order”). Rules (such as private property, honesty, contract enforcement) do not survive because they are true in the mathematical sense, but because they are fit (functional) for solving the problem of coordination under radical ignorance. Carpio attacks Hayek for not being a constructivist rationalist, which is precisely the central point of Hayek’s epistemological refutation. Carpio’s Rebuttal, therefore, does not refute this argument; it simply ignores it and reaffirms the apriorist premise that was in dispute. It is a monologue that fails to connect with the paradigm I am attempting to explain.

This refusal to abandon the apriorist bunker is, in itself, a form of fatal conceit. Carpio’s Rebuttal operates under the assumption that a complete set of just social rules can be deduced by reason and subsequently installed in society—an assumption identical to that of the rationalist contractualism that De Jasay dismantles. De Jasay argues that the idea that rational individuals would invent a State (or a complete legal code) for prudential reasons “on political hedonist grounds” (De Jasay, 1985/1998, p. 38) is an illusion. He demonstrates, for example, that prisoner’s dilemmas (such as international trade) supposedly requiring a coercive State are in fact resolved without it, since “Trade is typically an indefinite series of recurrent acts” where learning fosters cooperation (De Jasay, 1985/1998, p. 42). Hoppe’s apriorism is a praxeological “social contract”: an intellectual construction that, much like its Hobbesian or Rawlsian counterparts, fatally underestimates society’s self-ordering capacity (Nomos) and naively assumes that its rational construction (Thesis) is the only alternative to chaos.

This apriorist monologue is incapable of processing the thesis, rigorously defended by the constitutionalist tradition, that justice itself is logically dependent upon rules, and not the other way around. Brennan and Buchanan, in a Hayekian defense of the legal order, are explicit: “Our specific claim is that justice takes its meaning from the rules of the social order within which notions of justice are to be applied. To appeal to considerations of justice is to appeal to relevant rules. Talk of justice without reference to those rules is meaningless” (Brennan & Buchanan, 1985/2000, p. 108). Therefore, Carpio’s Rebuttal, by demanding that evolutionary rules justify themselves before an a priori tribunal of justice (the Argumentation Ethics), commits a categorial error: it employs a concept (justice) whose very meaning presupposes the object (rules) it purports to judge ab initio.

III. THE FALSE DILEMMA: PROPERTY (MISES) VS. KNOWLEDGE (HAYEK)

The core of the Rebuttal’s narrative regarding a Hayekian “defection” rests upon the creation of an artificial dichotomy. It contends that Hayek supplanted, diluted, or betrayed Mises’s genuine argument (grounded in property) in favor of a “lesser” and “confused” argument (grounded in knowledge).

A. The False Dichotomy: The Argument of the Rebuttal

Carpio’s Rebuttal constitutes a catalogue of this accusation:

Hayek, though trained in the same tradition, drifted toward Wieser’s subjectivism... In doing so, he diluted the Misesian insight […] El problema con el socialismo, para Mises, no es que carezca de información sino que abole la propiedad […] Hayek’s celebrated essay ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ replaced that syllogism [Mises’s] with an epistemic metaphor […] By shifting the argument from property to knowledge, Hayek transformed an impossibility proof into a complexity problem (Carpio, 2025, Sec. III).

The issue at hand is how a methodological error has calcified into dogma. This formulation, far from being mere hyperbole within the Rebuttal, constitutes the quintessence (locus classicus) of Hoppean critique—a postulate honed to the status of unquestionable doctrine. The insistence upon an irreconcilable dichotomy between Misesian calculation and Hayekian knowledge is the foundational maneuver that enables this school to dismiss Hayek. N. Stephan Kinsella himself, in his review of a work by Barnett (a legal theorist influenced by Hayek), articulates this very false disjunction. Kinsella (1999) explicitly criticizes Barnett for following Hayek, juxtaposing “Hayek’s emphasis on the role of knowledge in the economy” with “Ludwig von Mises’s more fundamental emphasis on the role of monetary prices in economic calculation” (p. 51). Kinsella continues, citing Salerno and Hoppe approvingly, to lament that “the differing views of Hayek and Mises have been improperly merged” (p. 51), making it clear that the “de-homogenization”—that is, the creation of this false dichotomy—is a deliberate intellectual project of the Rothbardian-Hoppean school, essential to their narrative of Hayekian “defection.” Carpio’s Rebuttal, therefore, is not presenting a new argument, but re-enacting a begging of the question that has defined his school for decades: the insistence that these two concepts are antagonistic, when in reality they are sequential and inseparable.

Nevertheless, this narrative of a supposed “betrayal” or “deviation” (which Carpio attributes to Hayek) rests entirely upon a specific historical genealogy: the idea that there exists a “pure” causal-realist line (Menger–Böhm-Bawerk–Mises) that was contaminated by an “equilibrium” line (Wieser–Schumpeter–Hayek) (Salerno, 1999, p. 37). Carpio’s Rebuttal requires this division to be clean in order to portray Hayek as a defector. The problem with this genealogy is that it collapses under the weight of its own historical evidence. The irony, which the Rebuttal omits, is that the “hero” of the pure line, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, personally showed no particular regard for Mises in available correspondence while extolling and promoting Schumpeter.

The very historiographical evidence that the critique utilizes to define these lines of thought (Salerno, 1999) documents this inconvenient reality. Salerno (1999) notes that, in his correspondence, “Böhm-Bawerk’s references to Mises betray not the slightest degree of personal regard or appreciation of his abilities” (p. 41). When Mises published his The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Böhm-Bawerk wrote to Wicksell with notable coldness: “Mises is a student of mine and of Prof. Wieser, which, however, does not mean that I would want to take responsibility for all his views” (Böhm-Bawerk, quoted in Salerno, 1999, p. 42).

By contrast, Böhm-Bawerk, despite his profound criticisms of Schumpeter’s theory of interest, considered him “the most gifted among them” and it was “largely due to Böhm-Bawerk’s intercession that Schumpeter became the youngest [...] full professor in the Empire” (Salerno, 1999, p. 41). Salerno himself (1999) concludes: “from this, it must be concluded that even Böhm-Bawerk [...] considered [Schumpeter] far the most promising of the third generation of Austrian economists” (p. 42). This destroys the premise of the Rebuttal. Carpio’s critique is based on a revisionist genealogy that Mises and Hayek would not have recognized. If the very godfather of the causal-realist tradition (Böhm-Bawerk) saw more future in the “heretic” Schumpeter than in the “orthodox” Mises, the accusation that Hayek “betrayed” a pure line by aligning himself with the Schumpeter/Wieser tradition (Salerno, 1999, pp. 40, 43) is an unsustainable anachronism.

This formulation is the keystone of the Hoppean critique. My original essay did not ignore it: it identified it as the central misunderstanding and addressed it head-on. My argument was not that Hayek was right instead of Mises, but that Hayek’s epistemology is the necessary explanation of why Mises’s argument concerning property is irrefutably correct. They are complementary, not antagonistic. Peter Boettke, in his essay dedicated to dismantling this false dichotomy, argues that Hayek’s “knowledge problem” is precisely what gives force to Mises’s “calculation problem,” rescuing it from a static neoclassical interpretation:

Hayek’s ‘knowledge’ problem... serve as the backdrop against which economic calculation proceeds. If these data are assumed to be given, as in the general equilibrium models of socialism, then Mises’ argument becomes theoretically trivial and just practically burdensome. But these data cannot be assumed to be given, as they are intimately tied to the institution of private property and the market process and do not come into existence in the absence of that process. It is the context of the market... which gives rise to the market’s own error-corrective character. And, it is this character of the market which is the common ground in the theory of the market economy presented by Mises and Hayek (Boettke, 2001, p. 43).

My original Refutation was clear: Hayek’s epistemology not only does not contradict Mises’s methodological individualism, but rather deepens it and endows it with an indispensable cognitive realism. By incorporating the insuperable limits of individual reason and the dispersion of knowledge as the central economic problem, Hayek offers a more robust explanation of how large-scale social coordination is possible.

B. The Dismantling of the False Dichotomy

The analysis of the Rebuttal completely ignores this thesis of complementarity. Carpio, following Hoppe, insists on presenting as a dilemma (Property OR Knowledge) what my essay demonstrated is an unbreakable logical sequence (Property, THEREFORE, Dispersed Knowledge, THEREFORE, Necessity of Prices). The deepest irony, bordering on intellectual absurdity, is found in Section IV of the Rebuttal, where Carpio believes he deals a decisive blow. In attempting to refute Hayek, he writes: “Hayek’s emphasis on the dispersion of knowledge mistakes the symptom for the cause. Knowledge is dispersed because property is divided” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. IV).

Carpio presents this phrase as if it were a refutation of Hayek, when in reality it is the most succinct and precise description of the thesis of my original essay. It is exactly because property is divided (Mises’s institutional starting point) that the knowledge relevant for production (Hayek’s knowledge of “the particular circumstances of time and place”) is necessarily and irreducibly dispersed and cannot be aggregated. Without private property, the knowledge relevant for economic calculation would not even exist in a usable form. Carpio does not refute Hayek; he stumbles upon the Misesian-Hayekian synthesis and presents it, mistakenly, as a critique.

In fact, Carpio’s attempt to divorce “property” (Mises) from “knowledge” (Hayek) collapses the foundational structure of Rothbard’s praxeology. For Rothbard (1960/1979), the action axiom is inseparable from a knowledge problem. He writes explicitly: “Man is born with no innate knowledge of what ends to choose or how to use which means to attain them” (p. 3). Human action, therefore, is not merely “choice,” but a learning process: “Having no innate knowledge of how to survive and prosper, he must learn what ends and means to adopt, and he is liable to make errors along the way” (Rothbard, 1960/1979, p. 4). For Rothbard, “knowledge” (Hayek) and “purposeful action” (Mises) are not two separate arguments; they are two facets of the same axiom.

Likewise, Carpio’s attempt to separate “property” from “knowledge” is a direct violation of Rothbard’s central argument regarding the very justification of property. In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard’s defense of original appropriation (homesteading) is intrinsically epistemological. A man acquires property, according to Rothbard, not simply by being physically present, but by “mixing his labor” (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 34) with a resource, a process that requires “powers of observation, abstraction, thought: in short, his reason” (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 30). Property emerges because an actor uses his knowledge (“ideas” and “technological know-how”) to transform the raw material given by nature (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 49). For Rothbard, property isthe embodiment of knowledge applied to matter. Therefore, Carpio’s assertion that “knowledge is dispersed because property is divided” is a Rothbardian tautology. Divided property is dispersed and applied knowledge. Carpio’s critique not only fails to refute Hayek, but it dismantles the epistemological foundation of Rothbard’s theory of property. Therefore, Carpio’s critique, by creating this false dichotomy, not only misunderstands Hayek, but also dismantles Rothbard’s own premise, revealing a misunderstanding that human action is, at its root, a learning process to overcome ignorance.

Indeed, Hoppe’s own explanation of the origin of society in Democracy: The God That Failed is a sociological evolutionary reconstruction, not a praxeological deduction. Hoppe describes a spontaneous process where cooperation emerges from “integrated family-households” and then evolves toward “separate households, villages, tribes, nations” (Hoppe, 2001, p. 175). It is only as a result of this evolutionary process and the “increasing diversity and differentiation” that “professional traders, merchants, and trading centers” arise (Hoppe, 2001, p. 175). This narrative, which describes the appearance of complex orders (cities, international trade) as an undesigned result of the evolution of simpler structures (the family), is methodologically indistinguishable from Hayek’s “spontaneous order” approach. Hoppe, therefore, uses an a priori method for ethics (Argumentation Ethics) but an evolutionary/sociological method for institutional history, validating this essay’s thesis that both approaches are necessary.

What Carpio calls “defection,” Mises called “contribution.” My original essay documented this with a direct quote that Carpio’s Rebuttal, predictably, omits completely: “The fact that knowledge exists dispersed, incomplete, and inconsistent in many individual minds has been pointed out by Hayek, and this is very important... Under capitalism, the coordination of the various fragments of knowledge is achieved via the market” (Greaves, 1958).

A Rebuttal that ignores such inconvenient primary evidence is not an exercise in refutation, but of confirmation bias. Mises saw no defection, but a valuable contribution. Mises’s (1920) argument is logical-institutional: without property there are no prices; without prices there is no calculation. Hayek’s (1937, 1945) argument is cognitive-epistemological: it explains why that calculation is impossible at a deeper level, demonstrating that prices are the only mechanism capable of transmitting and using the knowledge that divided property generates. Hayek provided the cognitive micro-foundations for Mises’s institutional macro-conclusion.

Historical evidence suggests that Mises not only accepted Hayek’s epistemic turn, but understood that it completed his own critique of socialism. Ebeling (2014) emphasizes that, for Mises, Hayek’s contribution regarding the dispersion of knowledge was not a poetic metaphor replacing calculation, but the explanation of the mechanism whereby the market overcomes the limitations of the individual mind. Mises was emphatic regarding this point:

Under capitalism, the coordination of the various bits of knowledge is brought about through the market. In a socialistic society it must be effected either in the mind of the dictator or in the minds of the members of the dictator’s committee (Mises, cited in Ebeling, 2014, p. 153).

Far from the dichotomy posited by Carpio, Mises considered that “the fact that knowledge exists dispersed, incomplete, and inconsistent in many individual minds has been pointed out by Hayek, and this is very important” (Mises, cited in Ebeling, 2014, p. 153). Ebeling’s reading confirms that both approaches are “parallel and complementary”: Mises establishes the impossibility of rational calculation without market prices; Hayek explains that those prices are the only vehicle capable of encapsulating the dispersed information necessary for said calculation (Ebeling, 2014, p. 153).

The narrative of a methodological “rupture” ignores the precise nature of Hayek’s “transformation” in the 1930s. Bruce Caldwell, in his meticulous analysis of Hayek’s seminal 1937 essay, “Economics and Knowledge,” argues that said essay was a deliberate and gentle attempt to redefine the limits of Misesian apriorism, not to abolish it. Hayek’s turning point was recognizing that, while the “logic of choice” for an isolated individual may be a priori and tautological, the central problem of economics—the coordination of many individuals—introduces an inescapable “empirical factor”: learning and the communication of knowledge. Caldwell documents Hayek’s own reflection regarding this attempt at persuasion:

I believe it was in that same article on economics and knowledge where I made the point that... the empirical element enters in people learning about what the other people do. And you can’t claim, as Mises does, that the whole theory of the market is an a priori system, because of the empirical factor which comes in that one person learns about what another person does. That was a gentle attempt to persuade Mises to give up the a priori claim, but I failed in persuading him. [Laughter.]... Curiously enough, while Mises was very resentful of any criticism by his pupils... he took my critique silently and even approved the article as if he had not been aware that it was a criticism of his own views (Hayek, cited in Caldwell, 2004, p. 221).

C. Impossibility vs, Complexity: The Deconstruction of a Slogan

Carpio’s critique that Hayek “transformed a proof of impossibility into a problem of complexity” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. III) is a repetition of the Hoppean slogan that my essay already deconstructed. This slogan suggests that Hayek’s complexity problem could, as Carpio insinuates, “one day be approximated by technology” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. III),¹ whereas Mises’s impossibility is absolute.

This is a grave misunderstanding of both thinkers. The “Impossibility vs. Complexity” slogan is the central rhetorical tool through which apriorist criticism evades epistemology. This line of attack, demonstrated by Kinsella (1999), consists of presenting Mises’s argument as pure logical proof, while caricaturing Hayek’s as mere data engineering.

In summarizing Mises’s argument (via Hoppe), Kinsella (1999) asserts that “the fatal error of socialism is the absence of private property… and, by implication, the absence of economic calculation” (p. 51). In the same context, he presents the Hayekian critique as distinct and lesser, summarizing it in the idea that “socialism’s impossibility stems from its inability to communicate dispersed knowledge” (Kinsella, 1999, p. 51). On this basis, he even cites with approval Hoppe’s well-known dictum that “Hayek’s contribution to the debate on socialism must be discarded as false, confused, and irrelevant” (Kinsella, 1999, p. 55). This is precisely what the present essay diagnoses: not a refutation, but a petitio principii that declares “irrelevant” the element—the problem of dispersed knowledge—that must be integrated to fully comprehend Mises’s argument. This maneuver—separating calculation (Mises) from knowledge (Hayek)—is what allows Carpio’s Rebuttal to commit its categorial error: ignoring that it is precisely the nature of knowledge (tacit, dispersed, to be discovered) which causes the impossibility of calculation, turning Hayek’s complexity into a synonym for Mises’s impossibility.

The complexity Hayek speaks of is Mises’s impossibility. However, the impossibility vs. complexity slogan relies on Salerno’s influential (though here considered erroneous) distinction regarding the calculation debate. According to Salerno, Hayek and Robbins focused erroneously on the impracticability of gathering dispersed knowledge to solve the system of simultaneous equations. In contrast, for Mises, according to this same interpretation, the equations themselves were the error: “But for Mises, the economy was always in deep and fundamental disequilibrium and these equations were, therefore, completely irrelevant to the problem of economic calculation” (Salerno, 1999, p. 51). Carpio/Hoppe’s critique adopts this reading of Salerno, viewing Hayek as an equilibrium theorist who sees only a “data” problem, while Mises is seen as a disequilibrium theorist who sees a “logic” problem. It is not the complexity of an engineering equation with 10,000 variables (a complicated but solvable problem). It is the organized complexity (Hayek, 1964/2014) of a system. As Hayek explained in “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” society is not a phenomenon of “disorganized complexity” (statistically treatable), but organized, where the structure depends on the connection between individual elements and it is “really impossible to determine all the particular circumstances” (Hayek, 1964/2014, pp. 265-269). Science in this field cannot predict specific events, only “pattern predictions” (p. 264). It is a system where:

1. The relevant knowledge (of time and place) is tacit and cannot be articulated or transmitted to a central planner.

2. The relevant knowledge (future preferences, innovations) does not yet exist and is created only by the market’s discovery process.

3. The number of variables is the totality of human minds interacting in real time.

A problem with complexity of this nature is not a problem of complexity in the engineering sense; it is a logical and metaphysical impossibility of centralization. Hayek’s critique did not “reopen the door” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. III) to market socialism; it closed it even more tightly, demonstrating that even if the central planner were a benevolent angel (solving the incentive problem) and possessed Mises’s Logic of Action (solving the praxeological problem), they would still fail because they would be epistemologically blind.

It is important to emphasize that this formulation—“logical and metaphysical impossibility”—is my manner of making explicit what is implicit in the Mises–Hayek combination. Mises shows that, without private property, no monetary calculation is possible; Hayek shows that, even assuming property, the relevant knowledge is tacit, dispersed, and often not yet existent, so no central organ can gather it. Together, both lines of argumentation go beyond a mere “computational capacity problem”: they point to a limit of principle on what any centralized mind can do in such a social system.

The opposition “impossibility (Mises) vs. complexity (Hayek)” is apparent: Hayek’s organized complexityexplains why central calculation is impossible in principle, not just difficult in practice. If relevant knowledge is tacit, contextual, and partly nonexistent, no ex ante algorithm can substitute the competitive process that generates it.

D. Signals vs. Appraisals: Another False Dichotomy

Finally, the Rebuttal (Sec. IV) insists that calling a price a “signal” (Hayek) is a “subtle but lethal error,” and that prices are “appraisals” (Mises/Rothbard). “To call a price a “signal” is to commit a subtle but lethal error. [...] But an appraisal is not a signal; it is an act of judgment. [...] Hayek’s emphasis on the dispersion of knowledge mistakes the symptom for the cause” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. IV). This is, again, creating a distinction where there is no functional difference. It is a sterile dichotomy. The same misunderstanding is made explicit in Kinsella (1999) when, after admitting that prices result from the subjective evaluations of goods by sellers and buyers, he concludes: “Prices are exchange ratios. Besides these ratios, what other information could monetary prices communicate?” (p. 53). The question, which he frames as rhetorical, is precisely the one Hayek answers: the “exchange ratio” is the condensed footprint of a set of judgments and particular circumstances of time and place that no individual observer knows in its entirety. Kinsella’s inability—and, by extension, Carpio’s—to see that this exchange ratio is the signal transmitting information no individual actor possesses is the very definition of the categorial error here denounced: reducing price to mere static data, instead of understanding it as the result of subjective valuations and, simultaneously, as an epistemic signal for third parties.

As my essay contends, prices function precisely as both, in an inseparable sequence.

1. Private property (Mises) gives individuals the incentive and the right to make...

2. ...Subjective appraisals (Mises/Rothbard) regarding the use of their resources, based on their...

3. ...Local and tacit knowledge (Hayek).

4. These appraisals are expressed in the market through bids and offers, culminating in a...

5. ...Price (an historical fact), which then functions as a...

6. ...Signal (Hayek) for all other market actors, who need not know the subjective appraisals nor the tacit knowledge that formed it, but only the price itself.

A price is simultaneously the result of subjective appraisals under property rights and a signal for third parties who do not know those appraisals or their causes. Denying either of the two sides breaks the epistemic function of the price system. That some interpreters have read Hayek as suggesting a simple complexity problem “to be solved with more data and better algorithms” says more about their own assumptions than about Hayek’s text. If one takes his theory of “complex phenomena” seriously, Hayek is precisely denying that relevant knowledge can pre-exist market interaction, or that it can be described by a finite and stable set of data. In this sense, the label “complexity problem” is misleading if interpreted in engineering terms: it is organized complexity generating new knowledge, and that is incompatible with any classical conception of planning.

IV. THE CENTRAL EVASION: THE FAILURE TO REFUTE COERCION AND NOMOS

If the Rebuttal’s failure regarding the Mises/Hayek debate is a failure to grasp complementarity, its failure regarding the debate on coercion is even more flagrant. It is not a misunderstanding; it is a total evasion of the central argument.

A. The Ignored Distinction: Nomos vs. Thesis

The Rebuttal devotes its Section VI (“Coercion Redefined and Liberty Diluted”) to attacking the Hayekian definition of coercion. Carpio describes it as “disastrously elastic” and a “dissolution” of liberty:

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek attempts to define coercion as the arbitrary control of one’s environment by another’s will... but the definition is disastrously elastic. [...] Rothbard restores the precision that Hayek abandoned. Coercion is the initiation of physical force or the threat thereof against person or property [...] Nothing more, nothing less (Carpio, 2025, Sec. VI).

This is the standard Rothbardian critique, word for word. This original essay not only anticipated this critique, but based its entire defense of Hayek (Section IV of the Refutation) on a fundamental conceptual distinction that Hayek establishes (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021) and which apriorist critics systematically ignore. This is the distinction between:

• Nomos: Law as a set of abstract, general, impersonal rules independent of ends (e.g., “thou shalt not steal,” contract rules). These rules do not tell anyone what to do, but create a framework of predictabilitywithin which all individuals can pursue their own ends.

• Thesis: Law as a teleological, specific, and end-dependent command (“produce 10,000 boots,” “pay this specific group,” “give me your wallet”). These commands subjugate the will of an individual to the ends of another.

Rothbard himself (1960/1979) provides us with the tool to dismantle Carpio’s simplistic definition (initiation of force). Rothbard insists that the fundamental methodological error is treating humans as mechanical objects: “Stones, molecules, planets cannot choose their courses; their behavior is strictly and mechanically determined for them. Only human beings possess free will and consciousness... they must choose their course of action” (p. 3). Applying this very principle, Carpio/Rothbard’s definition of coercion (physical force) is, in itself, a “false mechanical analogy” if applied simplistically. It treats law like a social engineer applying a template (the NAP) to passive objects.

By contrast, Hayek’s Nomos/Thesis distinction is the only one that respects the primordial fact of free will that Rothbard defends. Thesis (the command of the planner or the robber) is coercion precisely because it treats man as a “stone,” mechanically determining his course for another’s ends. Nomos (traffic rules, property laws) does not do this; it provides a framework of predictability so that actors with “free will” may choose their owncourses of action. Ironically, it is the Hayekian definition that is truly “scientific” by Rothbard’s standard, while Carpio’s mechanical application of the NAP is “profoundly and radically unscientific” because it “ignores... his volition” and the epistemic function of law to coordinate those volitional actors.

Carpio’s Rebuttal insists that Rothbard’s precise definition of coercion (the initiation of physical force) (Carpio, 2025, Sec. VI) is superior to Hayek’s “elastic” distinction. However, this Rothbardian definition collapses into incoherence precisely because it lacks the Nomos/Thesis functional distinction. Rothbard (1982/1998) initially defines the criminal as “anyone who initiates violence against another man and his property” (p. 51). However, he immediately recognizes that this formula is insufficient. Positing the case of A forcefully taking a watch from B, he admits that “we certainly cannot [simply infer that A is a criminal]… we do not know if A is indeed a thief, or if A is merely retrieving his own watch that B had previously stolen from him” (pp. 51–52). From that example, Rothbard is forced to “modify or, rather, clarify the basic rule” and maintains that no one has the right to aggress against another’s legitimate or just property (p. 52). But the legitimacy of title can no longer be defined by the simple physical description of the act of force: it requires a set of general rules regarding acquisition, transfer, and restitution. In other words, it presupposes a corpus of abstract norms—a Nomos—that allows qualifying the same physical gesture (taking a watch) as either criminal aggression or legitimate restitution of what is one’s own.

My central argument was that the restrictions of Nomos (the “rules of the game”) are not “coercion,” but the condition of possibility for liberty. True coercion is Thesis (arbitrariness). This categorial blindness to the Nomos/Thesis distinction is endemic in apriorist criticism, as evidenced again in Kinsella’s (1999) analysis. In reviewing Barnett’s legal theory, Kinsella is forced to confront an explicitly Hayekian argument regarding the epistemic function of law. His reaction is a case study of methodological evasion: “Barnett’s various [Hayekian] ‘knowledge problems’ are thus better recast as conflict problems” (Kinsella, 1999, p. 59). Instead of asking how general rules of conduct transmit information, reduce uncertainty, and enable coordination—the central question of Nomos—Kinsella redefines them by decree as simple instruments for resolving clashes of already given rights. It is, again, a petitio principii: what was under discussion, the cognitive and coordinating function of the legal order, is eliminated, replacing it with a purely conflictual scheme in which law becomes a mere application of the NAP. By doing this, Kinsella (and by extension, Carpio) surgically removes the core of the Hayekian argument. The function of law as a knowledge transmission mechanism (Nomos) enabling coordination is no longer discussed; only law as a set of property deductions to avoid physical conflicts is discussed. This reduction is a begging of the question that refuses to see the epistemic function of law, which is, precisely, Hayek’s central thesis.

The Rebuttal’s insistence on rejecting this fundamental distinction, labeling it “elastic” and contrasting it with Rothbard’s “precision” (initiation of force), ignores that Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1993/2006) himself builds his analysis of state domination precisely upon this same dualism. What Hayek terms Nomos (private, abstract, and spontaneous law of the market) and Thesis (organizational, concrete, and teleological law of government), Hoppe identifies as the fundamental contrast between “private law” and “public law.”

For Hoppe, the essence of the State is not merely the “initiation of force” in a legal vacuum, but the “creation of a system of public law superimposed upon private law” (1993/2006, p. 129). It is precisely this “domination and infiltration of public law over and into private law” that constitutes “class justice” and the motor of exploitation (1993/2006, p. 129). Hoppe (1993/2006) is unequivocal in an extensive direct quotation:

Class justice, i.e., a dualism of one set of laws for the rulers and another for the ruled, comes to bear in this dualism of public and private law and in the domination and infiltration of public law over and into private law. It is not because private-property rights are recognized by law, as Marxists think, that class justice is established. Rather, class justice comes into being precisely whenever a legal distinction exists between a class of persons acting under and being protected by public law and another class acting under and being protected instead by some subordinate private law (Hoppe,1993/2006, p. 129).

Therefore, when Carpio rejects Hayek’s distinction as a statist confusion, he is not only evading the central thesis of my essay, but is, ironically, repudiating Hoppe’s own methodology for analyzing the nature of state coercion. Both Hayek and Hoppe recognize that state aggression is not a simple act of theft, but the substitution of one type of legal order (Nomos/Private Law) for another (Thesis/Public Law).

The apriorist critique’s pretension of evaluating the justice of society as a whole based on adherence to a single axiom also incurs what Popper calls the fallacy of holism. Popper distinguishes between studying society as a totality (the sum of all its properties and relations) and studying selective aspects. Attempting to control or judge the totality is logically impossible and leads to tyranny or inefficiency. As Popper notes: “Wholes in the sense of totalities cannot be made the object of scientific study, or of any other activity, such as control or reconstruction” (Popper, 1957/2002, p. 71). The Hayekian Nomos respects this limitation by regulating only abstract aspects of conduct, whereas the imposition of a totalizing deductive ethics (a universal Thesis) attempts the impossible: to govern the totality of human interactions under a single logical mandate.

B. The Rebuttal’s Methodological Evasion

Juan Fernando Carpio’s Rebuttal confronts this—the central argument of my section regarding coercion—in the only manner available to it: by ignoring it entirely. Across the ten sections of the Rebuttal, the word Nomosdoes not appear. The word Thesis does not appear. The conceptual distinction between general/abstract rules (Nomos) and specific/arbitrary commands (Thesis) is neither mentioned, nor analyzed, nor refuted.

Carpio merely reiterates the Rothbardian definition (physical force and nothing else) as though my initial essay had not already provided a detailed deconstruction of why that definition is (a) insufficient for a complex social order and (b) commits a categorial error by conflating two functionally distinct types of restriction (confounding traffic rules with the command of a carjacker). For Carpio’s Rebuttal to have succeeded, it would have needed to demonstrate why the distinction between Nomos and Thesis is invalid. It would have required arguing why a general rule such as “thou shalt not steal” (Nomos) is functionally identical to the command “give me your wallet” (Thesis). By failing to do so, Carpio does not engage with my argument. He simply evades it.

Carpio’s evasion of the Nomos/Thesis distinction is even more flagrant, given that Hoppe himself constructs his ethical justification of capitalism upon a functionally identical dichotomy. For Hoppe, ethical norms must pass the test of “universalization,” a principle which, according to him, “requires that, to be just, a rule must be general and applicable to everyone and every person in the same way” (Hoppe, 1990/2010, p. 14). Hoppe explicitly condemns socialism precisely because it is based on: “Particularistic rules... of the type ‘I can hit you, but you cannot hit me,’ [which] are, as will be seen in the course of this treatise, at the very base of all practiced forms of socialism” (Hoppe, 1990/2010, p. 14).

This distinction is exactly Hayek’s: Nomos is the general and universalizable rule (the Golden Rule that Hoppe invokes [p. 14]); whereas Thesis is the “particularistic rule” that applies different rights to different classes of people (rulers and ruled). Furthermore, Hoppe’s (1990/2010) distinction between “natural” and “aggressive” property titles perfectly replicates the Nomos/Thesis dualism. Hoppe defines a natural title (our Nomos) as that based on “the existence of an objective, intersubjectively ascertainable link between owner and property owned,” that is, first use. Conversely, he defines an “aggressive” title (our Thesis) as one that “only [invokes] purely subjective evidence” or a mere verbal declaration (Hoppe, 1990/2010, p. 23). Hoppe ridicules these verbal declarations as invalid justifications: “I am bigger, I am smarter, I am poorer or I am very special, etc.!” (Hoppe, 1990/2010, p. 24).

Therefore, Carpio’s critique, which brands the Hayekian distinction as elastic and statist, self-destructs. Hoppe himself uses this very distinction (objective/abstract/universal rule vs. subjective/arbitrary/particular declaration) as the very foundation of his justification of private property.

Carpio’s Rebuttal, by insisting on an axiomatic and constructivist definition of law (the NAP deduced a priori), ironically places itself in direct collision with Murray N. Rothbard’s own description of a functional legal system. When Rothbard describes a private justice system in For a New Liberty, the model he praises is not a newly deduced axiomatic code, but rather the common law, precisely the best historical example of the Hayekian Nomos. Rothbard celebrates that “the main body of Anglo-Saxon law, the justly celebrated common law, was developed over centuries by competing judges applying time-honored principles rather than the shifting decrees of the State” (Rothbard, 1978/2006, p. 283). In this system, “it was universally held that the judge did not make the law... the judge’s task... was to find the law in the accepted principles of the common law” (Rothbard, 1978/2006, p. 283). Rothbard also praises the “law merchant” and “admiralty law” as complete legal systems developed entirely by private courts, outside the State (Rothbard, 1978/2006, pp. 282–283). Therefore, Rothbard himself validates the Hayekian thesis that functional law is a spontaneous, discovered, and evolutionary order (Nomos), not an axiomatic construction (Thesis). Carpio’s Rebuttal, in rejecting this model, not only evades Hayek’s argument but also ignores Rothbard’s own solution to the problem of law.

This evasion is the central contradiction of the Hoppean critique. Carpio’s Rebuttal ignores the Nomos/Thesisdistinction because Hoppe himself, ironically, uses it as the fundamental pillar of his proposal for a libertarian social order. In his chapter on conservatism and libertarianism, Hoppe confronts the problem of how a private property order (a Hayekian cosmos) can be maintained over time. His answer is not simply the application of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), but the need for an underlying normative structure—a Nomos—which he terms a covenant.

Hoppe argues that the survival of a libertarian society depends on its ability to expel those who advocate ideas incompatible with the covenant. In doing so, Hoppe exactly replicates Hayek’s distinction: the “covenant” (the general rule of protecting property) is the Nomos, while the ideas that must be expelled (such as communism or democracy) are the Thesis (arbitrary commands that subvert the Nomos). Carpio’s Rebuttal demands a simple definition of coercion (physical force), whereas Hoppe demonstrates that the libertarian order must use force (exclusion) not only against physical aggression but also against ideological subversion.

In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society (Hoppe, 2001, p. 218).

This argument is functional, not aprioristic. Hoppe does not maintain that expelling a communist is just because the communist has initiated force (he may not have done so), but rather because his ideology is functionally incompatible with the survival of the Nomos. Hoppe, therefore, validates the central thesis of my essay: liberty is not a floating axiom; it is a structural condition (Hayek’s Nomos) that must be defended functionally, even against non-physical threats, in order to survive.

C. The Calumny of Scarcity: A Textual Falsehood

Worse yet, Carpio repeats the accusation that Hayek’s concept “transforms economic scarcity into a moral fault” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. VI). This is a misrepresentation that my original essay had already refuted explicitly and textually, directly quoting Hayek on this very point: “Even if the threat of starvation... impels me to accept a distasteful job at a very low wage, even if I am ‘at the mercy’ of the only man willing to employ me, I am not coerced by him or by anyone else... the effect on my freedom is not different from that of any natural calamity—a fire or a flood that destroys my house...” (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 204). [Hayek] expressly distinguishes ‘natural calamity’ from ‘subjection to others’ ends’; therefore, poverty or scarcity do not qualify as coercion within his framework.

My essay demonstrated that Hayek explicitly distinguishes coercion from scarcity. Carpio’s Rebuttal ignores this textual evidence and merely repeats the false accusation. This is not a refutation; it is the repetition of a charge despite the fact that proof of its falsity has been directly presented. Indeed, by insisting upon this falsehood, he ignores Rothbard’s (1982/1998) careful distinction between a criminal invasion of rights and a tragic situation of scarcity. When analyzing “lifeboat situations,” Rothbard is explicit that libertarian ethics apply even there: the first occupant (homesteader) of the boat or plank holds the property right, and anyone who forcibly ejects him “commits an act of aggression” (pp. 150–152). Rothbard never suggests that the drowning castaway (the subject of scarcity) is being “coerced” by the occupant of the boat. He simply notes that, although the situation is tragic, “the right of property continues... to be absolute” (p. 153). Consequently, both Rothbard and Hayek agree that extreme scarcity does not constitute coercion. Carpio’s critique is not only textually false regarding Hayek, but it is also incoherent with Rothbard’s own extreme examples.

D. Nomos as a Hidden Presupposition

Indeed, the simple definition by Rothbard that Carpio so lauds (the initiation of force) implicitly presupposes Hayek’s concept of Nomos. How do we distinguish the (aggressive) initiation of force from defensive (legitimate) force? How do we know if an act of force is an assault or the execution of a contract? Whether it is aggression or restitution? The answer is: by consulting a system of general and abstract rules of conduct... that is to say, a Nomos.

The Rothbardian system cannot function without some type of corpus of general norms determining what is whose property, what constitutes fulfillment or violation of a contract, what may be legitimately defended by force, etc. In other words, it needs something functionally equivalent to a Nomos: a framework of abstract and predictable rules that are not made case-by-case to favor a particular end. Rothbard and Hoppe do not deny this; in fact, they attempt to derive such a corpus from the non-aggression principle and original appropriation. My point is not that they “lack” a Nomos, but that their own normative project depends on the existence of an order of general rules that strongly resembles the type of thing Hayek describes and which they disqualify as mere “evolutionary convention.”

Viewed in this light, Rothbard’s apparently “simple” definition of coercion (“initiation of physical force or threat thereof”) only becomes operative when placed against a background of Nomos: general definitions of title, transfer, breach, restitution, etc. Without that background, the NAP is an empty formula: it does not tell us if a specific use of force is defensive or aggressive. On this point, the Hayekian contribution does not compete with the NAP; it makes it applicable in a complex society by providing a framework of impersonal and stable rules within which we can classify facts as “aggression” or “defense.”

This function of predictability is, in fact, the raison d’être of rules. The apriorist critique, focused exclusively on the derivation of the rule (from the NAP), ignores its operative function (enabling coordination). Brennan and Buchanan point out that the critique of market failure (or, in this case, of evolutionary failure) often ignores the rules governing individual behavior (Buchanan, 1985/2000, p. 16). The primordial function of the Hayekian Nomos is precisely that which B&B (1985/2000) attribute to the rules of the road: “Rules provide to each actor predictability about the behavior of others. This predictability takes the form of information or informational boundaries about the actions of those involved in the interaction” (Buchanan, 1985/2000, p. 10). The Rothbardian NAP, to be more than an ethical slogan, must presuppose a functional constitutional order that provides exactly this predictability.

It is imperative to note that even Mises himself, often portrayed as a pure apriorist oblivious to empirical learning processes, incorporated elements that fulfill a function analogous to that of Hayek’s Nomos and price signals: “ideal types.” Ebeling argues that Mises, influenced by Max Weber, developed a theory of expectations based on the construction of ideal types derived from experience. These ideal types serve as the anticipatory framework through which actors attempt to coordinate their actions (Ebeling, 2014, pp. 156–157).

Thus, Ebeling concludes that Hayek’s work on the cognitive function of prices “refined and extended Mises’s analysis [...] filling in a missing element in the theory of prices as a communication mechanism” (Ebeling, 2014, p. 156). If Mises needed (empirical) “ideal types” to explain the formation of expectations, and Hayek needed prices to explain the transmission of knowledge, both were addressing the same problem of coordination under uncertainty. The Rebuttal’s insistence on radically separating both systems ignores that the “consistent subjectivism” of the Austrian School requires both the logic of choice (Mises) and the theory of expectations and learning (Hayek/later Mises) (Ebeling, 2014, p. 157).

This presupposition of an underlying Nomos is visible in Rothbard’s own definition of property rights. In justifying a sculptor’s right over his work, Rothbard notes that he “has transformed the nature-given matter... into another shape dictated by his own ideas” (Rothbard, 1978/2006, p. 37). This justification depends on a set of implicit rules (a Nomos) that society recognizes: that transformation based on ideas generates title, that the nature-given matter was previously unowned, and that one’s energy is an extension of self-ownership. These are not mere deductions from the NAP, but a set of culturally understood norms regarding what constitutes a legitimate appropriation. The NAP (do not initiate force) can only be applied after this Nomos (which defines what “property” is in the first place) is already operating. Carpio’s critique ignores that Rothbard’s own system requires this evolutionary foundation of abstract rules which he erroneously attributes solely to Hayek.

V. THE POLITICAL CONTRADICTION: THE MISES-HAYEK-ANARCHY DOUBLE STANDARD

The Rebuttal attempts a third major line of attack, this time of a political nature. In Section VIII (“The Political Failure: State as Predator, Not Guardian”), Carpio criticizes Hayek for his constitutionalist “naïveté,” for failing to question the State’s monopoly on law, and for not “evolving” toward the anarcho-capitalist vision.

Carpio writes:

Hayek’s constitutionalism leaves untouched the state’s monopoly on law... He hopes to restrain it... but never questions its legitimacy as such […] For Rothbard and Hoppe, this is naïve... The State is not the custodian of order but its principal violator (Carpio, 2025, Sec. VIII).

This line of argumentation constitutes a twofold fallacy: it is a “red herring” or distraction, which furthermore undermines the Rebuttal’s own position by revealing a fatal contradiction.

A. The Red Herring: Epistemology vs. Politics

First, it is a red herring. The central argument of my essay (the Refutation) was methodological and epistemological, not a debate regarding anarchy versus minarchism. The subject was how we understand the emergence and function of rules (evolutionism vs. apriorism), not what the final political conclusion regarding the State is. Carpio shifts the focus. He criticizes Hayek not for his method, but rather for failing to arrive at the political conclusion (anarchy) that Carpio prefers.

In doing so, the Rebuttal implicitly rejects the only form of political action compatible with fallibilism: what Popper terms “piecemeal social engineering.” Unlike the utopian (or holistic) engineer who seeks to redesign society as a whole based on a deductive ideal plan—a task logically impossible given that the necessary knowledge cannot be concentrated—the piecemeal engineer recognizes his cognitive limitations. Popper describes this attitude, perfectly aligned with Hayek and the pragmatic Mises: “The piecemeal engineer knows, like Socrates, how little he knows. He knows that we can learn only from our mistakes. Accordingly, he will make his way, step by step, carefully comparing the results expected with the results achieved, and always on the look-out for the unavoidable unwanted consequences of any reform” (Popper, 1957/2002, p. 61).

To label this approach as “political failure” or “naïveté” is to ignore that the alternative—the total restructuring of society based on an ideal axiomatic model, whether socialist or anarcho-capitalist—invariably entails the suppression of criticism and the inability to correct errors, for the utopian planner cannot admit that his “ideal plan” might fail.

B. The Contradiction: The Double Standard

Second, and more devastatingly for the Rebuttal’s argument, by attacking Hayek for not being an abolitionist anarchist, Carpio implicitly attacks Ludwig von Mises himself for the exact same failing. The Rebuttal is designed to present Mises as the gold standard of praxeological purity from which Hayek “defected.” However, on the question of the State, Mises was an explicit and scathing critic of anarchism.

In my original essay I anticipated and documented this exhaustively. I demonstrated that Mises, far from being the anarchist Rothbard and Hoppe might have wished for, was an explicit defender of a coercive apparatus (a State) as a necessary condition for civilization. Both recognized the need for an institutional framework. Mises maintained that the State is the “social apparatus of compulsion and coercion” destined to protect “property, liberty, and peace,” being an absolute necessity (Mises, 1927/2005, pp. 16–19) and that “liberalism differs radically from anarchism” (Mises, 1944/2011, pp. 55–58). Similarly, Hayek held that a free society requires conferring upon the State a monopoly on coercion limited to preventing private coercion (Hayek, 1960/2011, pp. 71–72, 332). In his 1940 treatise, Nationalökonomie, Mises is even more explicit in refuting the basis of anarchism (which Rothbard and Hoppe would later adopt):

Der Grundfehler der anarchistischen Lehre liegt in der Nichtbeachtung der Erfahrungstatsache, dass es Menschen gibt, denen die Einsicht oder die Kraft mangelt, ihr Handeln den Anforderungen der Gesellschaft gemäss einzurichten... Gesellschaftliches Zusammenleben und Zusammenwirken von Menschen ist daher nur im staatlichen Verbande denkbar, d.h. nur in einem Verbande, der über einen Zwangsapparat zur Unterdrückung gesellschaftstörenden Handelns von Einzelnen oder von Gruppen verfügt (Mises, 1940, p. 120).²

Carpio’s Rebuttal annuls itself. It falls into a performative contradiction: to attack Hayek, it must adopt a standard (anarchism) that, if applied consistently, would demolish the authority of Mises, from whom Hayek allegedly “defected.” And what is more ironic, Carpio must ignore that Rothbard’s own defense of the “minimal State” (minarchism) as the only viable alternative to anarchism is based on an argument almost identical to Mises’s. Rothbard explicitly rejects pacifist (Tolstoyan) anarchism (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 53) and defends the necessity of an apparatus of “defensive violence” (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 77). Although Rothbard would prefer this apparatus to be private, his central argument is that the function of coercive defense is indispensable. By attacking Hayek for “not questioning the legitimacy [of the monopoly on law] as such” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. VIII), Carpio ignores that both Mises and Rothbard (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 161) agree on the necessity of the function (coercive defense), even if they differ regarding who should provide it (a minimal State or private agencies). Carpio’s critique of Hayek for being a “constitutionalist” is, therefore, an evasion that conceals the functional similarity between Mises’s minimal State and Rothbard’s system of defense agencies.

This methodological contradiction is even deeper if one considers the central argument of Hoppe’s own main work. In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe abandons the strict apriorism of the “Argumentation Ethics” to adopt a fundamentally functionalist and consequentialist analysis. His celebrated argument in favor of monarchy over democracy is not based on monarchy being ethically just (for he admits that both are States that violate property rights), but rather on it being consequentially superior.

Hoppe’s argument is purely Hayekian in method: the institutional structure (private ownership of government vs. public ownership) systematically alters the incentives of rulers, which leads to predictably different results (high vs. low time preference).

Instead of a prince who considers the country his private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge. The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his protégés’ advantage. He owns its current use, usufruct, but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. Rather, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock. In other words, it is shortsighted (Hoppe, 2001, p. 83).

This constitutes a functional argument regarding how disparate institutional structures alter time horizons. It is an analysis that Hayek, or Brennan and Buchanan, would recognize as indigenous to their own approach. By demanding that Hayek justify the Nomos via an a priori axiom, Carpio proscribes a methodology (the functionalist analysis of institutions) upon which Hoppe himself relies for his most celebrated critique of democracy. Consequently, the “double standard” consists not merely in absolving Mises for his minarchism, but also in absolving Hoppe for employing a “Hayekian” (consequentialist) method to arrive at his most renowned political conclusion.

Ironically, Hayek’s (and Mises’s) constitutionalist defense is, in fact, logically untenable—yet not for the axiomatic reasons wielded by Carpio, but rather on the grounds of rational choice theory as expounded by De Jasay. Hayek’s “naïveté” lies not in his rejection of anarchism, but in his belief in “fixed constitutions” as a genuine limit upon State power (De Jasay, 1985/1998, p. 205). De Jasay refutes this Hayekian-Misesian hope, arguing that a sovereign State cannot be genuinely constrained by a constitution that it alone must interpret and enforce. It is analogous to a lady who wears a chastity belt yet “hangs the key to the padlock on the bedpost of her own bed” (De Jasay, 1985/1998, p. 211). A State, De Jasay argues, merely feigns being bound by a constitution as a “confidence-building measure” (De Jasay, 1985/1998, p. 210), yet will breach it as soon as the “balance of interests” (De Jasay, 1985/1998, p. 206) renders it advantageous to do so. Carpio attacks Hayek’s political conclusion (minarchism) utilizing the wrong implement (ethical apriorism); De Jasay demonstrates the weakness of that very conclusion, yet does so employing a functional analysis of State incentives—a method far more coherent with Hayek’s own fallibilism.

If Hayek’s “political failure” lies in being a “constitutionalist” who accepts a monopoly on law and its legitimacy as such, then Mises—who termed the State an absolute necessity and the only conceivable form of association for social cooperation—is guilty of the selfsame failure. The Rebuttal’s error in adjudicating the legitimacy of the State based on its historical trajectory of abuses rests upon a categorial confusion identified by Popper: the conflation of laws and trends. To affirm that the State always degenerates into tyranny is to postulate an absolute trend, something Popper denounces as unscientific.

A statement asserting the existence of a trend is existential, not universal... And a statement asserting the existence of a trend at a certain time and place would be a singular historical statement, not a universal law (Popper, 1957/2002, p. 106).

Trends depend on changing initial conditions. The task of the social scientist (and of the Hayekian liberal) is not to prophesy the inevitable collapse of civilization under the State, but to design institutions (Nomos) that alter the conditions under which those dangerous trends operate.

Carpio finds himself in a logical impasse:

1. If he attacks Hayek for not being an anarchist, he must logically attack Mises for the same reason, thereby dissolving the basis of his own critique (Hayek’s alleged “defection” from “Misesianism”).

2. If he absolves Mises for his defense of the State, he must explain why the same position in Hayek constitutes a “political failure” and a “betrayal.”

It is not, therefore, a coherent critique of Hayek on methodological grounds; rather, it is the political expression of a prior anarchist commitment projected retrospectively onto Mises and Hayek. The result is a selective use of Mises: he is invoked as an authority when he appears to support the Hoppean thesis, but those passages in which Mises defends a coercive state apparatus as a necessary condition for social cooperation are silenced.

A defender of the Rebuttal might respond that these political discrepancies with Mises are secondary to methodological agreement. That distinction would be legitimate if the Rebuttal itself did not utilize Hayek’s supposed “political failure” (his constitutionalism, his acceptance of a monopoly on law) as evidence of a deeper “defection.” Once the political arena is used to measure fidelity to Mises, it becomes inconsistent not to apply the same criterion to Mises himself. Either the standard is purely praxeological (and then the political critique of Hayek leaves the field of play), or the standard includes institutional conclusions (and then Mises and Hayek must be judged symmetrically).

VI. LA RAZÓN CONSTRUCTIVISTA CONTRA LA RAZÓN EVOLUTIVA: LA PETICIÓN DE PRINCIPIO DE LA “ÉTICA”

The Rebuttal extensively develops the ethical question, which my original essay did not treat in depth—nor was that its purpose—but which constitutes the clearest manifestation of the methodological error I indeed pointed out. It rightly identifies the locus classicus of the disagreement: Hume’s “is/ought” dilemma. Carpio argues: “The ‘is’ of historical success never entails the ‘ought’ of moral legitimacy. The only path from is to ought passes through reason: the logic of action and the ethics implicit in discourse” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. I).

He accuses Hayek of “ethical evasion” and “suicidal moral skepticism” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. VII) and posits Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics (AE) and Rothbard’s Natural Law as the axiomatic “backbone” that would provide the a prioricertainty Hayek allegedly lacks: “Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics closes the door Hayek left ajar” (Carpio, 2025, Sec. I). My thesis is the exact opposite: AE, as utilized in the Rebuttal, does not close any door left ajar by Hayek; rather, it throws wide open the door to the constructivist rationalism that Hayek denounces. It is, in concentrated form, the paradigmatic example of the petitio principii that pervades the entire Rothbardian–Hoppean critique.

A. AE as Constructivist Rationalism and Petitio Principii

The structure of AE can be summarized schematically:

1. It starts with the act of arguing: two agents deliberating rationally on norms, using language, reasons, and validity claims.

2. It holds that this act presupposes certain normative conditions: self-ownership, non-aggression, the unimpeded use of one’s own body and voice, etc.

3. From these performative conditions, AE attempts to derive a fairly complete substantive code of principles of justice (private property, NAP), valid universally.

Up to this point, nothing in points (1)–(2) is, in itself, incompatible with a Hayekian approach: it is plausible to maintain that certain minimal presuppositions are implied in the very fact of rational discussion. The problem arises in the leap from (2) to (3): when it is claimed that, from the formal structure of argumentation, a practically complete legal order, valid for every society and historical context, can be deduced a priori.

Methodologically, this aligns AE with the Rawlsian device of the “veil of ignorance.” Rawls designs an “original position” and requires that every rational agent accept its rules; Hoppe designs the “argumentative situation” and requires that every rational agent accept as “non-contradictory” the libertarian norms he inserts into that situation. In both cases, De Jasay’s diagnosis of Rawls holds true: the device does not demonstrate the justice of the principle, but presupposes that everyone already shares the “article of faith” that the device itself has codified as an entry condition (De Jasay, 1985/1998, p. 170).

In Rawls, that article of faith is the idea that unequal endowments “must not be allowed” to shape distribution if it is to be considered just; in Hoppe/Carpio, it is that only a set of norms based on self-ownership and the NAP can count as “non-contradictory.” In both cases, those who do not share that premise are simply excluded as irrational or self-refuted. Thus, AE does not provide a neutral criterion of justification, but rather codifies a prior conception of libertarian justice as a condition of the game.

From this perspective, AE does not solve the Hayekian problem of how functional norms are discovered in a context of radical ignorance; it simply declares it irrelevant, substituting it with an intellectual construction in which the conclusion (NAP) is implied in the admission rules of the device. It is a petitio principii in the strict sense: it purports to derive libertarian ethics from the structure of argumentation when, in reality, that ethics has been introduced as a tacit assumption to determine what counts as “valid argumentation.”

B. The collapse between praxeology and ethics: AE against Misesian–Rothbardian Wertfreiheit

There is a second problem here, perceptible from within the apriorist tradition itself. Mises and Rothbard insist on carefully distinguishing between:

• praxeology, the formal science of action, wertfrei, based on the axiom “man acts” (Mises, 1949/1998, pp. 11, 32; Mises, 1933/2003, p. 73);

• ethics, a normative discipline concerned with what ends ought to be pursued and what norms ought to be considered just (Rothbard, 1960/1979, pp. 3–4).

In that taxonomy, praxeology describes structures (the use of scarce means for ends) and is value-neutral; ethics prescribes. Rothbard denounces as “profoundly and radically antiscientific” the attempt to introduce arbitrary value judgments under the guise of formal science (Rothbard, 1960/1979, Sec. 6).

AE, as presented in the Rebuttal, does exactly that: it attempts to derive an “ought” (NAP) directly from the “is” of argumentation. It moves from:

• “in order to argue, A and B must be able to use their bodies and their language without being physically impeded”

to:

• “therefore, any norm that contradicts self-ownership and the NAP is a priori unjust and self-refuting.”

This leap turns a praxeological statement (structure of the act of arguing) into the foundation of a complete ethical code. Thereby, the Misesian distinction between wertfrei science and ethics collapses. Praxeology ceases to be a formal description of action to become a channel of normative justification.

By Mises’s and Rothbard’s own criteria, this move is methodologically illegitimate: it introduces through the back door precisely that which praxeology had sought to keep out of its domain (Mises, 1962/2006, pp. 4–6). AE, in its maximalist version, violates the Wertfreiheit that apriorism intended to safeguard: it ceases to describe how men act and proceeds to tell them how they ought to live in every conceivable context.

C. Hayek, Cultural Evolution, and the Function of Norms: What AE Fails to See

The third problem is that AE, as a project of a complete ethics deduced a priori, is blind to the core of the Hayekian approach: the problem of ignorance and the evolutionary function of law and morality.

For Hayek, the moral and legal rules that sustain the Extended Order—property, contract, liability, etc.—are not theorems discovered by axiomatic deduction, but the result of a process of cultural selection. Different groups adopted different rules; those that allowed for reducing conflict, facilitating calculation, and sustaining increasingly wide networks of peaceful cooperation survived over time, even when the actors themselves did not fully understand why they worked (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, pp. 27, 117, 149–150; 1988/1989, ch. 1; Caldwell, 2004, pp. 306–315).

As Hayek summarizes in his essays on cultural evolution, culture is “neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed” (Hayek, 1979d, p. 155, cit. in Caldwell, 2004, p. 313). Moral rules “are selected” because the groups that follow them prosper more than others, not because isolated individuals have scientifically deduced their long-term benefits (Hayek, 1967d, p. 67; 1979d, p. 161, cit. in Caldwell, 2004, pp. 309, 315).

From this perspective:

• a norm is not “true” like a mathematical proposition, but apt or inapt according to its capacity to sustain social coordination;

• the justification of a rule is not purely deductive, but also functional: it is linked to its role in solving the problem of dispersed knowledge (Hayek, 1964/2014; 1968/2014).

Hayekian evolutionism is not relativism, but a theory about the process of discovery of norms that work. To demand from that process a justification in terms of a priori certainty is to commit a category mistake: asking for a logico-propositional demonstration for something whose status is instrumental and adaptive.

This critique has also been developed from constitutional theory. Boettke emphasizes that “economic performance is a function of the rules of the game,” but adds that rules “are only rules if customary practice dictates it”; a code deduced in a vacuum lacks social authority and motivational force (Boettke, 2001, p. 257). An ethic that attempts to impose itself ex nihilo, disregarding institutional evolution, ignores this elementary fact: rules work because they are internalized, not because they have been demonstrated in a philosophy seminar.

From this perspective, the problem with AE is not that it is “too rational,” but that it is insufficiently realistic: it confuses the logical validity of a construction with the capacity of that construction to take root in the fabric of practices, expectations, and tacit knowledge that sustain a complex social order.

D. Internal Coherence: Between Minimal Core and Total Code

None of the foregoing necessitates discarding every intuition underlying AE. It is reasonable to maintain that:

• certain minimal presuppositions are implied in the act of arguing (use of language, absence of immediate physical violence against the interlocutor, etc.);

• denying those presuppositions in the course of a dispute may generate performative tensions.

As a minimal core, that idea can coexist without difficulty with Hayekian fallibilism: it is an interesting observation regarding the conditions of rational discourse, not a complete theory of law.

The problem arises when that core becomes what the Rebuttal needs it to be: an exhaustive normative code, capable of resolving a priori all questions of justice without recourse to history, real conflicts, institutional diversity, or collective learning. At that moment, AE ceases to be a modest theory of discourse presuppositions and becomes a project of total ethical engineering, that is, exactly the kind of constructivist rationalism that Hayek and Popper consider epistemologically inviable (Popper, 1957/2002, pp. 26–27).

The irony is that Hoppe himself, when he steps outside formal demonstration to analyze concrete institutions, resorts to the type of functional and evolutionary analysis that Hayek defends. His comparison between monarchy and democracy is based on the incentive structure of different property arrangements regarding the coercive apparatus and how this alters the time horizons of rulers (Hoppe, 2001, pp. 72–83, 175–176). It is a fully “Hayekian” argument in method: it judges institutions by their systemic effects, not merely by their logical compatibility with the argumentation axiom.

The same occurs with his defense of covenant communities and the expulsion of ideas incompatible with the purpose of preserving the property order (Hoppe, 2001, p. 218). There, the legitimacy of excluding a communist is not based on his having physically initiated aggression, but on the function of that exclusion to preserve the institutional ecology that makes coexistence possible. That is to say: Hoppe’s own theoretical practice recognizes that the evaluation of norms cannot be reduced to an a priori deduction; it requires analysis of context and incentives.

At this point, the maximalist reading that Carpio makes of AE proves to be internally unstable:

• if AE is understood in a minimal sense, as an analysis of discourse presuppositions, it is compatible with the Hayekian approach, but then it ceases to be the monolithic block Carpio needs to disqualify evolutionism;

• if it is understood in a strong sense, as the ultimate foundation of a complete code of justice, it falls squarely into the category of constructivist rationalism that Hayek, Popper, and De Jasay critique (Popper, 1957/2002, pp. 26–27; De Jasay, 1985/1998, pp. 170–171).

E. Result: The ethical “solution” as confirmation of the Hayekian problem

The place of AE in the debate can be synthesized as follows:

1. As a theory of “ultimate justification,” AE does not correct Hayekian fallibilism, but rather ignores the problem it poses: how to discover functional norms in a world of dispersed knowledge and unintended consequences.

2. As a project of ethical engineering, AE reproduces the essential features of the methodological essentialism that Popper identifies as the main obstacle in the social sciences: the obsession with finding the “true definition” of justice, coercion, or the State, instead of studying how institutions behave under different rules (Popper, 1957/2002, pp. 26, 71, 106).

3. As an intellectual practice, Hoppe’s own work shows that, when analyzing real institutions, it is indispensable to return to Hayekian terrain: incentives, learning, evolutionary selection of norms (Hoppe, 1993/2006, pp. 281, 295–300).³

In this sense, AE—in the form employed by the Rebuttal—is not an overcoming of the Hayekian approach, but its Gnostic counterpart: where Hayek proposes epistemic humility regarding orders that no one has designed, AE claims to offer absolute certainty about the correct normative order starting from a single logical starting point.

The consequence for the debate is clear: if the critique of Hayek rests on an ethical theory that falls back into the same constructivist vices that Hayek denounced—and which, moreover, enters into tension with the praxeological Wertfreiheitthat Mises and Rothbard defended—then the ethical “solution” proposed by the Rebuttal does not refute the Hayekian diagnosis, but rather confirms it on the moral plane. Faced with a world of organized complexity, radical ignorance, and institutional evolution, Hayek’s fallibilism is not a renunciation of truth, but the recognition that no mind—not even that of the philosopher equipped with a brilliant axiom—can substitute the long process of learning and selection of norms that sustains civilization (Hayek, 1974/2014, p. 372).⁴

VII. CONCLUSION: EVASION AS VALIDATION

Juan Fernando Carpio’s Rebuttal is a fascinating document. As a defense of Rothbardian-Hoppean orthodoxy, it is eloquent and passionate. However, as an attempt to refute the central theses of my original essay, it leaves unanswered precisely the points where the disagreement is deepest: the status of knowledge, the evolutionary function of law, and the relationship between Mises and Hayek. Its method is not refutation, but evasion.

In other words, the core of the present essay is not merely to show that a specific rebuttal fails, but to clarify what is required for a serious critique of Hayek from within the Austrian tradition. This implies, at a minimum, recognizing (i) the complementarity between the calculation problem (Mises) and the knowledge problem (Hayek), (ii) the epistemic function of Nomos vis-à-vis Thesis, and (iii) the logical limits of constructivist rationalism in ethics and political theory. If these three planes are not addressed, the critique inevitably becomes a reaffirmation of presuppositions, not a refutation.

In summary, Carpio’s Rebuttal confirms the diagnosis of evasion that this essay had formulated. Instead of refuting the theoretical cores in dispute, it skirts them:

1. It evades the thesis of Mises–Hayek complementarity, insisting on a false dichotomy that Mises himself rejected textually, by recognizing the problem of dispersed knowledge as an indispensable complement to his argument on economic calculation.

2. It evades the conceptual distinction between Nomos and Thesis, which was the pillar of the Hayekian defense of limited coercion, in order to repeat a critique based on a selective and largely distorted reading of The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty.

3. It evades the textual evidence regarding coercion and scarcity, repeating the thesis that Hayek “moralizes” poverty, despite the fact that he explicitly distinguishes between natural calamity and subjection to the will of others, and that both—Hayek and Rothbard—deny that mere scarcity constitutes coercion.

4. It evades the internal contradiction of his political critique, in which he blames Hayek for “constitutionalist naïveté” for accepting a minimal coercive state apparatus, given that Mises repeatedly defended the necessity of a liberal State as a condition of possibility for social cooperation. A criterion that would disqualify Hayek for that reason would affect, mutatis mutandis, Mises himself, the supposed standard of apriorist orthodoxy.

5. It evades the nature of its own critique, failing to acknowledge that his ethical “solution”—Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics—is, in itself, a paradigmatic example of the constructivist rationalism that Hayek denounces. It is not a mere refinement of praxeology, but a project of a priori deduction of a complete normative code, consistent with Hoppe’s reading which presents Hayek as a “moderate social democrat” and with Rothbard’s extremely severe judgment of The Constitution of Liberty: this shows that the breaking point is not an internal inconsistency in Hayek, but a prior doctrinal shift in the Rothbardian–Hoppean tradition.

6. And finally, it evades the contradiction that his own “precise” definition of coercion (Rothbard’s) collapses instantly when applied to concrete cases, being forced to presuppose an underlying legal order—a Nomos of general rules regarding title, transfer, and restitution—to distinguish between the criminal initiation of force and the legitimate recovery of property (Rothbard, 1982/1998, pp. 51–52).

A critic who does not engage with the arguments of his opponent cannot refute them. He merely boxes with his own shadow. My original essay diagnosed the Rothbardian-Hoppean critique of Hayek as a petitio principii that refused to change its analytical paradigm. Carpio’s Rebuttal, by refusing to engage with the central arguments of my essay and simply reaffirming the premises that were in dispute, has done nothing more than spectacularly confirm that diagnosis.

If this exchange has any value, it is not that of winning a debate between schools, but that of making explicit the frameworks from which each judges the other. The Rothbardian–Hoppean tradition provides a potent and coherent defense of self-ownership and the non-aggression principle; the Hayekian tradition provides an equally potent theory of ignorance, complexity, and institutional learning. My thesis—and I reaffirm it in light of the Rebuttal—is that to understand and defend liberty in a complex society we need both: the logic of action and humility before the order that no one has designed.

From this diagnosis follows an uncomfortable consequence for any attempt at doctrinal “purification” of the Austrian School: a theory of liberty that dispenses with Hayekian fallibilism runs the risk of sliding into a rationalist Gnosticism incapable of dealing with real institutions; a theory that ignores Mises’s praxeological structure, for its part, is left without a logical core to distinguish spontaneous order from any historically given outcome. If the Rothbardian–Hoppean critique aspires to something more than an intra-school polemic, it must integrate this double requirement rather than amputating one of its poles.

Ultimately, the insistence on purging the Austrian School of Hayekian influence is not only a tactical error, but a theoretical mutilation. As Ebeling sentences after exhaustively analyzing the intellectual relationship between both Viennese:

It is difficult to imagine how Hayek the economist and social philosopher would have been possible without Mises... Together, their contributions in fact are the basis and framework for the entire edifice of modern Austrian economics. It does not detract from the significance of Hayek’s body of work to say that in many of its facets, it was the ideas of Ludwig von Mises that were being carried on (Ebeling, 2014, p. 157).

My original refutation, therefore, not only remains intact, but is validated and strengthened by the very nature of the “Rebuttal” it provoked. In the words of F.A. Hayek:

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson in humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed… (Hayek, 1974/2014, p. 372).

If this exchange demonstrates anything, it is that the defense of liberty in a complex order demands precisely that lesson of humility: recognizing that no axiom, however brilliant, can replace the evolutionary order of norms, prices, and practices in which reason itself has been formed.

Author’s Note: On the Second Part

Thus far, we have addressed the methodological insufficiency of the apriorist critique and its relapse into constructivist rationalism. However, deconstruction is but the first step. The substantive question persists: if we reject Hoppean ethical deduction, are we condemned to accept the “naïve statism” of the late Hayek?

The answer is negative. In the second and final installment of this essay—which will be an essay with a spirit of its own—to be published next week, we will shift from defense to proposal. We will present the “Ontological Condition of Action” as the foundation that integrates Misesian logic with Hayekian epistemology, and we will demonstrate that the logical conclusion of this system is not the minimal State, but an “Anarchy of Spontaneous Order” much more robust and inevitable than the one designed by its critics.

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1. See my essay titled “El debate sobre el cálculo económico en perspectiva: cronología, fundamentos y vigencia”, Taula y Moneta (Substack), 2025, esp. sec. VII, “El debate contemporáneo: Big Data, IA y nuevos socialismos”. There it is shown that the Hoppean slogan taken up by Carpio—according to which Hayek supposedly reduced Mises’s “impossibility” to a mere complexity problem that technology could “one day approximate”—inverts the logical order of the debate: even if overcoming the computational obstacle were conceded, Hayek’s problem of tacit knowledge, the entrepreneurial function, and the limits of computability would remain, such that neither AI nor Big Data can convert logical impossibility into a simple problem of high-power calculation.

2. Author’s translation from the original: “The fundamental error of anarchist doctrine lies in ignoring the fact of experience that there are men who lack the insight or the strength to adjust their conduct to the needs of society... Social coexistence and cooperation among men are, therefore, possible only within a state association, that is to say, only within an association possessing a coercive apparatus to repress conduct disruptive to society...” (Mises, 1940, p. 120). This argument, which the present—and the previous—essay draws from Mises’s later work, is entirely consistent with his main treatise of 1940. In Nationalökonomie, Mises had already refuted the basis of anarchism (which Rothbard and Hoppe would later adopt) by establishing the necessity of a coercive apparatus for the existence of society. Mises’s critique of anarchism is identical to the Hayekian critique that liberty requires a coercive legal framework.

3. Hayek developed this assertion regarding the limits of explanation formally in The Sensory Order. He maintains that any classificatory apparatus—including the human mind—must possess a degree of complexity superior to that of the objects it classifies. It follows that “any explaining agent can never explain objects of its own kind, or of its own degree of complexity, and, therefore… the human brain can never fully explain its own operations” (Hayek, 1952/2017, p. 296)

4. This epistemic humility is reflected in Hayek’s own conception of the task of the legislator in a free society. Far from being an omnipotent social engineer, the legislator must act as a “gardener,” cultivating the conditions for spontaneous growth rather than attempting to design the final result. His main function is not to invent new rules ex nihilo, but to articulate and improve the existing system of rules of just conduct, eliminating inconsistencies and adapting it to new circumstances, always with the aim of maintaining and perfecting the overall abstract order (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, pp. 117, 129–130, 149–150).