A REFUTATION OF ROTHBARDIAN AND HOPPEAN CRITIQUES OF F.A. HAYEK

From apriorism to spontaneous order: a defense of evolutionary individualism

I. INTRODUCTION

A. Context of the Debate

In the history of twentieth-century liberal thought, the Austrian School of Economics stands out as one of the most coherent and robust traditions in its defense of the free market and the open society. Yet beneath an apparent doctrinal unity lies a deep intellectual fracture—one that does not manifest primarily at the level of political conclusions, but at the level of epistemological foundations. The present essay explores this rift by analyzing the debate between the philosophy of Friedrich A. Hayek and the systematic critique advanced by the line of thought that runs from Ludwig von Mises to his most direct 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 irreversibly, laying the groundwork for a controversy that endures to the present day.¹

This friendship was not merely an affective bond or professional courtesy, but a relationship of profound trust and mutual support, especially during the darkest moments of the twentieth century. Their correspondence shows Hayek acting as Mises’s trusted agent on multiple fronts: from managing his finances in London—where he even held a significant sum of Mises’s savings in safekeeping (Hayek, 1939)—to organizing his desperate flight from Europe in 1940. Amid the collapse of France, Hayek not only actively sought a publisher for Mises’s books; he also devised methods to transfer Mises’s funds while evading wartime capital controls, contacted intermediaries to obtain transit visas, and advised him on safeguarding his most prized belongings. His letter of 1 June 1940, written as London braced for the bombings, stands as the testimony of a friend risking his own tranquility to save his colleague’s life. Hayek closes that letter with a reflection encapsulating their shared tragedy: “I have no doubt that we shall go through a terrible time, but that in the end we shall prevail. But we shall never see the old Europe again” (Hayek, 1940). This deep personal and material loyalty contextualizes their later methodological disagreements and suggests that the narrative of a simple intellectual “betrayal,” as framed by some critics, is a simplification that ignores the complexity of their bond.

This relationship of unshakeable loyalty between Mises and Hayek, which survived their profound methodological divergences, stands in marked contrast to the rupture Mises experienced with one of his most brilliant students, Fritz Machlup. Whereas the friendship with Hayek endured despite growing theoretical differences, the relationship with Machlup fractured definitively not over a question of method but over what Mises perceived as a capitulation of principles on a fundamental matter of economic policy. The break came to a head at the 1965 Mont Pèlerin Society meeting in Stresa, where Machlup publicly argued against the gold standard, reducing the debate to an issue of special-interest policy. For Mises, this was not a mild academic disagreement but an intellectual betrayal by someone who, having been trained in his seminar, “knows exactly what he is doing.” Hülsmann describes Mises’s reaction as a point of no return: “The break with Fritz Machlup became strained. […] In Machlup’s case, Mises eventually broke off all contact for a few years. The issue for him was integrity. It was one thing to disagree on the importance of the gold standard, but he believed Machlup’s change of heart to be unprincipled” (Hülsmann, 2007, p. 998).

This rupture—“painful but inevitable” for the cohesion of the movement—illustrates a crucial facet of Mises’s intellectual character: his tolerance for honest theoretical divergence (as with Hayek) was considerable, but his intransigence was absolute in the face of what he regarded as an opportunistic abandonment of the fundamental principles of the market economy. Whereas Hayek represented the figure of the “heterodox yet loyal colleague,” Machlup became the archetype of the “lost ally,” whose pursuit of acceptance within the academic mainstream led him to abandon positions Mises considered non-negotiable. While Mises—and even more rigorously Hoppe—conceive of economic science as a deductive and aprioristic system, closed in upon itself and derived from the logic immanent in human action (praxeology), Hayek develops an evolutionary and complex epistemology.

The praxeological conception, which Hoppe rigorously defends in his early work, holds that economics is, of logical necessity, an aprioristic and non-empirical science. Its object is not the causal explanation of specific actions or contexts—which are treated as “given” and inexplicable in themselves—but the deduction of the necessary logical consequences that follow from given acts of choice (actions) within equally presupposed contexts (Hoppe, 1983, pp. 41–42). Hoppe is explicit in asserting that the task of the theoretical economist is “to determine the logical consequences that result from the performance of a given action within such presupposed constructions […] regardless of how realistic the constructions themselves may be” (Hoppe, 1983, p. 53).² This approach stands in radical contrast to any methodology that seeks to validate or refute economic theorems by means of empirical experience.³

For Hayek, reason, language, moral norms, and social institutions are not axiomatic starting points but emergent products of a prolonged, unplanned process of cultural learning. They are the result of human action, but not of human design. This conception distances him from Cartesian rationalism and situates him within an intellectual tradition that values tacit, dispersed knowledge embodied in social practices. The Hayekian view is rooted in the idea that human reason is limited and that much of a functional social order is not the product of conscious design. Hayek argues that many indispensable institutions are the outcome of customs and practices that were neither invented nor observed with an explicit purpose in mind, but evolved because they enabled the groups that practiced them to be more successful (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, p. 27). He criticizes the Cartesian presumption that only action determined entirely by known and demonstrable truth is rational, noting that “it is simply false that our actions owe their effectiveness solely or even mainly to the knowledge we can express in words” (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, p. 27). Civilization, therefore, rests to a great extent on observance of rules whose purpose or origin we often do not know (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, pp. 27–28).

Hayek himself draws this distinction in his essay “Individualism: True and False,” where he contrasts the “false individualism” of the Cartesian and French tradition with the “true individualism” of eighteenth-century British thinkers. The former, rationalist and constructivist in character, leads directly to socialism, whereas the latter, anti-rationalist and evolutionary, is the foundation of a free society. Hayek describes it thus: “The anti-rationalistic approach, which regards man not as a highly rational and intelligent but as a very irrational and fallible being, whose individual errors are corrected only in the course of a social process, and which aims at making the best of a very imperfect material, is probably the most characteristic feature of English individualism” (Hayek, 1946/2010, p. 55). This distinction is crucial for understanding that Hayek’s critique is not directed at reason as such, but at the presumption that individual reason can consciously design the social order in its entirety.⁴

From Hoppe’s rigorous perspective, however, this Hayekian distinction between a “true” (evolutionary) and a “false” (constructivist) individualism is epistemologically problematic and politically dangerous. For Hoppe, the only solid foundation for a free society lies in the aprioristic recognition of a natural theory of property, grounded in the principle of first appropriation through use and in contractual transfer (Hoppe, 1988/2010, pp. 10, 28–29, 151). Any social order not derived strictly from these principles—regardless of whether it presents itself as “evolved” or “traditional”—necessarily entails elements of aggression against private property and, hence, is a form of socialism (Hoppe, 1988/2010, pp. 10, 17, 29). Hayek’s “true individualism,” by valuing institutions and rules simply for their evolutionary survival rather than for their conformity with the aprioristic principles of property, runs the risk, according to Hoppe, of legitimizing norms or institutions that, although functional in some historical sense, violate the individual’s natural rights. The only coherent defense of liberty, Hoppe insists, must rest on the argumentative justification of property rights, not on the contingency of cultural evolution (Hoppe, 1988/2010, pp. 155, 158–159, 161–162).

Along similar lines, the critique of constructivist rationalism finds an echo in Mises’s own delimitation of the object of economic science. Mises emphasizes that economics begins from the given action of the individual, without judging the “correctness” of his ends or means from an external or “objective” standpoint (Mises, 1933/2003, p. 101). Praxeology explains how prices are formed from individuals’ subjective valuations, whether these are deemed “rational” or “irrational” by an observer (Mises, 1933/2003, pp. 34–35, 181). By rejecting the imposition of an “objectively correct” scale of values, Mises—like Hayek—implicitly criticizes the presumption of an external reason capable of dictating “correct” ends or designing a social order based on them. For Mises, science must accept subjective valuations as the fundamental datum (Mises, 1933/2003, p. 142)—a point that converges with Hayek’s critique of the fatal conceit of conscious social design.

The root of this epistemological divergence lies in Hayek’s fundamentally different conception of the relation among reason, morality, and evolution. Far from being a starting point, reason is for Hayek a product of cultural evolution, a late result operating within a framework of norms and traditions not designed by it. This idea, which pervades his late work, is articulated with particular clarity in The Fatal Conceit, where he argues that civilization depends on an evolved morality positioned between instinct and reason. Hayek maintains that “our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 10). It is this tradition—not constructivist reason—that made human intelligence possible in the first place: “Man became intelligent because there was a tradition—something lying between instinct and reason—which he could learn” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 21). This inversion of the primacy of reason is what his apriorist critics interpret as a capitulation to irrationalism, when in fact it is the foundation of his critique of constructivist rationalism—that is, of the “fatal conceit” of believing that individual reason can design the social order from scratch.

After Hayek’s death in 1992, it was primarily Hans-Hermann Hoppe who consolidated and radicalized the critique of his work, transforming methodological differences into an accusation of intellectual betrayal. In a series of influential essays—notably F. A. Hayek on Government and Social Evolution: A Critique (1994), Why Mises (and Not Hayek)? (2011), and The Hayek Myth (2012)—Hoppe argues that Hayekian evolutionism dissolves the certainty of economic laws into a relativistic historicism, thereby undermining the aprioristic foundations Mises had established for economic science. On this view, Hayek abandoned the robust edifice of praxeology to embrace a subtle empiricism that ultimately opens the door to state intervention and weakens the defense of liberty. This critique—already sketched decades earlier by Rothbard—became a pillar of the more dogmatic strand of contemporary libertarianism.⁵

B. Problem and Thesis

The core problem this essay addresses is that Hoppe’s and Rothbard’s criticisms of Hayekian philosophy rest on a series of category mistakes and on an incomplete reading of key concepts, particularly that of “coercion.” Both authors, operating within a strictly aprioristic framework, construe Hayek’s evolutionary epistemology as a form of empiricism or relativism. They accuse him of substituting adaptive success for logical truth and historical observation for deductive certainty. Yet, as will be shown, Hayek does not formulate an empiricist epistemology in the classical sense, but rather a contextualist and anti-constructivist theory of knowledge. His critique is not directed at reason per se, but at a specific conception of reason—constructivist rationalism—which presumes that the human mind can consciously design the social order.

The problem deepens because Hoppe’s and Rothbard’s critique commits a fundamental category error: they demand that Hayek’s system be justified with the very tools of constructivist rationalism that he explicitly seeks to refute. They require an a priori justification and logical deducibility for an order that, by definition, Hayek describes as evolutionary and emergent, and whose embodied knowledge exceeds the capacity of individual reason. This inability to shift the analytic paradigm—judging an evolutionary system by the metrics of an axiomatic one—is the ultimate source of the misunderstanding. It is a methodological petitio principii. Trapped in a Cartesian foundationalism, they are unable to process Hayek’s central thesis: that reason itself is a product of cultural evolution, not its point of departure. Consequently, they interpret epistemic humility (fallibilism) as relativism and the functional Rule of Law—that is, Nomos⁶—as statism.

Likewise, the charge that the Hayekian concept of coercion justifies state intervention stems from a confusion between the constraints imposed by general and abstract rules (Nomos) and the subjugation of one individual’s will to the arbitrary ends of another. Failing to understand the coordinating and enabling function of norms in Hayek’s theory, Hoppe and Rothbard collapse a conceptual distinction fundamental to the Hayekian theory of liberty, interpreting any restriction on action as a form of aggression.⁷

In response to these criticisms, the present essay advances a twofold thesis. First, Hayek’s epistemology not only fails to contradict Mises’s methodological individualism; it actually 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 account of how large-scale social coordination is possible. His approach does not deny the logic of action (praxeology); rather, it situates it within the context of an intergenerational learning process that produces the institutions that make rationality itself possible.

This deepening of the knowledge problem is precisely what Hayek develops in his concept of competition as a discovery procedure (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 304). The praxeological critique, like the neoclassical theory of perfect competition, errs by assuming that the data (resources, scarcities, preferences) are “given” and known. Hayek inverts this premise: competition is valuable precisely because “we do not know in advance the facts which determine the actions of competitors” (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 304). The market is not merely a calculation mechanism based on pre-existing information; it is the very process that generates information that otherwise would be known by no one. It discovers which goods are scarce (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 306) and who can produce them at the lowest cost. Market outcomes are therefore inherently unpredictable (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 305). To demand an a priori justification (prior deductive knowledge) for the results of a process whose value lies in its capacity to discover the unknown is, in itself, a constructivist category error.

Second, the Hayekian concept of coercion, far from destroying the principle of individual liberty, functionally redefines it so as to render it compatible with a theory of the extended order. In Hayek, freedom is not an axiomatic, ahistorical postulate, but a structural condition that emerges within a framework of impersonal and predictable rules (Nomos). His distinction between the constraints of Nomos and arbitrary coercion is not a concession to statism, but a recognition that liberty can exist and be effective only within a normative order that shields it from arbitrariness.

These two theses are not independent; they are intrinsically connected and form the core of this refutation. The second thesis—the functional redefinition of coercion—follows logically from the first—the epistemology of dispersed knowledge. 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. Law, then, is not primarily a system of ethical mandates deduced a priori, as the critique would have it, but the principal social instrument for the transmission of knowledge that enables the coordination of actions in a complex world. The Rothbard–Hoppe critique of Hayekian coercion fails, as will be shown, because it ignores this epistemological function of law.

C. Method

To substantiate this thesis, a hermeneutic-comparative method will be employed, centered on the analysis of the primary texts of Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe. The analysis will be organized into three fundamental parts that mirror the axes of the controversy. First, it will address the methodological debate, contrasting praxeological apriorism with Hayek’s evolutionary epistemology. Second, it will explore how this methodological difference leads to radically different conceptions of the nature and order of knowledge in society. Finally, it will reconstruct the Hayekian concept of coercion to demonstrate that the Rothbardian and Hoppean criticisms rest on a category error that ignores the epistemological function of law in creating a free and predictable social order.

Throughout this inquiry, the aim is not merely to juxtapose two systems, but to expose the petitio principii at the core of the Hoppean critique. It will be shown that the critique faults Hayek for not being a constructivist rationalist—precisely the central point of Hayek’s epistemological refutation of total apriorism. The method, therefore, will consist in deploying Hayek’s own analytical apparatus (the critique of constructivism) to deconstruct his opponents’ objections, showing that they themselves embody the very “fatal arrogance” they denounce. The critique, accordingly, does not refute Hayek; it merely reaffirms the premise that Hayek identifies as the fundamental error of intellectual arrogance.

II. THE METHODOLOGICAL DEBATE: APRIORISM VS. EPISTEMOLOGICAL

A. The Apriorist Core of Mises and Hoppe

To grasp the vehemence of Hoppe’s and Rothbard’s critique, it is first imperative to delineate with clarity the methodological paradigm they defend—one inherited from and systematized on the basis of Ludwig von Mises’s work. In his magisterial treatise, Human Action (1949), Mises maintains that economics is a purely deductive science, a branch of a broader discipline he calls praxeology: the science of human action. The point of departure for all praxeological knowledge is not empirical observation or experimentation, but a self-evident and irrefutable axiom: that human beings act. To act, for Mises, is to employ means to attain desired ends—a manifestation of the will that seeks to move from a less satisfactory state to a more satisfactory one.

To sharpen this description, it is pertinent to quote Mises directly, who in the opening pages of his treatise delineates the object of study in unequivocal, categorical terms, distinguishing it from mere biological or psychological reactions:

HUMAN action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement or commentary (Mises, 1949/1998, p. 11).

From this simple axiom, Mises logically deduces the entire corpus of economic theory: marginal utility, time preference, the law of supply and demand, the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, and so forth. These laws are not hypotheses subject to empirical falsification, but apodictic truths whose validity is as certain as that of mathematical propositions.⁸ Historical experience may illustrate the operation of these laws, but it could never refute them, for their validity precedes any experience. This conception of economics as an a priori science—whose validity does not depend on experience—is among the most distinctive (and controversial) pillars of the Misesian system. Mises is explicit in separating praxeology from the historical and empirical sciences, likening its epistemic status to that of logic and mathematics.⁹ ¹⁰ Their validity, he argues, is a precondition for the very comprehension of history itself:

Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts. They are a necessary requirement of any intellectual grasp of historical events. Without them we should not be able to see in the course of events anything else than kaleidoscopic change and chaotic muddle (Mises, 1949/1998, p. 32).¹¹

Hoppe, carrying this line of argument to its logical conclusion, devotes much of his analysis to demonstrating the categorical impossibility of a causal–empirical social science that would seek to formulate predictive laws analogous to those of the natural sciences. He argues that the very concept of empirical laws of action, susceptible to falsification by experience, entails an insurmountable logical contradiction. This is because the notion of “law” in this context requires the validity of the “principle of constancy” (equal causes produce equal effects), which is logically incompatible with the irrefutable fact that human beings can learn (Hoppe, 1983, pp. 11–13, 15). Since learning implies the possibility of changing knowledge and, hence, of altering future actions in ways that are a priori unpredictable, any attempt to establish causal constants in the realm of human action is doomed to logical failure (Hoppe, 1983, pp. 14, 18). Hoppe summarizes as follows: “If we can learn […] then our knowledge and action must, as a matter of logical necessity, be conceived as a-causal” (Hoppe, 1983, p. 29).

It is crucial to understand that, for Mises, this a priori character does not mean that praxeology operates in a vacuum, disconnected from reality. Mises clarifies that, although praxeological laws are not derived from experience, they do refer to it in order to delimit their field of application and relevance. Experience informs us about the conditions under which action takes place (Mises, 1933/2003, p. 15), but the logic of action itself precedes that experience (Mises, 1933/2003, p. 13). In his own words: “All that we owe to experience is the demarcation of those problems that we consider with interest from those we wish to set aside because they are not interesting from the point of view of our desire for knowledge” (Mises, 1933/2003, p. 16). This nuanced relation between the a priori and experience is fundamental for assessing Hoppe’s critique of Hayek, for it suggests that even within the Misesian system experience plays an indispensable role in guiding theoretical inquiry toward problems relevant to the real world—thereby opening a conceptual space that the Hayekian approach explores in investigating how empirical conditions (including dispersed knowledge and institutions) affect the concrete manifestation of the logic of action.

Murray N. Rothbard, in his influential essay “The Mantle of Science,” develops this point by contrasting the methodology appropriate to human action with that of the physical sciences, arguing that to ignore free will is, in itself, an anti-scientific stance. For Rothbard, the distinction is categorical and irreducible and grounds the autonomy of praxeology:

Scientism is the profoundly unscientific attempt to transfer uncritically the methodology of the physical sciences to the study of human action. [...] But then it becomes crucially important, in reason, not to neglect the critical attribute of human action: that, alone in nature, human beings possess a rational consciousness. [...] Only human beings possess free will and consciousness: for they are conscious, and they can, and indeed must, choose their course of action. To ignore this primordial fact about the nature of man to ignore his volition, his free will is to misconstrue the facts of reality and therefore to be profoundly and radically unscientific (Rothbard, 1960, p. 1).

For his part, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his influential monograph Economic Science and the Austrian Method (1995), radicalizes this stance, arguing that denying the action axiom constitutes a performative contradiction, since the very act of denying it is itself an intentional action. Hoppe states unequivocally:

The attempt to disprove the action-axiom would itself be an action aimed at a goal, requiring means, excluding other courses of action, incurring costs, subjecting the actor to the possibility of achieving or not achieving the desired goal and so leading to a profit or a loss. And the very possession of such knowledge then can never be disputed, and the validity of these concepts can never be falsified by any contingent experience, for disputing or falsifying anything would already have presupposed their very existence (Hoppe, 1995/2007, p. 24).

From this perspective, economic knowledge is categorically distinct from that of the natural sciences: it is deductive, not hypothetical; a priori, not a posteriori. In his 1994 essay, Hoppe accuses Hayek of replacing praxeology with a theory of social evolution that he labels mysticism, arguing that if economic laws are the product of an evolutionary process, then they lack the necessity and universality that praxeology attributes to them. Hoppe’s critique is not a mere academic objection but a frontal accusation that portrays Hayek as a thinker whose original contributions—particularly in political and social philosophy—are fundamentally mistaken and represent a harmful deviation from Mises’s teaching.

Hoppe stakes out this dichotomy from the opening lines of his analysis, contending that while Hayek’s achievements as an economist are largely an inheritance from his teacher, it is in his social philosophy—the source of his fame—that his intellectual failure lies. This separation is crucial for understanding Hoppe’s attack: he does not deny the validity of early Hayekian economics, but deems it derivative, concentrating his critique on the contributions that made Hayek celebrated in the realm of political philosophy. Hoppe puts it as follows:

My thesis is that Hayek’s greater prominence has little if anything to do with his economics. There is little difference in Mises’s and Hayek’s economics. Indeed, most economic ideas associated with Hayek were originated by Mises, and this fact alone would make Mises rank far above Hayek as an economist. [...] Rather, what explains Hayek’s greater prominence is Hayek’s work, mostly in the second half of his professional life, in the field of political philosophy — and here, in this field, the difference between Hayek and Mises is striking indeed (Hoppe, 2011).

This declaration not only sets the polemical tone of the debate; it also delineates with precision the battlefield itself: not technical economics but social philosophy and epistemology are, according to Hoppe, the terrain on which Hayek abandoned Austrian principles. Moreover, this accusation of falsity is not confined to the theoretical plane; Hoppe extends it into a thesis about the sociology of intellectual power. In his lecture The Hayek Myth, he argues that Hayek’s fame was strategically constructed by the left-wing establishment, which allegedly selected him as its “official enemy” precisely because he was a muddled and moderate thinker. On this view, the left could appear tolerant and open by engaging Hayek in debate, only to win easily by pointing out that “even Hayek and Friedman admit this and do not deny that,” thereby sidelining the true radicals such as Mises and Rothbard (Hoppe, 2012).¹²

B. Hayek: Knowledge as a Classificatory Order

Hayek’s response to this paradigm is found, in the first instance, not in his economic writings but in his work of theoretical psychology, The Sensory Order (1952)—a book he began to conceive in his youth and which contains the seed of his later philosophy. In this dense work, Hayek argues that the human mind is neither a passive receiver of sensory stimuli nor a logical machine operating with innate categories, but a self-organizing, complex system. The mind is an “apparatus of classification” that learns to group stimuli from the external world into patterns and categories. This mental order is not a faithful copy of a preexisting order in the world; it is a structure formed and adapted through experience.

In his analysis, Hayek rejects the idea of a “pure sensation” or a primary sensory datum that serves as the brick from which experience is constructed. He argues that every perception is itself an act of interpretation shaped by the organism’s history: “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 the species” (Hayek, 1952/2017, p. 280).
The map of relations that the nervous system builds through experience is, of necessity, intrinsically imperfect and selective. Its configuration is not a complete reflection of the physical world but the outcome of multiple limiting factors. First, it depends on the organism’s structure, including its receptor organs, which are sensitive only to certain kinds of external events. Second, it reflects the contingencies of the particular environment in which the organism has existed, not the conditions of the universe as a whole (Hayek, 1952/2017, p. 229). Finally, this map is subject to continuous—though gradual—change as new bridges are formed through experience. Mental order is therefore a tool of pragmatic orientation, not a mirror of reality.

The idea that the mind is a classifying apparatus formed through experience was not a late conclusion but the core of Hayek’s research from his youth. In his 1920 manuscript, Contributions to a Theory of How Consciousness Develops, he had already articulated the revolutionary idea that physiological memory precedes and creates sensation, inverting the logic of classical empiricism. This argument undergirds his entire epistemological system: “We do not first have sensations that are then preserved by memory, but it is as a result of physiological memory that the physiological impulses are converted into sensations. The connections between the physiological elements are thus the primary phenomenon that creates the mental phenomena” (Hayek, 1920/2017, p. 327).

This early conception is fundamental to refuting the claim that Hayek slid into empiricism. For him, “experience” is not the passive reception of sensory data but the active, pre-sensory process of forming neuronal bridges. It is this process that constructs the apparatus of classification which, in turn, makes qualitative perception possible. Hence, mental order does not derive from conscious experience; it is the condition of possibility for such experience. Knowledge, therefore, is not a deduction from axiomatic premises but a progressive adaptation to the immense complexity of the environment. The rules that guide our perception and our action are not the products of conscious design; they are the result of an evolutionary process in which the neural connections that lead to successful actions are reinforced while others are weakened. In this biological and epistemological context, in The Sensory Order Hayek develops the idea that the mind should not be understood as a substance but as a particular order of events formed within the physical universe. This mental order is not a separate entity but the outcome of the same forces that govern the material world—a conception that departs both from traditional dualism and from a simplistic materialism (Hayek, 1952/2017, p. 290). Reason, from this perspective, is not a faculty that imposes its logic upon the world from without, but a discipline shaped by its successful adaptation to an order that transcends it.

This conception of the mind as an adaptive order translates directly into his social philosophy, set out in works such as The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952). There, Hayek fiercely criticizes what he calls “constructivist rationalism”: the belief that human institutions, to be legitimate, must be the product of deliberate, conscious design. Against this intellectual arrogance, Hayek sets an “evolutionary” or “critical” rationalism, which recognizes that the most important institutions of society—language, law, the market, morality—were not invented but emerged spontaneously over centuries, embodying more knowledge than any individual mind could ever possess. The function of reason is therefore not to construct society from scratch but to understand and improve the functioning of these inherited traditions and institutions.

From Rothbard’s perspective, this rejection of constructivist rationalism is indistinguishable from a frontal attack on reason itself. He interprets Hayekian evolutionism not as a defense of a humble, contextual reason but as a total capitulation to tradition and irrationalism. For Rothbard, reason is the only tool capable of discovering the absolute truths of natural law and, by extension, the natural rights that ground liberty. Hayek’s approach, by denying this foundational capacity of reason, becomes his chief philosophical defect. In his 1958 memorandum, Rothbard puts it forcefully:

Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek’s continuous and all-pervasive attack on reason. Reason is his bête noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even contradictory standpoints, he opposes it. The true rationalist theory was, and is, that reason can discover the natural law of man, and from this can discover the natural rights of liberty. Since Hayek dismisses this even from historical consideration, he is left with only two choices for the formation of a political ethic: either blind adherence to custom and the traditions of the ‘social organism,’ or the coercive force of government edict (Rothbard, 1958/2009, p. 63).

This interpretation sees in Hayek’s system a false dichotomy that forces a choice between the chaos of constructivist reason (which Rothbard also rejects) and blind conservatism, thereby eliminating the possibility of a rationalism grounded in natural law. Now, this distinction between the humility of evolutionary individualism and the arrogance of constructivist rationalism is the central theme Hayek develops in his critique of “scientism.” For him, the aspiration to subject the social order to conscious, centralized control is the culmination of an epistemological error that fails to recognize the limits of individual reason. True reason, Hayek argues, does not exist as an isolated and superior entity; rather, it is itself a product of the social process. In this sense, the opposition between his approach and that of socialist planners is irreconcilable:

The individualist approach, in awareness of the constitutional limitations of the individual mind, attempts to show how man in society is able, by the use of various resultants of the social process, to increase his powers with the help of the knowledge implicit in them and of which he is never aware; it makes us understand that the only ‘reason’ which can in any sense be regarded as superior to individual reason does not exist apart from the inter-individual process in which, by means of impersonal media, the knowledge of successive generations and of millions of people living simultaneously is combined and mutually adjusted, and that this process is the only form in which the totality of human knowledge ever exists (Hayek, 1942-44/2010, p. 153).

This evolutionary and anti-rationalist perspective that Hayek defends is not his own invention but the continuation of a long intellectual tradition reaching back to classical antiquity. Indeed, the ancients understood the conditions of liberty better than the design theorists of the French Revolution. Hayek himself, in his work, turns to the wisdom of Cicero to illustrate how a robust constitutional order cannot be the product of the reason of a single man or a single generation, but the outcome of a prolonged process of learning and accumulated experience. As Cicero quotes Cato:

was based upon the genius, not of one man, but of many: it was founded, not in one generation, but in a long period of several centuries and many ages of men. For, said he, there never has lived a man possessed of so great a genius that nothing could escape him, nor could the combined powers of all men living at one time possibly make all the necessary provisions for the future without the aid of actual experience and the test of time (Cicerón, citado en Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 113).

This view of reason as a limited faculty operating within a framework of undesigned rules is precisely what Hoppe and Rothbard misinterpret as a concession to empiricism. Yet for Hayek the error does not lie in appealing to experience, but in believing that economic theory can dispense with it. In his foundational essay Economics and Knowledge, Hayek argues that praxeology—what he calls the “Pure Logic of Choice”—is a system of tautologies that is logically impeccable but empirically empty. It becomes a causal and empirical science only when propositions are added concerning how individuals acquire and communicate knowledge. This is the gap that, according to Hayek, strict apriorism cannot bridge.

My main contention will be that the tautologies, of which formal equilibrium analysis in economics essentially consists, can be turned into propositions which tell us anything about causation in the real world only in so far as we are able to fill those formal propositions with definite statements about how knowledge is acquired and communicated. In short, I shall contend that the empirical element in economic theory—the only part which is concerned not merely with implications but with causes and effects and which leads therefore to conclusions which, at any rate in principle, are capable of verification—consists of propositions about the acquisition of knowledge (Hayek, 1937/2014, p. 57).

This reverence for knowledge embodied in “spontaneously arisen” institutions is what distinguishes Hayekian liberalism from constructivist rationalism which, in its zeal to redesign society from scratch, disparages the wisdom contained in tradition.

C. Opposition and Misunderstanding

The divergence between these two approaches is not merely a matter of nuance; it represents two fundamentally different visions of the nature of knowledge and the role of reason in human affairs. From his praxeological stronghold, Hoppe interprets Hayek’s evolutionary epistemology as a capitulation to historicism and empiricism—two philosophical currents that the Austrian School, since Carl Menger, had vigorously opposed. In his 1994 essay, Hoppe accuses Hayek of promoting a “Darwinian historicism,” arguing that if economic laws are the product of an evolutionary process, then they lack the necessity and universality that praxeology attributes to them. For Hoppe, the mere “survival” of an institution or economic rule tells us nothing about its truth or justice; it tells us only about its adaptive success within a particular historical context.

Hoppe contends that grounding the justification of norms in their evolutionary success is logically invalid, since the fact that a rule has enabled a group to survive or prosper does not demonstrate its intrinsic ethical validity. For Hoppe, the only valid justification for a norm is its compatibility with the a priori preconditions of argumentation itself—specifically, the implicit recognition of property rights in one’s own body and in goods originally appropriated through action (Hoppe, 1988/2010, pp. 155, 158–159, 162). Classifying capitalist principles as just is a purely cognitive matter derived from this argumentative logic. Although people may propose or impose incompatible norms, this does not invalidate the distinction; it merely classifies such proponents as misinformed or dishonest to the extent that it has been shown to them that their alternatives are argumentatively unjustifiable (Hoppe, 1988/2010, pp. 163–164).

These Hoppean criticisms, rooted in his early and later analyses of empiricism, identify a fundamental aporia in any attempt to ground knowledge exclusively in what is empirically “given.” As Hoppe notes, citing Kambartel, a purely passivist theory of experience faces an insuperable dilemma: “On the one hand […] certain statements must be made about the initial basis, since a foundation, as it were, without form or properties—like ‘the night in which all cows are black’—can be identified neither as experience nor as the beginning of a well-determined system of definitions. On the other hand, statements about the basis also necessarily seem already to employ a certain conceptual instrumentarium and thus to call into question the ‘immediacy,’ the empirical purity of the starting point” (Hoppe, 1976, p. 9, quoting Kambartel, 1968, p. 153).¹³ From this perspective, Hayek’s evolutionary epistemology—by emphasizing learning through experience (even if culturally mediated)—would, for Hoppe, seem to fall into the same empiricist trap by attempting to derive normative or cognitive structures from a contingent process, without acknowledging the need for a conceptual, a priori starting point inherent in action itself.

This Hoppean critique follows directly from his fundamental rejection of any form of empiricism or historicism in the sciences of action. For him, attempts to find “constants” or “laws” through statistical or econometric methods in the social sciences are logically erroneous (Hoppe, 1983, pp. 9–10). He argues that the correlations observed between social variables do not represent constant causal relations but mere “contingent covariational associations” discovered at a specific historical moment. To maintain that such associations constitute falsifiable empirical “laws” is, according to Hoppe, a “logical nonsense” (logischer Unsinn), since it ignores actors’ capacity for learning, which precludes the existence of temporally invariant causal relations discoverable empirically (Hoppe, 1983, pp. 14, 18). Therefore, from this standpoint, Hayek’s evolutionary approach—appearing to rest on the observation of historical patterns of success—would inevitably fall into the category of historicism that praxeology seeks to overcome.

Later, the same author explains that subjecting economic propositions to empirical testing is not merely an error but a sign of profound intellectual confusion. For him, the truth of a praxeological law is as apodictic as that of a geometric theorem, and attempting to “test” it is as absurd as trying to verify the Pythagorean theorem by measuring triangles in the physical world. This stance outright rejects any methodology that does not begin with logical deduction from the action axiom. Hoppe illustrates the point with a striking analogy: “To use an analogy, it is as if one wanted to establish the theorem of Pythagoras by actually measuring sides and angles of triangles. Just as anyone would have to comment on such an endeavor, mustn’t we say that to think economic propositions would have to be empirically tested is a sign of outright intellectual confusion?” (Hoppe, 1995/2007, p. 16).

It is this apodictic certainty that, according to Hoppe, Hayek sacrifices by introducing an evolutionary framework, thereby opening the door to historical contingency that praxeology had succeeded in overcoming. Yet this critique rests on a profound misunderstanding. Hayek does not deny the existence of universal regularities in human action or market processes. What he denies is that the human mind can access the totality of these regularities in a purely a priori manner, without the scaffolding of cultural learning and institutional experience. For Hayek, the validity of a social rule—be it a moral norm or a legal principle—does not stem from its logical deducibility from an axiom but from its coordinating function. Rules survive and spread because they enable individuals with limited, dispersed knowledge to coordinate their actions effectively, making possible the emergence of a complex and productive social order. The “truth” of a rule, in this sense, is pragmatic and systemic: it lies in its capacity to generate and sustain a spontaneous order.

The central error in Hoppe’s reading, therefore, is to confuse Hayek’s epistemological anti-apriorism with a philosophical anti-rationalism. Hayek is not an irrationalist; on the contrary, he is a defender of reason—but of a humble reason, conscious of its own limits. His critique targets the presumption that individual reason can, by itself and without the aid of tradition, design the social world. This constructivist presumption—the “fatal conceit”—is, for Hayek, the root of all totalizing and constructivist projects, from socialism to centralized planning.

D. Refutation

A rigorous refutation of the Hoppean critique must begin from the idea that Hayek does not renounce reason but strips it of its foundational pretension.¹⁴ Far from constituting a betrayal of, or departure from, the Misesian project, Hayek’s epistemology was conceived from the outset as an attempt to correct what he regarded as an overextension of his teacher’s apriorism. Hayek himself, in a late autobiographical reflection, explains that his famous 1937 article was a deliberate effort to persuade Mises that a priori certainty is confined to the logic of individual action and cannot be extended to the complex and empirical field of social interaction. In his own words:

Let me get to the crucial point. What I see only now clearly is the problem of my relation to Mises, which began with my 1937 article on the economics of knowledge, which was an attempt to persuade Mises himself that when he asserted that the market theory was a priori, he was wrong; that what was a priori was only the logic of individual action, but the moment that you passed from this to the interaction of many people, you entered into the empirical field (Hayek, 1994, p. 72).

Hayek’s statement is logically devastating for the Hoppean critique. Hoppe accuses Hayek of betraying apriorism, when Hayek never disputed the apriorism of the logic of individual choice (the “Pure Logic of Choice”). What Hayek identified is that praxeology, by itself, is incapable of explaining the social phenomenon of market order. Praxeology explains why an isolated individual values (axiom), but it cannot explain how millions of subjective valuations, based on dispersed and even contradictory knowledge, manage to coordinate so as to form a coherent capital structure and functioning prices. That problem is not logical–deductive but empirical–cognitive: it is the problem of the communication of knowledge. Thus, Hoppe criticizes Hayek for failing to use a hammer (praxeology) to tighten a screw (the knowledge problem).

Additionally, the statement is pivotal, for it reveals that Hayek’s intention was not to break with Mises but to refine his system from within, arguing that market coordination is not a purely logical truth but an empirical problem that depends on how knowledge is acquired and communicated among fallible individuals. In the Hayekian framework, the relation between reason and order is inverted: reason does not create order; it is the evolved social order that makes possible the development and efficacy of individual reason. Our logical faculties and our capacity for abstract thought are themselves products of a cultural evolution that has endowed us with conceptual tools—such as language and arithmetic—that we could not have invented from scratch. The apriorism of Mises and Hoppe offers the seductive promise of absolute logical certainty, but it does so at the cost of isolating economic science from the dynamic and open-ended process of human knowledge. Their system is logically coherent, yet epistemologically sterile when it comes to explaining how real economic agents, operating under conditions of radical ignorance, succeed in coordinating their plans.

It is telling that Mises himself, far from viewing Hayek’s work as a refutation, explicitly recognized the value and originality of his contribution on knowledge. Mises regarded his colleague’s work as a crucial extension of his own argument, especially in the context of the critique of socialism, referring to it as Hayek’s valuable contribution to knowledge (Ebeling, 2014, p. 153). In one of his lectures, Mises summarized the significance of this contribution as follows:

The fact that knowledge exists dispersed, incomplete, and inconsistent in many individual minds has been pointed out by Hayek, and this is very important […] In a socialist economy, knowledge has value only insofar as it is available to the central authority—to the dictators who make the central plan. Under capitalism, the coordination of the various fragments of knowledge takes place through the market (Greaves, 1958).

This appraisal by Mises himself underscores the profoundly complementary nature of their contributions: while he had focused on the impossibility of economic calculation even with given knowledge, Hayek demonstrated the prior impossibility of aggregating that knowledge in the first place.

This epistemological affinity between Mises and Hayek—centered on the limits of human knowledge in the face of social complexity—is a point that praxeological critics such as Hoppe and Rothbard systematically omit. They caricature Mises’s apriorism as a form of constructivist rationalism that presumes omniscience about the content of action, when in fact Misesian apriorism is confined to the form of action. Mises himself, in the very work his heirs defend, emphasizes the radical uncertainty of the future as a fundamental praxeological datum—a pillar that would later support Hayek’s emphasis on the market as a “discovery procedure.” For Mises, action is always oriented toward the future, and the future, by definition, is unknowable: “Since the human being knows nothing with certainty about the future, it always remains indeterminate how much of the time that has not yet elapsed we count as present and as now” (Mises, 1940, p. 79).¹⁵ Praxeology therefore offers no certainty about the outcomes of action, but only about the logical structure of action in the face of an inherently uncertain future. Hayek’s epistemology does not betray this foundation; it takes it as a point of departure to explain the social process by which actors, operating under radical uncertainty, manage to coordinate.

Hayek develops an epistemology of ignorance. He recognizes that the fundamental given of the human condition is not knowledge, but the lack of it. The economic problem is not how to allocate given resources (a matter of pure logic), but how to ensure the best use of resources for ends whose importance is known only to individuals. This requires a mechanism for utilizing knowledge that can never be concentrated in a single mind. This perspective enables Hayek to articulate his deepest defense of the market—not merely as a system of incentives but, more fundamentally, as a discovery procedure. In one of his most famous statements, he summarizes this view: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 76).

Hoppean apriorism, by focusing exclusively on the logical structure of action, ignores the content of the knowledge that guides that action. By placing dispersed knowledge at the center of his analysis, Hayek offers a far richer and more realistic account of how the world actually works. His evolutionism is therefore not a betrayal of the Austrian project, but its logical culmination, for it carries the school’s inherent subjectivism to its ultimate consequence: the recognition that reason itself is a social and evolutionary institution.

Consequently, the Hoppean critique—which frames Hayekian evolutionism as a capitulation to empiricism—errs in failing to see that Hayek does not substitute logic with history; he integrates it. Apriorism, in its quest for apodictic certainty, conceives reason as an ahistorical and self-sufficient faculty. Hayek, by contrast, demonstrates that the very capacity for deductive reasoning—the pillar of praxeology—is an emergent product of a cultural order that has furnished us with the conceptual tools, such as language and logic, necessary for systematic thought. Evolutionism thus does not invalidate praxeology; it explains its conditions of possibility, providing methodological individualism with a deeper and more realistic epistemological foundation: reason is not the starting point of social order, but one of its most sophisticated outcomes.

Hoppe’s insistence on the purity of apriorism, therefore, not only misreads Hayek; it risks caricaturing Mises. By transforming Mises’s apriorism—a method for understanding the form of action—into a dogmatic system that presumes to know a priori the conditions for the content of social coordination, Hoppe departs from Misesian humility. Mises grounded his praxeology in action directed toward a radically uncertain future; Hayek took that uncertainty (ignorance) as the central problem. In attacking Hayek, Hoppe defends a certainty that Mises himself would likely have regarded as an overextension of human reason—a constructivist rationalism that believes it can deduce the entirety of the social order from a single axiom, while ignoring the fundamental empirical and cognitive problem that Hayek placed on the table.

The accusation that Hayekian fallibilism leads to relativism or irrationalism can be refuted even more forcefully by appealing to Mises’s own definition of rationality in action. For Mises, human action is, by necessity, always rational. The expression “rational action,” therefore, is pleonastic. Rationality does not apply to ultimate ends, which are subjective, but to the suitability of the means chosen to attain those ends. This point is crucial for understanding Hayek’s critique of “constructivist rationalism,” which is not a critique of reason as such, but of a mistaken conception of its capacities. Mises clarifies it as follows:

Human action is necessarily always rational. [...] When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man. [...] When applied to the means chosen for the attainment of ends, the terms rational and irrational imply a judgment about the expediency and adequacy of the procedure employed. [...] An action unsuited to the end sought falls short of expectation. It is contrary to purpose, but it is rational, i.e., the outcome of a reasonable—although faulty—deliberation and an attempt—although an ineffectual attempt—to attain a definite goal (Mises, 1949, pp. 18, 20).

III. THE ORDER OF KNOWLEDGE: FROM PRAXEOLOGY TO SPONTANEOUS ORDER

A. Hayek’s Theory of Dispersed Knowledge

The methodological divergence discussed above is most clearly manifested in the conception of social knowledge. Whereas Misesian praxeology centers on the universal logic of individual action, Hayek shifts the focus to the epistemological problem of how the fragmented knowledge of millions of individuals can be integrated to create a coherent economic order. His seminal essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), is the cornerstone of this view. There, Hayek argues that the fundamental economic problem of society is not merely a problem of calculation or logic, as a central planner might suppose, but a problem of utilizing knowledge “which is not given to anyone in its totality” (Hayek, 1945/2014, p. 94).

This knowledge is not primarily scientific or theoretical in nature. On the contrary, most of the knowledge that enables a complex economy to function is practical, tacit, and local: it is knowledge of “the particular circumstances of time and place” (Hayek, 1945/2014, p. 95). It is the knowledge of the entrepreneur who perceives an arbitrage opportunity, of the artisan who knows the properties of his materials, or of the carrier who knows which route is least congested at a given moment. By its very nature, this kind of knowledge cannot be statistically aggregated or communicated to a central authority without losing its essence. It is intrinsically dispersed and can be effectively used only by the very individuals who possess it.

For Hayek, the market price system is the spontaneous solution to this epistemological problem. Prices act as signals that condense and transmit information about the relative scarcity of resources, enabling millions of economic agents to coordinate their plans without needing to know the innumerable factors that have determined those prices. A change in the price of a raw material, for example, informs all market participants that they should economize on its use, without requiring them to know whether the cause was a poor harvest, new demand elsewhere in the world, or a technological innovation.

Thus, in Hayek, the market order acquires an almost biological dimension: it is an exosomatic nervous system. While praxeology focuses on the individual “brain” (the logic of action), Hayek’s social epistemology focuses on the “nervous system” that connects all brains (the price system). This system is not “true” in the logical sense, but “effective” in the functional sense. Its function is not to prove axioms, but to process an amount of information that exceeds the capacity of any individual component, enabling the whole (society) to adapt to realities that none of its parts knows.¹⁶

In The Fatal Conceit, Hayek deepens this account of the market as a communication system that overcomes the limitations of individual knowledge. It is not merely a matter of transmitting data, but of a process that permits adaptation to countless circumstances unknown to any participant: “We are led — for example by the pricing system in market exchange — to do things by circumstances of which we are largely unaware and which produce results that we do not intend” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 14). This exosomatic process allows the dispersed knowledge of millions of individuals to be integrated into a coherent material pattern without anyone needing to possess the totality of the information. The information individuals use is “The information that individuals or organisations can use to adapt to the unknown is necessarily partial, and is conveyed by signals (e.g., prices) through long chains of individuals, each person passing on in modified form a combination of streams of abstract market signals” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 76). Hence, market order is not formed from unified knowledge, but from an evolved method of communication that transmits abstract properties of particular conditions—such as competitive prices—thereby enabling mutual adjustment on a scale that no mind could direct (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 86).

This market order, however, must not be confused with an economy in the strict sense, that is, an organization serving a unitary hierarchy of ends (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 307). Hayek employs the term “catallaxy” to describe the spontaneous order of the market (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 307), whose function is not to serve a common purpose but to allow many different individual purposes (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 308) to be pursued by individuals. The criticism that the market does not satisfy “the most important needs before the less important ones” (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 307) is therefore irrelevant, since it judges the catallaxy by the criteria of a planned economy—which it is not and cannot be by definition. The market does not maximize a known set of ends; it improves the opportunities available to unknown persons (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 308).

This conception of the market as a vast system of communication and distributed computation transcends Mises’s logical individualism without contradicting it. It complements praxeology by explaining how individual rational action, under conditions of inevitable ignorance, can give rise to a general social order that surpasses the cognitive capacity of any participant. Hayek emphasizes that this dependence on dispersed knowledge necessarily entails accepting outcomes that do not conform to any preconceived plan or to notions of individual desert. The market operates as a game of skill and chance, where rewards signal what to do in the future, not necessarily what was done well in the past. As he explains in Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

It is [...] a game which [...] leads to an increase of the stream of goods and of the prospects of all participants to satisfy their needs, but which retains the character of a game [...]: ‘a contest played according to rules and displaying in the result the superior skill, strength, or good fortune of the winner or winners’. That the outcome of this game for each will, because of its very character, necessarily be determined by a mixture of skill and chance will be one of the main points we must now try to make clear. [...] The remunerations which the market determines are, as it were, not functionally related with what people have done, but only with what they ought to do. They are incentives which as a rule guide people to success, but will produce a viable order only because they often disappoint the expectations they have caused when relevant circumstances have unexpectedly changed (Hayek, 1973-1979/2021, pp. 318-319).

B. Hoppe and Rothbard: Confusion Between Subjetivismo and Relativism

The response of the Rothbard–Hoppe current to this sophisticated social epistemology has largely been one of rejection and simplification. They accuse Hayek of sliding from Austrian subjectivism (value is subjective) into epistemic relativism (truth is subjective or contextual). Murray Rothbard, in his essay The Mantle of Science (1957), was among the first to articulate this critique, grouping Hayek with Karl Popper and charging them with introducing a corrosive skepticism into the foundations of economic science. According to Rothbard, by emphasizing fallibilism and learning by trial and error, Hayek undermines the possibility of establishing firm and universal economic truths.

In that text, Rothbard draws a radical methodological distinction between the physical sciences and the sciences of human action, arguing that the axiomatic–deductive method is not only valid but superior in the field of the study of man. His critique of empiricism rests on the claim that the nature of the phenomena under investigation is fundamentally different:

But this method is appropriate only in the physical sciences, where we begin by knowing external sense data and then proceed to our task of trying to find, as closely as we can, the causal laws of behavior of the entities we perceive. [...] In the study of human action, on the other hand, the proper procedure is the reverse. Here we begin with the primary axioms; we know that men are the causal agents, that the ideas they adopt by free will govern their actions. [...] The proper theoretical methodology in human affairs, then, is the axiomatic-deductive method (Rothbard, 1960, pp. 11-12).

Hans-Hermann Hoppe takes up and sharpens this argument in essays such as Why Mises (and Not Hayek)? (2011). For Hoppe, Hayek’s evolutionary epistemology commits the fatal error of conflating the process of discovery with the justification of knowledge.¹⁷ He contends that, in doing so, Hayek “replaces logic with evolution and truth with success” (Hoppe, 2011). From Hoppe’s aprioristic standpoint, valid economic knowledge must be logically deducible from self-evident and immutable axioms. Empirical learning, cultural adaptation, and the survival of rules are, for him, phenomena that belong to the domain of history or sociology, but are epistemologically inferior and categorically distinct from the apodictic certainty provided by praxeology.¹⁸ By denying the existence of an a priori foundation for ethics and law, and by attributing their origin to a blind process of evolution, Hayek would, according to Hoppe, be opening the door to legal positivism and moral relativism, thereby betraying the very foundations of classical liberal philosophy.¹⁹

The root of this Hoppean rejection of the evolutionary approach lies in his early critique of empiricist theories of experience (Hoppe, 1976). Hoppe argues that empiricism, by conceiving cognition as a passive reflection of external reality, is incapable of explaining the very possibility of structured and operationally relevant experience (Hoppe, 1976, pp. 7–9). He maintains that experience always presupposes subjective, aprioristic cognitive schemata linked to action—schemata not derived from experience but constitutive of it (Hoppe, 1976, p. 9). From this perspective, any attempt to explain the origin of fundamental norms or categories (such as causality or property) through a historical or evolutionary process based on “experience” or “adaptive success” begs the question, since it presupposes what it aims to explain: a cognitive–normative framework that allows one to interpret and evaluate such experience or success. The apodictic certainty of praxeology, for Hoppe, resides precisely in its independence from such historical contingencies.

For Hoppe, this slide into relativism is particularly evident in the field of ethics. If moral norms are the product of blind cultural evolution rather than of rational deduction from universal principles, then, he argues, there can be no ethical system with universal validity. Justice becomes a merely contingent outcome of survival, stripped of any cognitive or apodictic foundation. Hoppe cites Hayek directly to underscore what he takes to be the inevitable consequence of Hayek’s evolutionism: “Moreover, if civilization has resulted from undesigned gradual changes in morality, then, however reluctant we may be to accept it, we can never know a system of ethics that is universally valid” (Hayek, cited in Hoppe, 1994, p. 74).

For Hoppe, this conclusion is an unacceptable abdication. It undermines the possibility of grounding property rights and the non-aggression principle—truths that, from the praxeological perspective, are a priori. By substituting ethical certainty with “the selection of cultural groups,” Hayek would not only be committing an epistemological error but disarming liberalism of its most robust defense.

Mises, though a defender of a value-free economic science, likewise recognizes that human action is always guided by subjective valuations that are, ultimately, “irrational” in the sense of being ultimate data not susceptible of further scientific explanation (Mises, 1933/2003, p. 142). He writes: “Science belongs entirely to the domain of rationality. There can be no science of the irrational, just as there can be no irrational science. The irrational lies outside the domain of human reasoning and science. When faced with the irrational, reasoning and science can only register and classify. They are incapable of penetrating any ‘deeper’ […] the criterion of the irrational is precisely that it cannot be fully understood by reasoning” (Mises, 1933/2003, p. 143). Hoppe’s critique of Hayek for allegedly removing the rational foundation of ethics can be qualified in light of this Misesian perspective: if ultimate values are inherently irrational (in Mises’s sense), then the quest for a purely rational, a priori justification for a complete ethical system—as Hoppe demands—may be an overextension of the capacities of scientific reason as Mises defines it. Hayek’s evolutionary approach, in explaining the emergence of functional moral norms without recourse to a priori deduction, would be operating precisely in that realm of the “given” irrational that Mises holds to be beyond the explanatory reach—though not beyond the purview—of science.

The categorical distinction between theory (praxeology) and history, which Hoppe thinks Hayek dissolves, is indeed a central pillar of the Misesian system. For Mises, history treats the concrete and accidental content of human action, whereas praxeology concerns its pure form and categorial structure. Any attempt to derive economic laws from history is, on this view, a fundamental epistemological error: “Praxeology is not concerned with the changing content of acting, but with its pure form and its categorial structure. The study of the accidental and environmental features of human action is the task of history” (Mises, 1949/1998, p. 47).

However, this Hoppean critique—by insisting on so stark a dichotomy between theory and history—overlooks Mises’s own caveat about the limits of apriorism in interpreting complex phenomena. While praxeology supplies the logical scaffolding, it cannot dispense with the material that history provides. Mises acknowledges that the theorist must resort to experience not to prove his theorems, but to focus analysis on problems relevant to real human action. In his words: “They refer to experience only in order to separate those problems that are of interest for the study of man as he really is and acts from other problems that offer a merely academic interest” (Mises, 1962/2006, p. 37). This concession, subtle though it is, opens a door to the Hayekian perspective. If the relevance of economic theory depends on historical experience, then praxeology does not operate in a Platonic vacuum, but in constant dialogue with the world of contingent phenomena. Hayek, therefore, is not dissolving theory into history, as Hoppe charges; he is exploring precisely the interface that Mises himself recognizes as necessary if economic science is not to degenerate into a mere “idle pastime” (Mises, 1962/2006, p. 78).

C. Refutation

The Rothbard–Hoppe charge that Hayek lapses into relativism collapses under a precise examination of Hayek’s epistemology. Hayek does not identify “evolutionary success” with “truth” in a propositional sense, but with adaptive efficiency. The rules and institutions that survive and spread in a society do not do so because they are “true” in the same sense as a logical proposition; they persist because they prove functionally superior at solving the fundamental problem of social coordination under conditions of radical ignorance. Private-property rules, for example, are not true or false; they are effective or ineffective. Their “validity” is measured by their capacity to create an order in which individuals can pursue their own ends with a reasonable prospect of success, on the basis of stable expectations about others’ actions. Hence, the rules that survive are not true per se; rather, they enable the coordination of actions in a world of dispersed knowledge.

Far from substituting for reason, cultural evolution explains it as a social phenomenon and situates it in its proper context. For Hayek, the human mind and social institutions co-evolve through a process of trial and error. Reason does not operate in an institutional vacuum; it depends on a web of rules, norms, and conventions—such as language, morality, and law—that are themselves the product of a long evolutionary process. There is, therefore, no contradiction between the existence of a spontaneous order and individual rational action. On the contrary, spontaneous order is the condition of possibility for rational action to be effective at scale. Individual reason is a powerful but limited tool that works best when it is supported by the knowledge condensed and embodied in traditions and institutions. In this sense, reason itself is an emergent institution.

Here lies the fundamental difference: Rothbard and Hoppe work with an essentially static conception of knowledge, viewing it as a set of timeless logical truths that can be grasped once and for all by deduction. Hayek, by contrast, introduces the temporal dimension of learning as indispensable to understanding market processes and society as a whole. The market is not merely a mechanism that processes pre-existing data; it is a continuous discovery process in which new knowledge is constantly created and revealed. This dynamic vision is incompatible with rigid apriorism, yet essential to a realistic understanding of capitalism and innovation. By acknowledging the cognitive limits of the individual, Hayek’s epistemology compels us to admit that our very faculty of reasoning is part of the same evolutionary process it seeks to understand. He captures this idea masterfully in his early major work, arguing that the mind can never fully explain its own operation because any classifying apparatus must be of a higher order of complexity than the objects it classifies (Hayek, 1952/2017, pp. 296, 299, 302). The notion that the mind could explain itself is, for Hayek, a logical contradiction.²⁰

Thus, the charge of relativism reveals itself as a category error that confuses the functional justification of a rule with its propositional validity. For Hayek, a norm is not “true,” but “fit”; its legitimacy does not reside in its deducibility from an axiom but in its systemic capacity to coordinate the actions of individuals with dispersed knowledge, thereby enabling the emergence of an extended order. Working with a static, binary conception of knowledge (true/false), Rothbard and Hoppe are unable to capture this functional and dynamic dimension. They overlook that market and law are not systems of logical propositions, but processes of discovery and adaptation. Hayekian evolutionism therefore does not defend a world in which truth is relative; it defends a world in which human cooperation depends on institutions whose embodied knowledge necessarily exceeds any individual reason’s capacity for explicit justification.

Hoppe’s misunderstanding—equating the “survival” of a rule with its “truth”—ignores the systemic dimension of Hayek’s argument. For Hayek, rules of individual conduct are not selected for a direct or calculable benefit to the follower, but for their effect on the viability and efficiency of the overall social order. A rule “survives” not because it is logically “true,” but because the group that adopts it turns out to be more successful in competition with other groups. Selection operates on the resulting order, not on the isolated rule. Hayek makes this point unequivocally in his “Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct”:

The evolutionary selection of different rules of individual conduct operates through the viability of the order it will produce, and any given rules of individual conduct may prove beneficial as part of one set of such rules, or in one set of external circumstances, and harmful as part of another set of rules or in another set of external circumstances. [...] For the purposes of this discussion we shall define the different kinds of elements of which groups consist by the rules of conduct which they obey, and regard the appearance of a transmittable ‘mutation’ of these rules of individual conduct as the equivalent of the appearance of new elements, or as a progressive change in the character of all the elements of the group (Hayek, 1967/2014, p. 279, 280).

The criticism that Hayekian evolutionism leads to moral relativism also overlooks the instrumental and enabling role that Hayek attributes to tradition and moral rules. For him, reverence for tradition is neither an end in itself nor an abdication of reason, but a precondition for the existence of a free and successful society. Moral norms and customs are the scaffolding that makes social coordination—and therefore freedom itself—possible. Far from being an obstacle, tradition is what frees individual reason from the impossible task of calculating all the consequences of its actions. As Hayek argues, the paradox of a free society is that its functioning depends on being deeply rooted in tradition:

There probably never has existed a genuine belief in freedom, and there has certainly been no successful attempt to operate a free society, without a genuine reverence for grown institutions, for customs and habits and ‘all those securities of liberty which arise from regulation of long prescription and ancient ways.’ Paradoxical as it may appear, it is probably true that a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 122).

Therefore, Hayekian evolutionism does not dissolve morality; it explains it as a spontaneous normative order that is an indispensable condition for freedom and reason. The fundamental error of the Rothbard–Hoppe critique lies in its static conception of knowledge and law. For them, the system of property rights is a set of Platonic, timeless, logically deducible truths that reason can apprehend once and for all. Hayek’s system, by contrast, is dynamic. The market, law, and morality are not a corpus of static truths, but adaptive processes of discovery. The critique, therefore, confuses the process of discovery (evolution) with the result (truth). For Hayek, the value of rules does not lie in their a priori logical truth, but in their functional capacity to manage ignorance and to enable an ongoing process of discovery. The critics demand a complete and definitive map, whereas Hayek explains that civilization provides us only with a compass and the rules for navigating an unknown ocean.

IV. THE CONCEPT OF COERCION IN HAYEK: MISUNDERSTANDING AND RECONSTRUCTION

A. Hayek’s Concept of Coercion

Perhaps no other area of Hayek’s thought has been so persistently misread by his libertarian critics as his definition of coercion. In chapter nine of his monumental work The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek undertakes the task of defining with precision liberty and its opposite, coercion, as central concepts of a political philosophy. Crucially, Hayek argues that coercion is not synonymous with any and every form of interference, influence, or restriction on an individual’s action. On the contrary, he defines it in a specific, teleological way: coercion occurs when an individual is forced to act according to another’s will, so as to serve the other’s ends rather than his own.²¹

In his own words—resonant with a Kantian clarity—coercion occurs “when one man’s actions are made to serve the will of another man, not for his own but for the other’s purposes.” Coercion implies that a person’s mind becomes the tool of someone else, such that “although the coerced still chooses, the alternatives are so determined by the coercer that he will choose what the coercer wants” (Hayek, 1960/2011, pp. 199–200).

The key to this definition is arbitrariness and intentionality. Coercion subjects a person to the discretionary control of another, reducing him to a mere instrument. This allows Hayek to draw a fundamental distinction: not every constraint on our options is coercive. Constraints imposed by natural laws (such as gravity) or by impersonal market circumstances (such as a rise in the price of a good) may frustrate our plans, but they do not coerce us, because they do not subject us to anyone’s arbitrary will. More controversially for his critics, Hayek maintains that general rules of law, applied equally to all and not directed toward particular ends, limit our field of action but do not coerce us. These rules (the Nomos) do not tell us what to do; rather, they establish the boundaries within which we are free to pursue our own ends. Freedom, therefore, is not the absence of all influence or constraint, but the absence of intentional and arbitrary control by others.²²

It is crucial to understand that, for Hayek, the general rules of law (nomos) are non-coercive precisely because they are end-independent and purpose-independent. They serve to demarcate protected domains within which individuals are free to pursue their own ends, whatever these may be. Hayek contrasts these rules with rules of organization (thesis), which are end-dependent and designed to achieve predetermined, particular results (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, pp. 154, 171, 198). Coercion, in its pernicious sense, arises when specific mandates or discriminatory rules (proper to organization) are employed to direct individuals’ actions toward particular ends they have not chosen, thereby violating the general rules that define their liberty. The distinction is therefore not merely semantic but functional: the rules of nomos create freedom by generating predictability, whereas coercion destroys it by introducing arbitrariness. In his essay “Individualism: True and False,” Hayek precisely articulates this fundamental distinction between constraints imposed by general, impersonal rules and the specific orders that characterize coercion. This contrast is essential to understanding why Nomos, far from being an agent of coercion, is the very condition of possibility for freedom:

The fundamental contrast between government by rules, whose main purpose is to inform the individual what is his sphere of responsibility within which he must shape his own life, and government by orders which impose specific duties has become so blurred in recent years that it is necessary to consider it a little further. It involves nothing less than the distinction between freedom under the law and the use of the legislative machinery, whether democratic or not, to abolish freedom. The essential point is not that there should be some kind of guiding principle behind the actions of the government but that government should be confined to making the individuals observe principles which they know and can take into account in their decisions. It means, further, that what the individual may or may not do, or what he can expect his fellows to do or not to do, must depend not on some remote and indirect consequences which his actions may have but on the immediate and readily recognisable circumstances which he can be supposed to know (Hayek, 1946/2010, pp. 62-63).

B. The Hoppean and Rothbardian Critique

From the standpoint of Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism and Hoppe’s argumentation ethics, this Hayekian distinction is unacceptable and constitutes a conceptual contradiction that fatally undermines the defense of liberty.²³ For them, freedom is defined far more simply and absolutely: the absence of physical aggression—or the threat thereof—against the person and legitimately acquired property (the non-aggression principle). From this perspective, any law imposed by a state, regardless of whether it is general, abstract, or predictable, constitutes a form of coercion, since it ultimately rests on the threat of violence.

Hoppe and Rothbard interpret Hayek’s distinction as mere wordplay designed to justify a “minimal” level of state intervention. If every general norm limits action, why not call it, plainly, coercive? According to Hoppe, by redefining the term, Hayek dangerously dilutes the non-aggression principle and leaves the door open to an endless array of government interventions, so long as they are disguised as “general rules.”²⁴

Murray Rothbard was among the first to identify this point as the fundamental break in Hayek’s philosophy. For Rothbard, the definition of coercion had to be simple and physical: the use or threat of violence. By introducing a broader and more nuanced definition, Hayek, in Rothbard’s view, embarked on a “descent into the abyss” that ultimately justifies state intervention. Rothbard’s critique centers on how Hayek’s definition, by depending on the intention to harm, opens the door to treating perfectly legitimate market acts as coercive, thereby justifying government regulation:

For instead of defining coercion as physical violence or the threat thereof, as we would, he defines it to mean specific acts of one person with the intent of harming another. He says, for example, that the reason why A is firing B, in the free market, is not coercion is because A fires him not because he dislikes B, but because keeping him on is uneconomic. The implication is very strong that if A fired B because he hated him, then this would be coercion, and the government would have a very strong case for stopping this (Rothbard, 1958/2009, p. 62).

This reading sees Hayek’s definition not as an analytical tool for distinguishing forms of constraint, but as a calculated ambiguity that inevitably weakens the strict defense of property rights and the free market. Hoppe, for his part, ridicules Hayek’s claim that intrinsically aggressive measures such as taxation or compulsory military service lose their “malignant nature” if they are predictable and applied as general rules. He regards this argument as a logical absurdity that reveals a fundamental inconsistency in the Hayekian system, since it equates the predictability of a violent act with its legitimacy. In his lecture, Hoppe makes this point with eloquent sarcasm:

Taxes as such and the absolute height of taxation are not a problem for Hayek. Taxes — and likewise compulsory military service — lose their character as coercive measures, if they are at least predictable and are enforced irrespective of how the individual would otherwise employ his energies; this deprives them largely of the evil nature of coercion. [...] But please, it must be a proportional tax and general military service! [...] I could go on and on, citing Hayek’s muddled and contradictory definitions of freedom and coercion, but that shall suffice to make my point. I am simply asking: what socialist and what green could have any difficulties with all this? Following Hayek, they can all proudly call themselves liberals (Hoppe, 2011).

The root of this critique is that Hoppe regards the Hayekian distinction between the constraints of a general rule and arbitrary coercion as mere “terminological sleight of hand.” From the Hoppean perspective, the nature of coercion does not change simply because it is predictable or applied impersonally. Acts that are intrinsically aggressive—such as taxation or compulsory military service—do not cease to be coercive because they are legally sanctioned. Hoppe ridicules Hayek’s justification that measures like taxation or conscription, by virtue of being predictable, “largely lose the malign nature of coercion” (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 210). For Hoppe, this is an absurdity that exposes a fundamental inconsistency in the Hayekian system: “In light of this terminological hocus-pocus and the above cited list of legitimate government functions, the difference between Hayek and a modern social democrat boils down to the question whether or not the postal service should be privatized (Hayek says ‘yes’)” (Hoppe, 1994, pp. 69–70).

By collapsing this distinction, Hoppe concludes that Hayek’s philosophy offers no systematic defense against the growth of the state; on the contrary, it provides a formal justification that renders it indistinguishable from modern social democracy. In his lecture The Hayek Myth (2012), Hoppe infers that by redefining coercion to the point of making it disappear—so long as it is exercised in compliance with general rules—Hayek opens the door to any form of restriction on liberty, provided only that it is labeled a general rule and applied equally to all (Hoppe, 2012).

Similarly, Murray Rothbard, in Power and Market (1970), accuses Hayek of crafting a “mystical” and “confused” definition of coercion that, in practice, serves to legitimize the coercion inherent in all state action, such as taxation. For Rothbard, the fact that a theft is predictable, general, and legally sanctioned does not transform it into anything other than theft. Hayek’s distinction between arbitrary coercion and the constraints of the Rule of Law is therefore seen not as theoretical sophistication but as an intellectual abdication in the face of state power.²⁵

This critique—one that the present essay seeks to refute—is laid out with precision in Power and Market. Rothbard devotes a section to “unraveling” what he considers Hayek’s “confusion,” namely that, in his view, Hayek abandons the clear definition of coercion (physical violence or its threat) in favor of a psychological and “mystical” definition that equates state violence with the market’s “economic power.” For Rothbard, Hayek’s error is to apply the term “power” analogically and confusedly, conflating the capacity to serve consumers with the capacity to wield violence. According to Rothbard:

Hayek’s fundamental error is his failure to distinguish between coercion (violence) and noncoercive (voluntary) exchanges. […] He objects to ‘the power of the stronger over the weaker’ […], but this power is not coercive, for it is not based on violence. In the free market, the ‘stronger’ person is the one who serves the consumers better; the ‘weaker’ is the one who is less efficient. […] Hayek dislikes the ‘economic’ power of the employer over the employee. But the employer wields no coercion; he simply pays for the employee’s services, services which are vital to the employer. […] Hayek’s error is to take the term ‘power’ from its original context […] and apply it confusedly to voluntary-exchange relations. It is a mystical and unwarranted analogy (Rothbard, 1970/2009, p. 1032).

For Rothbard, this conceptual confusion in Hayek’s account of coercion is precisely what enables the justification of the paradigmatic case of state intervention: taxation. In Power and Market, Rothbard does not seek to nuance the definition of coercion; rather, he identifies its purest form in governmental action. He defines taxation not as a predictable “general rule,” but as plain theft—a direct violation of the non-aggression principle and the antithesis of voluntary market exchange.

Taxation is, purely and simply, robbery. […] It is the coercive seizure of the property of the inhabitants of the State’s territory. […] It is the violation by the State of its ‘own’ law, which forbids robbery. […] Far from being a ‘voluntary’ means of financing desired services, taxation is a coercive means. It might be alleged that taxation is a ‘price’ paid for the services of the State. But this is the reverse of the truth. A price is paid voluntarily in exchange for a desired service. A tax is a coercive exaction, regardless of whether any service is received in return (Rothbard, 1970/2009, p. 1051).

From a Hoppean viewpoint, this critique is sharpened by considering the inherent nature of the state. Hoppe defines the state as the institution that embodies socialism, characterized fundamentally by institutionalized aggression through taxation and non-contractual interference with private property (Hoppe, 1988/2010, pp. 173, 177). Every state action—regardless of whether it presents itself in the form of general and predictable rules—ultimately rests on this original expropriation (Hoppe, 1988/2010, p. 194). As Hoppe argues: “There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and since socialism rests on aggressive violence directed at innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state” (Hoppe, 1988/2010, p. 177). Therefore, Hayek’s distinction between arbitrary coercion and the “non-coercive” constraints of the Nomos is, for Hoppe, a contradiction in terms, since it ignores the intrinsically aggressive character of the state as an institution.

C. Refutation

The critique by Hoppe and Rothbard, though logically consistent within their own axiomatic framework, commits a fundamental category error in analyzing Hayek’s thought: it confuses the nature and function of different forms of constraint.²⁶ Hayek implicitly distinguishes between what we might call causal constraint and coercion. The laws of physics, impersonal economic conditions, and—crucially—general and abstract legal norms operate as causal constraints. They are part of the environment, the “conditions of possibility” within which an individual plans and acts. They do not tell us which ends to pursue; rather, they inform us of the probable consequences of certain actions, enabling us to form stable and predictable expectations about the world and, especially, about the actions of others.

This coordinating function of rules is best understood in light of Hayek’s theory of mind. In The Sensory Order, he describes how the nervous system creates an internal “model” of the environment out of a semi-permanent neuronal “map” of connections. This model does not merely represent the current situation; it constantly “rehearses” possible future developments, allowing the organism to anticipate the consequences of its actions (Hayek, 1952/2017, pp. 238, 242). General rules of law perform an analogous function at the social level: they act as the stable “map” that enables individuals to construct their models of action plans, anticipating others’ responses and coordinating behavior without the need for direct command. Arbitrary coercion, by contrast, destroys this map, rendering the social environment unpredictable and long-term planning impossible.

This coordinating and enabling function of general rules aligns with Mises’s understanding of how economic science reveals the limits of political action. Mises argues that one of the great achievements of economics was the discovery that “in the social sphere also there is something operative that power and force are incapable of altering and to which they must adjust if they hope to attain success” (Mises, 1933/2003, pp. 3–4). Praxeological laws, though a priori, describe these inherent constraints of coordinated human action. In the Hayekian view, general rules of law function as the social discovery of these constraints, creating a framework that—by reflecting (however imperfectly) these “unalterable necessities of human existence” (Mises, 1933/2003, p. 213)—permits individual planning and social cooperation more effectively than arbitrary intervention, which inevitably collides with those praxeological laws that limit the efficacy of political power.

By contrast, coercion for Hayek is fundamentally teleological: it implies direct intentionality. It occurs when A’s will is imposed upon B with the purpose that B serve A’s ends. The general norms of the Nomos lack this intentional and particularistic component. A law prohibiting theft is not designed so that a specific individual serve another’s ends; it is designed to create a framework of predictability within which all individuals can pursue their own ends more securely. To confuse the constraint imposed by a traffic rule with the direct order of an assailant is to deny the institutional structure that makes freedom itself possible.

This framework of predictability is the indispensable condition for the market to function as a discovery procedure. Hayek’s catallaxy, as he describes it, is a game—partly of skill and partly of chance—that works to increase the total product to be shared (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 310). Yet this game can be played, and yields its beneficial results, only if it is played according to rules (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 310). The general rules of law (the Nomos) are precisely these rules of the game. Their function is not to determine who wins or what the outcome will be for each player—this is left to skill and chance—but to ensure that the discovery process can take place in an orderly manner. Arbitrary coercion, by contrast, is akin to a player (or the referee) changing the rules mid-game to benefit a particular party.

For this reason, the insistence by Rothbard and Hoppe on “social justice” (understood as the correction of market outcomes to fit a desired distributive pattern) is, from the Hayekian perspective, a demand fundamentally destructive of the market process itself. Since the market is a discovery procedure that operates through negative feedback (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 309), prices and incomes must continually change to signal to individuals where their efforts are needed. Attempting to shield particular groups from the income reductions that this adaptive process requires is, in effect, to prevent the discovery mechanism from functioning (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 312). For Hayek, “social justice” (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 311) is the Trojan horse of constructivism within the liberal order, because it demands that the spontaneous order (catallaxy) (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 307) be treated as a directed organization (economy) (Hayek, 1968/2014, p. 307), thereby destroying the very source of general prosperity.

Indeed, Hayek’s position on the need for a legitimate coercive apparatus to protect freedom does not represent a betrayal of Misesian principles, but a coherent application of them.²⁷ Far from the anarchic system defended by Rothbard and Hoppe, Mises is explicit about the indispensable character of government as a social institution. He recognizes that peaceful cooperation—the precondition of civilization—is possible only if there exists a mechanism to repel aggression. The error, for Mises, does not lie in the state as such, but in misunderstanding its instrumental and limited function. In his analysis there emerges the very distinction Hayek draws between illegitimate and legitimate uses of force: “The evils of violence, robbery, and murder can be prevented only by an institution that itself, whenever needed, resorts to the very methods of acting for the prevention of which it is established. There emerges a distinction between illegal employment of violence and the legitimate recourse to it” (Mises, 1962/2006, p. 88).²⁸ The critique by Hoppe and Rothbard, which collapses all state action into the category of aggression, thus appears as a dogmatic purification that Mises himself would have regarded as a dangerous oversimplification, for it ignores the “inherent imperfection of many, perhaps most, humans” (Mises, 1962/2006, p. 88) that makes government a necessary evil.

Therefore, the disagreement is not merely semantic; it reveals two radically opposed conceptions of freedom. Rothbard and Hoppe adopt a purely formal and atomistic definition of freedom, wherein any physical invasion of an individual’s “living space” is aggression. Hayek, by contrast, proposes a structural and contextual definition. Freedom cannot be defined apart from the cognitive and normative conditions of the social order in which it exists. It is not a pre-social attribute of the isolated individual, but a quality that emerges from a system of rules that protect us from arbitrariness. As he himself argues:

But a liberty to dispose, and order freely as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be the subject of the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own (Locke, citado en Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 232).²⁹

On the epistemological plane, freedom for Hayek is inseparable from the predictability that emanates from a legal order. An individual’s capacity to form a coherent life plan depends on his ability to foresee, with a reasonable degree of certainty, the protected domain within which he may act without being subjected to the arbitrary will of others.

The Rothbard–Hoppe critique’s category error is starkly revealed in its inability to grasp that, for Hayek, coercion is an eminently physical phenomenon, not merely a psychological or economic one. Coercion entails one person’s control of another’s environment in such a way that the latter’s options are manipulated to serve alien ends. Hayek explicitly distinguishes this situation from the harsh conditions that impersonal circumstances may impose, including the threat of destitution. Being dismissed from a job or failing to find a buyer for one’s product may be painful, but it is not coercive, since it does not subject the individual to anyone’s arbitrary will; it subjects him to impersonal market conditions. Coercion, in the relevant sense, requires that a human agent threaten to inflict harm in order to bend another’s will. Hayek is unequivocal on this point, likening economic hardships to natural disasters, not to the intentional subjugation that defines tyranny.

Even if the threat of starvation to me and perhaps to my family 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 anybody else. So long as the act that has placed me in my predicament is not aimed at making me do or not do specific things, so long as the intent of the act that harms me is not to make me serve another person’s ends, its effect on my freedom is not different from that of any natural calamity—a fire or a flood that destroys my house or an accident that harms my health (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 204).

This distinction is fundamental: coercion is not the pressure of circumstances but the subjugation of the will. By equating taxation (a general rule) with theft (a particular act of aggression), Rothbard and Hoppe ignore the categorical difference Hayek draws between the conditions that constitute the predictable framework for action and the acts that destroy that framework. The charge that Hayekian coercion is “mental” or “psychological” is therefore a caricature that ignores the physical and environmental basis of his definition. The Rothbard–Hoppe critique thus collapses in failing to recognize that their purely physical definition of freedom (absence of aggression) operates in a conceptual vacuum, stripped of the institutional conditions that give it meaning. For Hayek, freedom is not a pre-social state of nature but a civilizational artifact that arises and is sustained only within a framework of impersonal, predictable rules (the Nomos). By collapsing the distinction between the constraint of a general rule and subjugation to an arbitrary will, Rothbard and Hoppe dissolve the fundamental difference between order and chaos. The function of law is not to eliminate all constraint—which is impossible—but to replace the arbitrary and unpredictable coercion of other individuals with known and general limitations, transforming a hostile environment of radical uncertainty into a predictable cosmos in which individual planning is possible. Freedom, in its functional sense, is precisely the result of this substitution.

This is the crucial point: Rothbard and Hoppe’s definition of freedom (the absence of physical aggression) is pre-social and non-institutional. It is a definition that operates conceptually within a state of nature. Hayek’s definition, by contrast, is social and civilizational. For Hayek, freedom is not the state of nature; it is an extraordinarily complex and fragile cultural artifact that emerges only within the framework of an evolved legal order. Consequently, one cannot define freedom in a vacuum and then use that definition to judge institutions. On the contrary, freedom can be defined only in terms of the institutions that create and sustain it. The Rothbardian critique, by defining freedom apart from law (as mere non-aggression) and then accusing law of being coercive, commits a category error: it destroys the conditions of possibility of freedom in the name of a purist definition that cannot exist in the real world.

D. Epistemological Implication

Rothbard and Hoppe’s misunderstanding of coercion ultimately stems from their non-evolutionary, purely constructivist conception of law. For them, just law is that which can be logically deduced from the axiom of private property; any other rule is an artificial, violent imposition. For Hayek, this view is a textbook instance of the “fatal conceit.” The legal rules that sustain a free society are, for the most part, not deliberate inventions but forms of condensed social knowledge. They are the outcome of a centuries-long discovery process in which societies have learned, through trial and error, what kinds of norms conduce to peace and prosperity.

To deny the epistemological function of law—its role as a transmitter of knowledge about how to coordinate actions peacefully—is to sever the continuity between individual knowledge and institutional order. If rules are seen merely as external impositions, rather than as the scaffolding that enables rational action, one loses sight of how large-scale social cooperation emerges. Hayek’s definition of coercion is therefore not a concession to statism but a pillar of his social epistemology. It recognizes that freedom is not a void, but a complex structure that depends on normative knowledge no individual or group could design on its own.

The apriorist critics’ error, then, is to treat a phenomenon of “organized complexity” as if it were simple, reducible to a single axiom from which the entire order can be deduced. They fail to grasp that the social order is an emergent phenomenon whose properties as a whole (the pattern) cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts (deducible individual actions). Hayek explicitly warned against this reductionist error, arguing that social science must accept the limits of its knowledge:

The fact is that in studies of complex phenomena the general patterns are all that is characteristic of those persistent wholes which are the main object of our interest, because a number of enduring structures have this general pattern in common and nothing else. [...] The prevalent stress on ‘laws’, i.ch., on the discovery of regularities in two-variable relations, is probably a result of inductivism, because only such simple co-variation of two magnitudes is likely to strike the senses before an explicit theory or hypothesis has been formed. In the case of more complex phenomena it is more obvious that we must have our theory first before we can ascertain whether the things do in fact behave according to this theory (Hayek, 1964/2014, pp. 271, 277).

A direct parallel can be drawn between this juridical-constructivist error and the central error of socialist calculation that Mises and Hayek refuted. The socialist planner (à la Oskar Lange) assumes that the economic knowledge required to organize society can be centralized and rationally supplied to a planner. Analogously, the juridical apriorist (Hoppe and Rothbard) assumes that normative knowledge—the just and complete legal code—can be centralized and rationally supplied to a philosopher by means of deduction. Both commit the same mistake: they underestimate radical human ignorance and ignore the fact that the relevant knowledge (of prices as well as of just rules) is not “given” to anyone in its entirety, but is an emergent and ongoing result of a social process of discovery (the market, in one case; legal evolution, in the other).

For this reason, the Hayekian system resembles the discovery process of the Common Law (customary law), where judges do not create or invent the law from their personal axioms but discover it (find) by articulating the expectations and norms of justice already implicit in society in order to resolve a specific dispute. For Hayek, law is a polycentric order that emerges from the resolution of millions of conflicts. In sharp contrast, the Hoppe–Rothbard system resembles a rationalist code (like the Napoleonic Code), monocentrically designed by the reason of a philosopher and imposed upon reality. The Hoppean critique is not merely a petitio principii; in the field of law it represents the victory of constructivist arrogance over evolutionary humility.

This is the unifying point of the refutation: the Hoppe–Rothbard critique of Hayek’s concept of coercion is the political manifestation of their fundamental epistemic error. Because they believe that economics is purely aprioristic, they also believe that just law can be deduced a priori (Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics” or Rothbard’s “natural law”). This is the summit of the constructivist rationalism Hayek denounces. They believe that the human mind can design from scratch the perfect normative system. Hayek, by contrast, as an epistemic realist, understands that law—like the market—is an evolutionary discovery process. Just rules are not deduced; they are discovered through the historical experience of conflict resolution. Hence the Hoppean critique is a petitio principii: it accuses Hayek of not being an apriorist in his theory of law, when that is precisely the central point of Hayek’s epistemological refutation of total apriorism.

V. CONCLUSION

Ultimately, the contrast between the two systems can be summarized as follows:

• Hoppean apriorism assumes a knower who is almost omniscient at the logical level, capable of deducing immutable truths from an axiomatic starting point. Its aim is deductive certainty.

• Hayekian evolutionism begins from a knower who is radically ignorant, whose survival and prosperity depend on insertion into a network of rules and institutions that embody the knowledge of generations. Its aim is to explain adaptive order.

In purely epistemological terms, Hayek’s system offers vastly superior explanatory power. Whereas apriorism can describe the internal logic of an isolated individual’s action, it fails to satisfactorily explain the emergence of social cooperation, the function of tacit knowledge, or the dynamism of the market as a discovery process.

This explanatory superiority follows from the fact that Hoppe’s and Rothbard’s apriorism is fundamentally a static system, while Hayek’s evolutionism is dynamic. Pure praxeology describes the logic of choice at a given moment with given knowledge. It is a flawless photograph of the structure of reason. Yet it cannot explain the motion picture of civilization: how that knowledge is created, how it is communicated over time, and how the inevitable errors of fallible agents are corrected. Hayek inverts the primacy of reason, viewing it not as the cause of social order but as one of its most sophisticated results: “Man did not adopt new rules of conduct because he was intelligent. He became intelligent by submitting to new rules of conduct” (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, p. 522).

In sum, the Hayekian system is a refutation of the strict apriorist “methodological monocentrism.” Hoppe and Rothbard demand that the same logical tool (praxeology) serve to define action, explain social order, justify ethics, and design law. Hayek shows that this is impossible. This critique of “monocentrism” reveals the final irony of the debate: the Rothbard–Hoppe critique is itself the purest form of constructivist rationalism. By positing that a philosopher’s individual reason can, through axiomatic deduction, design a priori an entire perfect juridical and ethical system (natural law or argumentation ethics), they commit precisely the “fatal conceit” Hayek denounced. Moreover, this conceit distances them from Mises’s own epistemic humility. The charge that Hayek’s fallibilism affronts Misesian rationalism ignores that Mises himself vehemently rejected the “omnipotence of thought,” a feature he ascribed to the totalitarian mentality, not to liberal reason (Mises, 1962/2006, p. 84). In this, Mises aligns far more closely with Hayek’s critical rationalism than Hoppe would admit.

The critics’ system is not a discovery of social reality; it is an attempt to impose a logical-verbal design upon it. In doing so, they caricature Hayek’s theory, accusing it of “mysticism” for describing an evolutionary process that operates above individuals (Hoppe, 1994, p. 77). They ignore that, for Hayek, individuals act rationally to achieve their local ends, and it is the interaction of these actions that generates unintended, system-level consequences.

In the end, Hoppe’s and Rothbard’s apriorism constructs a logically impeccable but hermetically sealed system, whose certainty is purchased at the cost of explanatory irrelevance. By positing a reason that is omniscient at the logical level, they are forced to dismiss the vast majority of human knowledge—tacit, practical, and dispersed—as epistemologically inferior. Hayek’s fallibilist realism, by contrast, begins from the real human condition—ignorance—in order to build a theory that explains how, despite this fundamental limitation, a coordinated and progressive social order is possible. It thus represents an irrefutable sophistication of the Austrian project: one that rescues it from dogmatism and turns it into a robust theory of the evolution of civilization.

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 but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals (Hayek, 1974/2014, p. 372).³⁰

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1. Hayek fundamentally distinguishes between two kinds of order: created order or taxis (such as an organization or a household economy) and spontaneous order or cosmos (such as the market or language). Whereas taxis serves a unified and known set of ends and is the product of deliberate design, cosmos emerges without a central plan, serving the multiplicity of individual ends through the mutual adaptation of its elements under general rules (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, pp. 59–62). This distinction is crucial for understanding Hayek’s critique of the rationalist constructivism that pervades both socialism and, in his view, certain strands of apriorism that assume the possibility of designing or fully comprehending the social order from individual reason.

2. Author’s translation from the original: “seine Aufgabe als aprioristischer Handlungstheoretiker ist vielmehr die Bestimmung der logischen Konsequenzen, die sich aus der Durchführung einer gegebenen Handlung im Rahmen solcher vorausgesetzten Konstruktionen für diese Konstruktionen selbst bzw. für deren Veränderung ergeben – gleichgültig, wie realistisch die Konstruktionen selbst auch immer sein mögen” (Hoppe, 1983, p. 53).

3. Hoppe’s fundamental critique of empiricism, already present in his doctoral dissertation, centers on the impossibility of a purely passive theory of knowledge. He argues that any theory admitting the possibility of experience must, of logical necessity, begin from the subjective (transcendental) conditions that make it possible. These are aprioristic cognitive schemata that constitute a “functional a priori” of thinking and knowing that is systematically linked to action and oriented toward possible action. Hoppe writes: “A theory of knowledge, consequently, that admits the possibility of experience must for that very reason begin from subjective (transcendental) conditions of the possibility of experience, from aprioristic subjective cognitive schemata that represent a ‘functional a priori’ of thinking and knowing systematically linked with acting and referred to possible action” [Author’s translation from the original: “Eine Erkenntnistheorie folglich, die die Möglichkeit von Erfahrung zugesteht, hat gerade darum von subjektiven (transzendentalen) Bedingungen der Möglichkeit von Erfahrung auszugehen, von apriorischen subjektiven Kognitionsschemata, die ein ‘funktionales Apriori’ eines mit Handeln systematisch verknüpften und auf mögliches Handeln bezogenen Denkens und Erkennens darstellen”] (Hoppe, 1976, p. 9). This perspective stands in radical contrast to the empiricist conception of the mind as a passive recipient of sensory data, highlighting instead the active, structuring character of human cognition, inseparable from its practical and teleological dimension.

4. Hayek was fully aware that his critique of rationalism could be misread as an attack on reason itself. In his essay “Kinds of Rationalism,” which serves as the preface to volume 15 of his Collected Works, he devotes considerable space to clarifying this distinction, coining the term “rationalist constructivism” to designate specifically the Cartesian tradition he opposes. His aim is not to disparage reason, but to rescue it from a mistaken application that, paradoxically, renders it less effective. This clarification is essential to rebut the Hoppean charge that Hayek promotes a form of irrationalism or mysticism. Hayek expresses it as follows: “There seems to me to exist a sort of rationalism which, by not recognizing these limits of the powers of individual reason, in fact tends to make human reason a less effective instrument than it could be. This sort of rationalism is a comparatively new phenomenon, though its roots go back to ancient Greek philosophy. […] It seems to me that the best name for this kind of naïve rationalism is rationalist constructivism. It is a view which in the social sphere has since wrought unmeasurable harm, whatever its great achievements in the sphere of technology may have been. […] It is from this kind of social rationalism or constructivism that all modern socialism, planning and totalitarianism derives” (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 41, 43). Hayek reiterates this critique of “rationalist constructivism” in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, arguing that it represents a “relapse into earlier anthropomorphic modes of thought” by attributing the origin of all cultural institutions to deliberate invention or design. He maintains that “man’s reason alone should enable him to construct society anew,” an attitude that disparages tradition, custom, and history (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, p. 26).

5. Hoppe’s thesis is explicit and forceful, arguing that Hayek’s celebrity is not due to his economics but to a political philosophy that removes him from classical liberalism. In the lecture that underpins several of his later writings on the subject, Hoppe declares: “My thesis is essentially the same one also advanced by my friend Ralph Raico: Hayek is not a classical liberal at all […]. Hayek is actually a moderate social democrat, and since we live in the age of social democracy, this makes him a ‘respectable’ and ‘responsible’ scholar. Hayek, as you may recall, dedicated his Road to Serfdom to ‘the socialists in all parties.’ And the socialists in all parties now pay him back in using Hayek to present themselves as ‘liberals’” (Hoppe, 2011). The virulence of this critique, which Hoppe inherits and systematizes, has its roots in Murray N. Rothbard’s initial reaction to the manuscript of The Constitution of Liberty. In a 1958 internal memorandum, Rothbard expressed outright rejection, describing Hayek’s work in unequivocal terms: “F. A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty is, a surprisingly and distressingly, an extremely bad, and, I would even say, evil book. […] The feeling one gets from reading it is the same sort of feeling I would have gotten if I had been a U.S. senator when Taft got up to support the Wagner public housing bill, or any of his other compromises: i.e., that this tears it” (Rothbard, 1958/2009, p. 61). This early condemnation—which brands the work not merely as mistaken but as a betrayal comparable to that of a politician who abandons his principles—sets the polemical tone that would define the debate in subsequent decades. The interpretation of Hayek as a relativist who dissolves truth into adaptive success ignores Hayek’s own distinction between the function of a rule within a system and its origin or rational justification. Hayek argues that many rules evolved and persisted because the groups that adopted them were more successful, without anyone needing to know why they were successful (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, pp. 36, 185). This is a causal explanation of the persistence of norms, not a theory of truth or moral justification. The subsequent (or “immanent”) critique of rules must proceed by evaluating their coherence and compatibility within the existing system of rules and their contribution to maintaining the overall order of actions (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, pp. 206–209).

6. In this essay the Hayekian term Nomos is preferred to the more ambiguous “Rule of Law.” Hayek uses Nomos to refer specifically to law as a just and abstract rule of conduct, emerging spontaneously (e.g., customary law), as opposed to Thesis, law created for the specific purposes of an organization (e.g., state legislation). The Rothbard–Hoppe critique often collapses these two concepts—an error facilitated by the use of “Rule of Law.”

7. Hayek defines coercion precisely, not as any limitation on action, but as the subjugation of an individual’s will to another’s ends. He maintains that coercion occurs “when one man’s actions are made to serve the will of another man, not for his own but for the other’s purposes” (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 199). This definition is crucial because it distinguishes between the impersonal constraints of a general rule—which serve no one’s particular end—and the arbitrary control of one agent over another, which is the essence of unfreedom.

8. This Misesian–Hoppean conception directly opposes the core of classical empiricism, as Hoppe analyzes in his critique of Hume (cf. Hoppe, 1976). For Hoppe, empiricism fails precisely because it attempts to ground all knowledge—including necessary relations such as causality—in the passive experience of what is “given.” Experience, understood as mere sensory reception, cannot by itself supply the conceptual structures (such as causality or universality) required to constitute meaningful and operationally useful knowledge (cf. Hoppe, 1976, pp. 9, 56–57). Praxeology, by contrast, beginning from the category of action—understood not as an observable empirical datum but as a structure grasped a priori—avoids the empiricist aporia and grounds economics in logical certainties, not in inductive generalizations from contingent observations.

9. The apriorism of Mises and Hoppe is rooted in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who established the existence of synthetic a priori propositions: statements that inform us about reality (synthetic) yet whose truth can be established without recourse to experience (a priori). Hoppe, following Mises, argues that praxeology is precisely such a science. Its axioms, such as the action axiom, are not mere logical (analytic) definitions; they disclose a fundamental truth about the structure of reality as it is experienced by an acting being. As Hoppe explains, “they are not derived from observation—there are only bodily movements to be observed, but not things such as actions—but stem from reflective understanding” (Hoppe, 1995/2007, p. 22) [author’s translation]. This Kantian foundation is crucial to understanding why empirical experience is held to be categorically irrelevant to the validation of economic laws.

10. For Mises, this categorical distinction underwrites the autonomy of the sciences of human action against any attempt to reduce them to the methodological monism of positivism. The error of applying the methods of the natural sciences to human action is not merely technical but epistemological, since it ignores the fundamental category that distinguishes the two fields: finality (teleology). Mises states it forcefully: “The natural sciences are causality research; the sciences of human action are teleological. In establishing this distinction between the two fields of human knowledge, we do not express any opinion concerning the question whether the course of all cosmic events is or is not ultimately determined by a superhuman being’s design” (Mises, 1962/2006, p. 6). This separation is crucial for understanding why, from a Misesian perspective, Hayek’s evolutionary approach is seen by Hoppe not as a complement but as a categorical transgression that dissolves teleology into a blind causal process.

11. La formulación en Nationalökonomie (1940) es igualmente categórica y refuerza la distinción entre la teoría apriorística y la experiencia histórica. Mises escribe: “No podemos extraer tal conocimiento de la experiencia. Así como la lógica y las matemáticas no provienen de la experiencia, tampoco proviene de la experiencia lo que sabemos sobre la acción en su forma pura... reconocemos la esencia de la acción como seres actuantes a partir de un conocimiento que nos es dado antes de toda experiencia” [Traducción propia del original: “Nicht aus der Erfahrung können wir solche Erkenntnis schöpfen. So wenig Logik und Mathematik aus der Erfahrung stammen, so wenig stammt das, was wir über das Handeln in seiner reinen Form wissen, aus der Erfahrung... das Wesen des Handelns erkennen wir als handelnde Menschen aus einem Wissen, das uns vor aller Erfahrung gegeben ist” (Mises, 1940, p. 16).

12. Hoppe’s portrayal of Hayek as a “confused” thinker whose fame was promoted by the left stands in marked contrast to the perception of Mises’s inner circle. Decades after Hayek’s supposed methodological deviations, Margit von Mises, Ludwig’s wife, turned to Hayek as the only person capable of paying an adequate intellectual tribute to her husband on the occasion of his 80th birthday. In a confidential letter, Margit writes: “I agree with Hunold that only someone with truly complete understanding can write about him, and that person is you, dear Professor. Would you do it if I ask you? [...] I know how busy you are, but I also know how close my husband is to you” (M. von Mises, 1961). The letter reveals not only deep personal closeness (“Why do you and your wife never return to New York? [...] I know how delighted Lu would be to see you both”), but absolute intellectual trust—so much so that she arranged the correspondence in secret so that her husband would not find out. That Mises’s own family regarded Hayek as the most faithful interpreter of Ludwig’s legacy undercuts the narrative that he was a thinker marginalized for supposedly erroneous ideas.

13. Author’s translation of the original: “Einerseits (...) müssen über die Aus- gangsbasis bestimmte Aussagen gemacht werden, da eine gleichsam form- und eigenschaftslose Grundlage, wie die Nacht, in der alle Kühe schwarz sind’, weder als Erfahrung identifizierbar, noch Anfang eines wohlbe- stimmten Definitionssystems sein kann. Andererseits scheinen auch Aus- sagen über die Basis notwendig schon ein gewisses begriffliches Instrumen- tarium zu verwenden und so die Unmittelbarkeit’, die empirische Rein- heit des Ausgangspunktes in Frage zu stellen” (Hoppe, 1976, p. 9, citando a F. Kambartel, Erfahrung und Struktur, 1968, p. 153).

14. This demystification of reason as a pre-social faculty is evident in early correspondence. As early as 1939, while Mises was laying the foundations of his great praxeological treatise, Hayek was acting as his scout in the Anglophone world, investigating the feasibility of translating the key term “praxeology.” He informs Mises: “The word ‘praxeology’ is not to be found either in the great Oxford Dictionary or in the various specialized dictionaries. My philosopher colleagues do not know the term either, so it appears not to have been used in English” (Hayek, 1939). This episode, though minor, is revealing: the universality of an a priori concept required, in practice, validation and adaptation within the linguistic and cultural ecosystem in which it sought to operate. Praxeology could not impose itself by sheer logical force; it needed to be integrated into the spontaneous order of academic language—a fact that foreshadows Hayek’s later emphasis on reason as a contextual and culturally situated faculty.

15. Author’s translation from the original: “Da der Mensch über die Zukunft nichts sicher weiss, bleibt es immer unbestimmt, wieviel von der noch nicht verstrichenen Zeit wir zum jetzt und zur Gegenwart zählen” (Mises, 1940, p. 79).

16. In his essay “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” (1964), Hayek provides the methodological basis for why this knowledge cannot be centralized. He argues that society—like biological organisms or the mind—is an “essentially complex phenomenon” (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 269). Complexity here does not refer to the difficulty of theories, but to the “minimum number of distinct elements of which an instance of the pattern must consist in order to exhibit all the characteristic attributes” of the system (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 260). He distinguishes between “disorganized complexity” (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 265), where variables are independent and amenable to statistical treatment, and the society’s “organized complexity” (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 265), where the character of the structure depends on “the manner in which the individual elements are connected with each other” (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 265). In such systems, it is “really impossible to ascertain all the particular circumstances” that determine a specific event (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 269). Therefore, the science of complex phenomena (such as economics) cannot aspire to the specific prediction of individual events (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 269). Its task is limited to “pattern predictions” (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 264) or to the mere “explanation of the principle” (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 264). The price system is the mechanism that evolves to handle this organized complexity— a problem that statistics or centralized planning (which treat elements as aggregates of disorganized complexity (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 265)) are powerless to solve (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 264).

17. This criticism was explicitly advanced by Rothbard, who considered grounding liberty in human ignorance to be a philosophically weak and ultimately counterproductive strategy. From his perspective, this argument implies that as human knowledge advances, the case for liberty weakens. In his memorandum on The Constitution of Liberty, Rothbard ridicules this position: “In short, Hayek explicitly bases his argument on the ignorance of man […]. Of course, such a flimsy argument means that, as civilization advances and we come to know more and more, the argument for liberty becomes weaker and weaker” (Rothbard, 1958/2009, p. 67).

18. Hoppe’s rejection rests on a radical distinction between theory and history. Theory (praxeology) is the domain of a priori, necessary, and universal truths deduced from the action axiom. History, by contrast, is the domain of contingent, complex, and unpredictable events. Hoppe argues that “social history, unlike natural history, does not produce any knowledge that can be employed for predictive purposes” (Hoppe, 1995/2007, p. 38). Hayek’s error, from this vantage point, is to confuse these two categories: by treating rules and institutions as products of historical evolution, he relegates them to the realm of the contingent, depriving them of the status of logical necessity that, for Hoppe, is the only solid foundation for economic science and ethics.

19. This charge of relativism overlooks the fact that Hayekian evolutionism is, in truth, a theory about the overcoming of ignorance, not about the impossibility of truth. “Truth” in a complex system is not a static datum to be deduced, but an emergent result. As Hayek notes, evolutionary theory (which he uses as a principal analogue for his social theory) is an “explanation of the principle” (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 264) which, although it cannot predict specific events (such as the appearance of a particular species) (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 269), is nonetheless falsifiable and therefore empirical (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 267). The theory forbids certain outcomes (e.g., that horses suddenly give birth to winged offspring) and thus its empirical content consists in what it forbids (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 267). Similarly, market rules are not “relative” in the sense of being arbitrary; they are “true” to the extent that they successfully prohibit types of actions that lead to the collapse of order (i.e., to chaos and the impossibility of coordination). Hoppe’s critique confuses the impossibility of specific prediction (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 269) (due to complexity and the absence of data) with the absence of theoretical truth (the validity of the mechanism) (Hayek, 1964/2014, p. 270).

20. Hayek developed this claim about the limits of explanation formally in The Sensory Order. He holds that any classifying apparatus—including the human mind—must possess a degree of complexity higher than 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 explain fully its own operations” (Hayek, 1952/2017, p. 296). This logical limitation, he argues, is why, in practice, we must always adopt a dualistic view of the world, recognizing the mental realm as a special category that cannot be fully reduced to particular physical events (Hayek, 1952/2017, pp. 299, 302).

21. It is crucial to note that this strict Hayekian definition of Nomos (general and abstract norms) functions as a direct indictment of the modern state. Insofar as the contemporary state operates through specific legislation, economic mandates, and the imposition of particular ends (such as “social justice”), it fits Hayek’s definition of coercion. From a rigorously Hayekian perspective, the present interventionist state is, in its habitual practice, an inherently coercive institution.

22. Hayek emphasizes that general rules, by being predictable, become data that individuals can use in their own plans. They are like laws of nature which, although they limit what we can do, do not subject us to anyone’s will. In his words: “in so far as the rules which foresee coercion are not aimed personally at me but are framed to apply equally to all people in similar circumstances, they are not different from any of the natural obstacles which affect my plans” (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 210). Arbitrary coercion, by contrast, being unpredictable, destroys the very possibility of rational planning.

23. This criticism overlooks the fact that the relationship between the two thinkers was marked by deep intimacy and trust, even in the most personal matters, which makes a deliberate conceptual “betrayal” as suggested implausible. In 1950, Hayek chose Mises as one of the few members of his circle of “Austrian friends in the U.S.” to whom he would communicate, by confidential letter, the painful news of the separation from his first wife. In that missive, Hayek apologizes for his secrecy and the irregularity of his correspondence, attributing them to the difficulty of speaking about such a personal matter until it was settled (Hayek, 1950a). Sharing a life crisis of this magnitude with Mises is not the act of a mere colleague, but of a loyal friend whom he considered part of his innermost circle. This closeness, documented over decades in Series 1 of the Mises collection (Eisenhart-Purvis, 2018, p. 7), suggests that their philosophical differences, though real, existed within a framework of mutual respect and affection that later criticism tends to efface.

24. For Hoppe, the practical consequence of this alleged epistemic relativism is the justification of a wide range of state interventions. He bases his charge on a list of functions that Hayek himself considered legitimate for government in works such as The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation, and Liberty. Hoppe argues that Hayek hands the government a “blank check” by asserting that it should provide services that the market “cannot adequately supply.” From there, Hoppe sarcastically enumerates Hayek’s concessions to statism: “Among these goods and services are protection against violence, epidemics […]; most roads […]; the provision of standards of measurement and of many kinds of information […]; the guarantee of a certain minimum income for everyone; […] schools and research; […] building regulations, pure food laws, the certification of certain professions, restrictions on the sale of certain dangerous goods […]; and the provision of public institutions such as theaters, sports fields, etc.” (Hoppe, 2011). For Hoppe, this list is irrefutable proof that Hayek’s philosophy, far from defending liberty, undermines it at its theoretical foundations. This critique overlooks Hayek’s central claim that the general rules of nomos are not merely predictable; they possess specific attributes that distinguish them qualitatively from arbitrary orders. They must be applicable to an unknown number of future cases, serve the formation of an abstract order rather than particular ends, and exclude provisions that primarily affect identifiable individuals or groups (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, pp. 153, 466). These characteristics are what, for Hayek, minimize interference in the individual sphere and maximize the predictability necessary for personal planning, differentiating them from organizational commands or discriminatory legislation. The critique that equates any legal restriction with coercion ignores these formal attributes which, for Hayek, are the essence of Nomos and the condition of liberty.

25. Rothbard compiled an extensive list of state interventions that, on his reading, Hayek justified under his lax definition of “non-coercive” state activities. This list, presented in his 1960 review, became for libertarians documentary proof that Hayek’s philosophy offered no robust defense of liberty. Among the policies Rothbard attributes to Hayek are: “government health services,” “government roads,” “conscription,” “government subsidies in the ‘public interest’ (e.g., for ‘defense’),” “government aid to the indigent, up to a ‘minimum subsistence’ for everyone,” “municipal parks, museums, theaters, and sports facilities,” “compulsory old-age insurance,” “compulsory unemployment insurance,” “government urban planning,” “government building codes,” “compulsory minimum education for children, with the government setting minimum standards,” and “federal aid to higher education” (Rothbard, 1960/2009, pp. 75–78). For Rothbard, this litany of concessions to statism demonstrated that Hayek’s principle of the “Rule of Law” was, in practice, a blank check for social democracy.

26. Rothbard, en Poder y Mercado, ataca frontalmente esta distinción (que el propio Mises también utiliza) entre la coerción humana y las “condiciones de la naturaleza”. Para Rothbard, esta es una distinción irrelevante que oscurece el verdadero problema: la violencia. Él argumenta que el mercado libre, al no ser una “condición de la naturaleza” sino un conjunto de acciones humanas voluntarias no puede ser equiparado a un “desastre natural” como Hayek pretende. “The Mises-Hayek attempt to salvage the concept [of coercion] by confining it to human interference with another’s ‘data of nature’ is vain. In the first place, what are the ‘data of nature’? The free market is not a ‘datum of nature.’ […] The ‘data of nature’ (such as climate, disasters) are identifiable, but they are not coercive. […] The only coercive factor is the violence of another man” (Rothbard, 1970/2009, p. 1033).

27. Many have argued—and do argue—that the praxeological system, in its most radical development, leads to a form of anarchy, just as Hayek’s theory of spontaneous orders might yield an anarchic vision of the social order. However, we must distinguish between the possible theoretical derivations of a system and the political convictions of its authors. Both Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek expressly recognized the need for a legitimate institutional framework to guarantee peaceful cooperation and the preservation of the legal order. Mises held that the state is the “social apparatus of compulsion and coercion” intended to protect “property, freedom, and peace,” being an “absolute necessity” and not a necessary evil (Liberalism, 1927/2005, pp. 16–19). He reiterated that “liberalism differs radically from anarchism,” for without some measure of coercion “no civilization could exist” (Omnipotent Government, 1944/2011, pp. 55–58). In the same vein, Hayek maintained that a free society requires conferring on the state “the monopoly of coercion” limited to preventing private coercion (The Constitution of Liberty, 1960/2011, pp. 71–72, 332), and rejected both the “absolute minimal state” and dogmatic laissez-faire (The Road to Serfdom, 1944/2007, pp. 71, 85–87). In short, neither Mises nor Hayek conceived anarchy as a desirable consequence of their theories. Both defended a limited—but indispensable—state as the guarantor of peace, freedom, and social cooperation.

28. This argument, which the present essay draws from Mises’s late work, is fully consistent with his major 1940 treatise. In Nationalökonomie, Mises had already refuted the basis of anarchism (later adopted by Rothbard and Hoppe) by establishing the necessity of a coercive apparatus for the existence of society. Mises’s critique of anarchism is identical to Hayek’s point that freedom requires a coercive legal framework: “The fundamental error of anarchistic doctrine lies in ignoring the fact of experience that there are men who lack either the insight or the strength to adjust their conduct to the requirements of society… Social co-existence and cooperation among men are therefore thinkable only within a state association, that is, only within an association that possesses a coercive apparatus for suppressing conduct disruptive of society by individuals or groups” [Author’s translation of: “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). This passage shows that Hayek’s defense of the Nomos is not a betrayal of Misesianism but a direct application of Mises’s own praxeology to the conditions of social cooperation, in clear contrast with Rothbard’s anarchist utopia.

29. Locke himself, in a passage Hayek cites in his essay “The Political Ideal of the Rule of Law,” defines freedom under government not as the absence of all rule, but as submission to a “standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society,” as opposed to being subject to the “inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.” In Locke’s words: “Freedom of men under government, is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it . . . and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man” (Locke, as cited in Hayek, 1955/2014, pp. 135–136). This formulation is virtually identical to Hayek’s and demonstrates that the distinction between the constraints of law and arbitrary coercion is not a Hayekian invention to justify statism, but lies at the heart of the classical liberal tradition. By rejecting this distinction, Rothbard and Hoppe depart not only from Hayek, but also from the Lockean foundations of liberalism.

30. This epistemic humility is reflected in Hayek’s own conception of the legislator’s task in a free society. Far from being an omnipotent social engineer, the legislator should act as a “gardener,” cultivating the conditions for spontaneous growth rather than attempting to design the final outcome. The legislator’s principal function is not to invent new rules ex nihilo, but to articulate and improve the existing system of rules of just conduct, eliminating incoherences and adapting it to new circumstances, always with the aim of maintaining and perfecting the general abstract order (Hayek, 1973–1979/2021, pp. 117, 129–130, 149–150). This vision stands in stark contrast to the constructivism implicit in strict apriorism, which appears to suggest that a just social order can be deduced and directly implemented from rational first principles.