SYMPOIETIC COSMOS: ACTION, FINITUDE, AND THE STRUCTURE OF ANARCHY

An Ontological Grounding of Hayekian Spontaneous Order vis-à-vis Constructivist Rationalism

Preliminary Note: The reader should note that Sections II and III of the present text correspond to a synthesis of a substantially more extensive theoretical work. The ontological and political arguments have been condensed herein to accommodate the constraints of this essay. This theoretical development, which will take the form of a book (currently undated), will address these theses with a deductive sequence and structural depth that are here merely sketched in their essential outlines.

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I. INTRODUCTION

The recent history of liberal and libertarian theory has been marked by an unresolved tension, often superficially reduced to a dispute over political preferences between evolutionary minarchism and private-property anarchism. Yet to reduce the divergence between the Hayekian tradition and the Rothbard–Hoppean strand to a question of state size or political strategy is to ignore the tectonic fracture underlying both theoretical edifices: the very nature of the acting agent and the structure of the world in which such action unfolds. While classical praxeology sought to shield economic science with the apodictic certainty of a logical actor, and institutional evolutionism sought refuge in the wisdom of tradition, contemporary debate appears to have reached a methodological impasse. Axiomatic rigor is demanded of evolutionary processes, and an attempt is made to impose logical closure on essentially open phenomena, perpetuating a dialogue of the deaf in which certainty sacrifices reality or history sacrifices consistency.

This essay contends that this stalemate is not the result of a miscalculation in political strategy, but of an ontological insufficiency in the characterization of human action. The figure of the sovereign actor—an abstract subject capable of infallible deductions or ex ante institutional designs—has obscured the fundamental phenomenological reality: the radical finitude of the agent and the irreducible resistance of the environment. It is therefore necessary to shift the axis of the discussion from the methodology of economics to an ontology of situated action.¹

What is proposed here is not a mere synthesis, but a dialectical overcoming through the formalization of a new guiding principle: the Contextual Action Axiom (CAA). Through this prism, the text explores the conditions of possibility of social order, not as the result of deliberate design (Thesis), nor merely as a blind accumulation of customs, but as a Sympoietic Cosmos: an order co-produced by finite intelligences within an environment of epistemic opaqueness. In this light, both the minarchist claim to contain order through a monopoly on force and the apriorist aspiration to legislate the entirety of law from pure deductive logic are revealed as remnants of a constructivist rationalism that has yet to assimilate the depth of the knowledge problem. The pages that follow thus invite us to move from the security of deductive dogma into the exposure of evolutionary realism, in order to inquire into what kind of legal and social order is, ultimately, compatible with the very structure of the human condition.

II. THE CONTEXTUAL ACTION AXIOM AS THE CULMINATION OF HAYEK’S INTELLECTUAL PROJECT

The history of social thought is, to a large extent, the chronicle of a struggle over its epistemic status. Confronted with the certainty and predictive power of the natural sciences, inquiry into human affairs has oscillated between a naïve empiricism, which chases quantitative constants where none exist, and a relativistic historicism, which denies the existence of any universal social law. It was in the midst of this methodological crisis that Ludwig von Mises undertook one of the most profound intellectual revolutions: the refoundation of economic science upon a “foundation of apodictic certainty” (Mises, 1949/1998, p. 32). What follows does not purport to attribute to Hayek the explicit formulation of this axiom, which is absent from his writings, but rather to reconstruct his intellectual project from a contemporary vantage point. To speak of a “culmination” here means identifying in the Contextual Action Axiom the most refined systematic form of certain Hayekian intuitions, and not a subjective intention on Hayek’s own part.

Mises’s project, praxeology, sought an “Archimedean point” for the social sciences. He found it in the action axiom, the self-evident and irrefutable proposition that “Human action is purposeful behavior” (Mises, 1949/1998, p. 11; Mises, 1940, p. 11). From this single truth—whose denial is itself an action, thereby demonstrating its certainty—Mises deduced the entire edifice of economic theory as a purely logical and a priori science, immune to the vicissitudes of experience. This “sovereign actor,” a logical ego that values, chooses, and acts, became the universal atom of social science. This does not mean that Mises ignored uncertainty or fallibility: his analysis of the entrepreneur and profit makes it clear that the agent acts under risk and conjecture. The question, and here the Hayekian fissure opens up, is whether that uncertainty is adequately captured by the aprioristic reconstruction of an abstract “sovereign actor.”

However, it was one of his disciples—by then regarded as a colleague—Friedrich A. Hayek, who identified a “fundamental epistemological fissure” within this structure. This theoretical divergence unfolded not in hostility, but within the context of a deep friendship and a shared struggle against the collapse of European liberal civilization. Their correspondence during the Second World War, while Mises was fleeing Nazism and Hayek was preparing for the Battle of Britain, reveals an existential urgency that shaped their methodological debate (Hayek, 1940; L. von Mises, n.d.-a). Precisely because of that community of purpose, the divergence reconstructed here should be read as an internal refinement of a common liberal program, rather than as an external rejection of the Misesian project.²

Hayek intuited that the apodictic certainty of individual logic could not simply be transferred to the analysis of social interaction. In a late reflection of crucial intellectual honesty, Hayek located the origin of his divergence in his 1937 work, acknowledging that it had been an attempt to persuade Mises himself: “that, when he claimed that market theory was a priori, he was mistaken; that what was a priori was only the logic of individual action, but that the moment one moved from this to the interaction of many people, one entered the empirical field” (Hayek, 1994, p. 72). This distinction recovers the demarcation Carl Menger had drawn against historicism, warning that methodological confusion arises when one demands of theory what only history can provide: knowledge of the concrete, as opposed to an understanding of the “forms of appearance” and the “laws” of phenomena (Menger, 1884/1935, p. 17). In this sense, Hayek does not break with the Mengerian program; he extends it. He transfers the distinction between exact theory and history from the realm of individual phenomena to the analysis of the extended social order, where the interaction of multiple agents demands precisely the kind of “pure theory” that Menger opposed to mere historical description. The specifically Hayekian move consists in shifting this Mengerian distinction to the problem of social order itself: it is no longer merely a question of what theory requires of history, but of recognizing that the interaction of multiple agents introduces structures of order that cannot simply be derived from the logic of the isolated actor.

This “new element of a completely different character” (Hayek, 1937/2014, p. 59) which emerges in the transition from the monologue of the isolated actor to the polyphony of social interaction is the knowledge problem. Hayek’s intellectual project thus became a systematic exploration of this “empirical field” of interaction, focusing on ignorance, learning, and evolution. This expository essay argues that the Contextual Action Axiom represents the philosophical culmination and systematic formalization of this Hayekian project, subsuming Mises’s axiom and providing Hayek’s vision with its own a priori and apodictic foundation.

2.1. Constitutive Ignorance and the Epistemological Turn

The first pillar of Hayek’s intellectual development was his radical reorientation of economics, shifting it from the logic of choice (central in Mises) to the knowledge problem. Whereas Misesian praxeology offers us a sovereign actor, a locus of pure rationality, Hayek presents us with a “situated agent,” whose defining feature is not logical rationality but constitutive ignorance.

Hayek demolished the notion that “data”—preferences, resources, technology—are “given” to a single mind, whether that of the observing economist or that of the hypothetical central planner, an assumption shared both by neoclassical general equilibrium theory and, to a considerable extent, by the aprioristic representation of the market as rational calculation from a “God’s-eye” standpoint. For Hayek, the fundamental economic problem of society is not how to allocate given resources, but how to ensure that the knowledge relevant to making such decisions—knowledge that is inevitably dispersed among millions of individuals—is used in the most effective way. He formulated the central question of all social science: “How can the combination of fragments of knowledge existing in different minds produce results which, if they were to be produced deliberately, would require knowledge on the part of the directing mind that no individual person can possess?” (Hayek, 1937/2014, p. 76). This question already presupposes, implicitly, the two elements that the Contextual Action Axiom will elevate to the rank of axiomatic components: the agents’ cognitive finitude and the existence of an encompassing context whose structure no mind can fully grasp.

The knowledge to which Hayek refers is not primarily scientific or theoretical knowledge, but rather the “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” (Hayek, 1945/2014, p. 95). It is the “local, tacit, and ephemeral” knowledge of the craftsman who understands the potential of a machine, the transporter who knows of underutilized capacity, or the real estate agent aware of a temporary opportunity. It is knowledge that “is possessed by practically every individual as an advantage over all others” (Hayek, 1945/2014, p. 95) because each has access to unique information. By its very nature, this knowledge cannot be centralized. It is not only dispersed (Hayek), but—as Michael Polanyi explored—to a great extent “tacit”: knowledge embodied in skills and practices such that “we know more than we can tell” (Polanyi, 1966, p. 4). The expertise of a skilled craftsman or a physician diagnosing a patient cannot be fully codified in manuals. This tacit dimension imposes an absolute limit on centralization.

From this perspective, the market is not fundamentally a forum of calculation (Mises), but a “discovery procedure.” Its marvel (Hayek, 1945/2014, p. 100) is the price system. It is not a scoreboard of outcomes, but a communication mechanism that transmits, in an economical and decentralized way, summaries of information that no individual could ever possess in its entirety. The price acts as a signal that allows tens of thousands of people (Hayek, 1945/2014, p. 100) to adjust their actions to events (such as the scarcity of a raw material) of which they have no direct knowledge. Mises’s sovereign actor, who calculates logically, thus becomes Hayek’s anchored agent, who sails on a “sea of ignorance,” responding to signals whose origin and full meaning he does not know.

This intuition about the dispersion and imperfection of knowledge has its genealogical root in Carl Menger’s very definition of a good. Long before Hayek articulated the division of knowledge, both Mises and Hayek drew upon Menger’s premise that the quality of “good” is not intrinsic to the thing, but depends on a subjective judgment about a causal connection. Menger explicitly established that one of the four preconditions for a thing to become a good is “knowledge of this causal connection on the part of men” (Menger, 1871/1934, p. 3). Moreover, Menger anticipated the inherent fallibility of the finite agent by categorizing “imaginary goods,” those that derive their quality from erroneous opinions about their properties or about human needs, thereby showing that economic action always takes place under the veil of limited and error-prone cognitive capacity (Menger, 1871/1934, p. 4). In the language of the Contextual Action Axiom (CAA)—which we will develop at length—the very quality of a good already presupposes a finite agent attempting to reconstruct a causal connection within a context he never fully masters. “Imaginary goods” are not a marginal anomaly, but the conceptual trace of that cognitive finitude: they show that all economic action is, from the outset, conjectural and situated in a partially opaque environment.³

2.2. The Evolutionary Nature of Institutions: Kosmos over Taxis

The second pillar of the Hayekian project was the shift from a rationalist to an evolutionist explanation of institutions. The praxeological method of Mises, brilliant as its internal logic may be, explains institutions ultimately as the result of deliberate, rational action. Again, this is a matter of methodological emphasis rather than a stark opposition: Mises acknowledges undesigned historical processes, but his theoretical strategy tends to reconstruct them as if they were intelligible in terms of conscious decisions by representative individuals. His “regression theorem,” for example, is an impeccable logical reconstruction of the origin of money. He maintains that the value of money today must be grounded in a prior value, and that this causal chain must terminate at a point in which the monetary good was valued solely for its utility as a commodity (Mises, 1949/1998, p. 407). It is a process in which individuals, “realizing that indirect exchange facilitates transactions,” converge rationally upon a common medium of exchange (Mises, 1949/1998, p. 403).

Hayek, influenced by Carl Menger and the Scottish moral philosophers, offered a complementary and deeper perspective. For him, fundamental institutions (language, money, law, morality) are not a taxis (an order created deliberately, like an army) but a kosmos (a “spontaneous” or “extended” order). They are “the result of human action, but not of human design” (Caldwell, 2004, p. 11). Hayek criticized the “false alternative” between what is “natural” (physei) and what is “artificial” (nomo), arguing that this dichotomy omits the third and most important category of phenomena: those that are the product of action but not of design (Hayek, 1967/2014, p. 295). This perspective recovers Menger’s fundamental category: to explain how institutions arise that serve the common welfare “without a common will directed toward their establishment” (Menger, 1883/1934, p. 163), defending this process not as mysticism, but as the “result of the contact of individual economic efforts” (Menger, 1884/1935, p. 43), where the organic paradoxically demands an exact analysis of its component elements.

Hayek himself identified this idea, inspired by Menger, as the axis of his thought, the element that separated him from the “constructivist rationalism” which, in his view, had infected even liberals such as Mises: “[Menger] made me realize that... most human institutions were not inventions but the result of a process of growth; [this] became for me the central idea that separated me from the rationalists of the Cartesian tradition” (Hayek, 1994, pp. 53–54). The CAA takes up this intuition and projects it onto the entirety of the social order: it transforms the Mengerian–Hayekian thesis about the spontaneous origin of particular institutions into a general principle concerning all human action embedded in an order it does not control.

The paradigmatic example of this unintentional process is Menger’s theory of money. Against the theory of social convention or state decree, Menger showed that money emerges from the interaction of agents pursuing their own individual interest—specifically, increasing the “saleableness” (Absatzfähigkeit) of their commodities—without any conscious intention to create a universal medium of exchange. Money is not an invention, but the unintended result of individuals with greater foresight exchanging their less saleable goods for more saleable ones, a process that, “under the powerful influence of habit” (Menger, 1871/1934, p. 254), becomes generalized socially. This mechanism paradigmatically anticipates the general structure that the Contextual Action Axiom formalizes: finite agents who, interacting within a partially opaque environment, unintentionally generate an order that transcends them. Menger’s theory of money thus offers the privileged empirical case of that which the CAA elevates to the level of an axiomatic principle.

The Hayekian agent is not only ignorant of the facts; he is also immersed in a stream of traditions and rules he often does not understand. These rules did not survive because individuals comprehended their logic, but because the groups that adopted them (often by accident or imitation) turned out to be more prosperous, successful, and numerous. Reason itself, for Hayek, is not a sovereign, ahistorical starting point, but the product of this cultural evolution. In The Fatal Conceit, Hayek delivers the definitive blow to the sovereignty of reason:

It is not our intellect that created our morals; rather, human interactions governed by our morals make possible the growth of reason and those capabilities associated with it. Man became intelligent because there was tradition — that which lies between instinct and reason — for him to learn (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 21).

At this point, Hayek’s project is clearly defined by two fundamental intuitions: epistemological finitude (dispersed knowledge) and evolutionary immersion (the cosmos of institutions). However, these ideas remained at the level of a brilliant historical and sociological description. They lacked the axiomatic and apodictic foundation that Mises had claimed for economics and that was necessary to protect them from the very historicism that both men opposed.

2.3. The Contextual Action Axiom: The Formalization of the Hayekian Project

It is at this point that the Contextual Action Axiom intervenes as the natural evolution and philosophical systematization of Hayek’s project. Whereas Mises gave us an axiom of the sovereign actor, a heroic abstraction that isolates the actor from his world in order to analyze his pure logic, the new axiom seeks a more primordial foundation. It begins from the intuition that action is never a monologue in the void, but a response, a participation in a dialogue that was already under way.

Mises’s “purposeful behavior” does not emerge from a pure and isolated consciousness. Before the first end is ever formulated, the agent has already been “thrown”—to use Martin Heidegger’s terminology—into a field of interaction that precedes and shapes him. Human existence is not that of a subject observing an object, but of a “being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-sein) (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. H 53). We are immersed in a “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt), a pre-reflective horizon of meanings, institutions, and practices that we take for granted (Schutz, 1932/1967, p. 9).

This “being-in-the-world” is the ontological condition that Hayek described sociologically. The Contextual Action Axiom formulates this condition with logical and a priori rigor: Every human action is, as a matter of logical necessity, an interaction between a finite agent and a context that exceeds him and therefore presents itself as epistemologically opaque and ontologically resistant. Schematically: for any action carried out by an agent x, there always exists a set C of conditions, rules, other agents, and states of affairs such that (i) x cannot know exhaustively the structure and evolution of C, and (ii) C imposes effective constraints on the outcomes of that x cannot annul at will. “Finite agent” and “exceeding context” are thus the two necessary poles of all human praxis.

This axiom does not refute Mises’s, but rather subsumes it, vindicating the method of isolation that Menger defended against Schmoller: just as the chemist isolates elements in order to understand laws that are not visible in impure nature, the theorist must isolate the “simplest elements” (Menger, 1884/1935, p. 19) in order to grasp interaction, making the finitude of the agent the very condition of exact analysis. It takes the two pillars of Hayekian thought (ignorance and evolution) and turns them into the components of a new apodictic foundation. The Misesian axiom then reappears as a limiting case of the CAA: the case in which the concrete structure of the exceeding context is entirely abstracted away in order to isolate the pure logical form of choosing means for ends. Likewise, the method of “isolating the simplest elements” defended by Menger is reinterpreted as a legitimate analytical tool within a framework that, nevertheless, never loses sight of the finitude of the agent and the complexity of the context.

The philosophical genealogy of this axiom is robust. It rests on Immanuel Kant, who in his Critique of Pure Reasondemolished the claim to know reality in itself (the noumenon). Kant confined us to an island of phenomenal truth, surrounded by a wide and tempestuous ocean of illusion (Kant, 1781/1998, p. A235–6/B295). The agent is finite because his knowledge is structurally limited to the phenomenal. The “exceeding context” is the vast noumenal realm that we can never encompass. It also rests on Heidegger, for whom the primordial mode of being is not the theoretical contemplation of things “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit), but the practical use of tools “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit) (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. H 67). We are immersed participants, not sovereign observers. Hayek may be read, in this sense, as an undeclared heir to this tradition: he takes seriously the finitude of the knowing subject and the primacy of “being-in-the-world,” but transposes that diagnosis from epistemology to the problem of social order and coordination under ignorance.

2.3.1. Unpacking the Axiom (I): The Finite Agent

The first component of the axiom, the “Finite Agent,” is the axiomatic translation of the Hayekian agent “anchored in ignorance.” Finitude is not a moral defect or a flaw to be overcome, but a fundamental and inescapable ontological condition.

This finitude is grounded, first of all, in Hayek’s own work. In The Sensory Order, he provides the physiological basis of cognitive finitude. The central nervous system is not a passive mirror of reality, but an “instrument of classification” (Hayek, 1952/2017, p. 184) that necessarily selects, abstracts, and organizes stimuli in light of past experience. We cannot perceive the totality of physical reality, only those properties that our system has learned to distinguish as relevant.

This cognitive finitude is precisely Hayek’s dispersed knowledge, but it is crucially complemented by Michael Polanyi’s “tacit dimension.” Polanyi showed that a large part of human knowledge is tacit, that is, that “we know more than we can tell” (Polanyi, 1966, p. 4). The knowledge of an expert craftsman, a physician diagnosing a disease, or an entrepreneur sensing a market opportunity cannot be fully codified in manuals or algorithms. It is personal, contextual, and inarticulable knowledge, and it imposes an absolute limit on any attempt to centralize knowledge.

The behavior of this finite agent was described by Herbert Simon through his concept of “bounded rationality” (Simon, 1947/1997, p. 88). Simon argued that human action in the real world is not an exercise in mathematical optimization—which would require omniscience—but a process of satisfaction (satisficing).⁴ Agents do not seek the best possible alternative in an absolute sense, but one that is good enough for their purposes. Simon distinguishes between objective rationality (the theoretically correct choice from an omniscient viewpoint) and subjective rationality, which maximizes achievement relative to the actual knowledge possessed by the individual (Simon, 1947/1997, p. 85). The finite agent of the axiom operates in this latter sphere. An investor, for example, does not compute the value of all stocks, but relies on heuristics: following an analyst, investing in what he knows (tacit knowledge), or imitating others.

The finitude of the agent is radically exacerbated by the introduction of the factor of time into the production process, a dimension that Menger rigorously analyzed. In moving from first-order goods (immediate consumption) to higher-order goods (production), the agent faces growing uncertainty. Menger warns that the owner of higher-order goods has no certainty regarding the quantity and quality of the final product, since the causal process is subject to changes beyond human control. This “uncertainty about the quantity and quality of the product” (Menger, 1871/1934, p. 24) is not a technical accident but a structural feature of human action extended over time, reinforcing the notion of the agent as an entity that does not optimize in a vacuum but bets against the entropy of an uncertain future. Hayek does nothing more than generalize this Mengerian intuition: by conceiving the market as a “discovery procedure,” he transposes the uncertainty tied to higher-order goods to the plane of the social order as a whole. The CAA gathers both levels—the level of individual production subject to time and that of social coordination under uncertainty—and condenses them in the figure of the “finite agent” who always acts under risk and with fragmentary information. Later, in extending the CAA toward a systems theory, it will also be possible to speak of non-human “agencies” (organizations, algorithms, bureaucracies) that exhibit analogous patterns of finitude and dependence on an exceeding context.

2.3.2. Unpacking the Axiom (II): The Exceeding Context

The second component, the “Exceeding Context,” is the axiomatic formalization of Hayek’s cosmos or “extended order.” The finite agent never acts in a vacuum, but always within a context (social systems, language, institutions, markets) that, by definition, exceeds him. It is immeasurably more vast, dense, and complex than the agent’s capacity to encompass it.

This concept is grounded in phenomenology. It is Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world,” where the world is not the sum of objects, but the horizon of meaningfulness that precedes and envelops us. The context exceeds the agent not only quantitatively (too much information), but qualitatively. It is the totality of “references” (Verweisungszusammenhang) (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. H 85) that gives meaning to action: a hammer is only a hammer by virtue of its reference to the nail, the wood, shelter, and the purposes of life. This web of meanings can never be fully objectified, for it is the very condition of action.

In sociological theory, Niklas Luhmann formalized this idea. Modern society is differentiated into multiple autopoietic social systems (economy, law, politics, science), each operating with its own code (Luhmann, 1995). For Luhmann, context is the “environment,” which is necessarily and functionally “always more complex than the system itself” (Luhmann, 1984/1995, p. 25). An agent never controls this context. A physician, for example, acts within a vast exceeding context: his action is guided by the scientific system (knowledge), constrained by the economic system (insurance), limited by the legal system (malpractice), and framed by an organization (the hospital). The context is not a passive background but an ensemble of active systemic logics.

2.3.3. Unpacking the Axiom (III): Epistemological Opacity and Ontological Resistance

The interaction between a Finite Agent and an Exceeding Context produces, by logical necessity, two conditions that define Hayek’s project: opacity and resistance.

Epistemological Opacity is the direct consequence of finitude in a complex world. The context is not only larger, but fundamentally unknowable in its totality. This is not a matter of missing data, but a structural barrier. It is the exact formalization of Hayek’s dual knowledge problem: knowledge is dispersed (no one possesses the whole) and tacit (much of it cannot be articulated). Opacity is the reality of the “unknown unknowns,” the fog that renders all long-term planning intrinsically fallible. The COVID-19 pandemic was a dramatic—though not exceptional—example of this opacity: governments acted under profound ignorance regarding transmission, lethality, and the consequences of their own policies, thereby demonstrating the inherent opacity of a complex socio-biological system.

Ontological Resistance is the quality of the context by which it “pushes back” or refuses to conform passively to the agent’s plans. If opacity is a problem of knowing, resistance is a problem of being. To give a theoretical account of this resistance, the axiom follows Menger’s methodological maxim: scire est per causas scire (to know is to know by causes), which requires reducing the complex phenomena of the popular economy to their “true elements,” the individual economies (Menger, 1883/1934, p. 87). This reduction is imperative because “full empirical reality” contains disturbing factors—error, custom, coercion—that oppose the exact law and distort its logical purity (Menger, 1884/1935, p. 18). In Karl Popper’s philosophy, this resistance is the basis of learning: reality “falsifies” our theories (Popper, 1963). In the social sphere, resistance has two sources: (1) scarcity, the resistance of the physical world; and (2) the plurality of wills, the resistance of the social world. The context is composed of other sovereign agents with their own plans.

This resistance manifests itself economically in what Menger defined as the “economic character” of goods. Reality pushes back when human “need” (Bedarf) exceeds the “available quantity” (verfügbare Quantität). This quantitative relation—strictly objective and given by the context, not by the agent’s will—is what imposes the necessity of economizing, choosing, and protecting property. Menger emphasizes that economic character is not an inherent property of goods, but a relation imposed by contextual scarcity upon the agent (Menger, 1871/1934, pp. 51–53). If this resistance (scarcity) were to disappear, economic activity itself would cease; thus, economic action is by definition a struggle against the ontological resistance of the environment. Formulated in terms of the CAA, “economic character” is the specific way in which the ontological resistance of the context is translated into the need for choice and the protection of property titles. It is not the agent who “creates” scarcity, but the exceeding context—the quantitative relation between needs and available quantities—that imposes that resistance and compels economizing action.

This is the “friction” that defines the “empirical field” of interaction that Hayek (1994, p. 72) distinguished from individual logic. It is the irreducible pluralism of values described by Isaiah Berlin, whereby the genuine ends of humanity (freedom, equality, justice) are multiple, incommensurable, and often come into direct conflict (Berlin, 1969/2002, p. 214). A diplomatic negotiation, in which the outcome is a compromise no one planned, is a perfect example of ontological resistance. Hayek’s discovery procedure (competition) (Hayek, 1988/1991, p. 19) is precisely the evolutionary response to a world defined by opacity and resistance.

2.4. An a priori Foundation for Spontaneous Order

The strength of the Contextual Action Axiom is that, like Mises’s axiom, it claims apodictic certainty. It is performatively irrefutable. Any attempt to deny it (e.g., “My action is not an interaction with an exceeding, opaque, and resistant context”) is, in itself, a perfect demonstration of the axiom. To see this clearly, it is helpful to reconstruct the attempted denial as a concrete action. Whoever denies the CAA formulates a proposition, expresses it in a shared language, directs it to an actual or potential audience, and exposes himself to having his assertion accepted, rejected, or misunderstood. The very structure of this act already contains interaction, an exceeding context, the opacity of the outcome, and the resistance of other wills. The act of denial is:

1. An interaction (with a real or imaginary interlocutor).

2. Within an exceeding context (language, logic, the philosophical tradition, the community of argumentation (Apel, 1973/1980, p. 259)).

3. With epistemological opacity (the outcome of persuasion is uncertain, an “unknown unknown”).

4. Confronting ontological resistance (the mind and will of the interlocutor who must be persuaded).

This resolves the Mises–Hayek tension. A priori certainty is not abandoned; it is relocated onto a deeper foundation that integrates the truths of both. This new foundation has radical implications, the most important of which is that it provides an a priori basis for spontaneous order.

Hayek’s cosmos is no longer merely an empirical observation or a historical preference; it becomes a logical necessity. If the axiom is true, then any large-scale designed order (taxis) is a “category mistake.” The central planner, whether a socialist bureaucrat or a social engineer, is himself a finite agent, incapable of overcoming the opacity and resistance of the exceeding context. “The Fatal Conceit” (Hayek, 1988/1989) is a logical impossibility; to attempt to grasp the totality of the context is to fall back into what Menger called the “monstrous thought” that a complete historical description could substitute for theory (Menger, 1884/1935, p. 38), a return to a sterile “micrography” incapable of guiding future action. Under the minimal normative assumption that it is not permissible to treat other finite agents as mere fully disposable means—that is, recognizing that they participate in the same opaque and resistant context—spontaneous order (market, language, law) appears as the only form of social organization compatible with the structure of human action as revealed by the CAA. This is the axiomatic basis for Berlin’s critique of “positive liberty,” which justifies the tyranny of the “engineer of human souls” (Berlin, 1969/2002, pp. 47–48) on the basis of a denial of finitude and pluralism.

This axiom also consolidates Hayek’s project by redefining efficiency. It abandons the static allocative efficiency of neoclassical economics (optimizing given resources) and replaces it with adaptive efficiency. The question is not whether the system is in equilibrium, but how quickly it learns from its errors and adapts to opacity. This perspective converges with the notion of “adaptive efficiency” developed by Douglass North (1990, 2005): the most successful societies are not those that maximize a static state, but those whose institutions facilitate trial and error, rule revision, and the rapid correction of mistakes. The bankruptcy of a firm, in this framework, is not a market failure; it is the market’s learning mechanism, the way in which the system adapts to ontological resistance.

In this light, prices cease to be parametric constants and become what Menger classified as empirical regularities, distinct from the exact laws of theory. Whereas exact theory isolates the necessary causal relation, real prices are the “unintended resultant” of individual efforts pursuing subjective goals under conditions of uncertainty (Menger, 1883/1934, p. 162). Menger described prices not as the essence of exchange, but as “symptoms of economic equilibrium” (Menger, 1871/1934, p. 172). Just as the waves that form when the sluices between waters of different levels are opened result from invisible forces, prices are the visible manifestations of the interaction between finite agents and the resistance of available quantities. TheContextual Action Axiom formalizes this view: price is the observable crystallization of the network of interactions among finite agents under conditions of scarcity, a signal that condenses the resistance of the exceeding context and allows the agent to adapt his conduct without ever fully understanding the forces that generate it. From the perspective of the CAA, one may say that “exact laws” capture the necessary structure of the interaction between finite agents and an exceeding context, whereas concrete prices are the contingent traces that this structure leaves in a specific historical situation.

Finally, this axiom explicitly situates Hayek’s project in dialogue with the contemporary science of “complex adaptive systems” (CAS) (Holland, 1995). A CAS is defined as (finite) agents interacting locally, following simple rules (buy low, sell high), in an environment that exceeds their understanding (opacity), giving rise to unplanned macroscopic properties known as “emergence” (spontaneous order). The Contextual Action Axiom is, in effect, the praxeological formulation of the principles of complexity. In the sections that follow, this reading will allow us to characterize the sympoietic cosmos as a particular case of a complex adaptive system endowed with legal rules (nomos) that co-evolve with patterns of action, reinforcing the compatibility between the Austro-Hayekian tradition and the contemporary science of complex systems.

2.5. Conclusion: The Culmination of Hayekian Evolution

The trajectory from Mises’s apodictic certainty to Hayek’s epistemological evolutionism marked one of the most fruitful intellectual tensions of the twentieth century. Mises provided the certainty of individual logic; Hayek introduced the complexity of social interaction. The Contextual Action Axiom completes this trajectory, transforming praxeology from a logic of action into an ecology of action.

This axiom is the natural evolution of the Hayekian project because it takes its central intuitions—the finitude of knowledge, the primacy of evolutionary tradition, and the market as discovery—and lifts them out of the realm of sociological description to refound them as a coherent philosophical system resistant to performative self-contradiction. By defining human action not as sovereign calculation but as the interaction of a “finite agent” with an “exceeding, opaque, and resistant context,” the axiom provides the strongest possible a priori foundation for Hayek’s vision.

The superiority of spontaneous order and the defense of freedom are no longer grounded in a mere preference for tradition or efficiency, but in the logical and inescapable structure of human action itself. This epistemic humility translates into a politics of piecemeal social engineering (Popper, 1963/2002, p. 485), focused on eliminating concrete evils rather than constructing abstract utopias. It accepts Isaiah Berlin’s warning, quoting Kant, as the summary of the human condition: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” (Berlin, 1953/2002, p. 92). The axiom compels us to accept this imperfection not as a failure, but as the very condition of our freedom and creativity. Later, in distinguishing between liberal and illiberal sympoietic cosmos, the difference will lie precisely in how each confronts—or attempts to deny—this “crooked timber” and the constraints it imposes on any project of totalizing social engineering.

III. THE SYMPOIETIC COSMOS AS THE LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE OF THE EXTENDED ORDER AND FUNCTIONAL ANARCHY

If the Contextual Action Axiom describes the interaction of finite agents with an exceeding context, it follows by logical necessity that no arkhós⁵ can possess the knowledge required to direct the social order. This order, inaccessible to central design, is what I call the sympoietic cosmos,⁶ that is, a dynamic web co-produced by multiple agents without unitary direction. In this section I shall reserve sympoietic cosmos to refer to the “grown” extended social order; sympoietic nomos for the set of abstract and evolutionary rules that structure it from within; and taxis for deliberate organizations—including the State—that occupy partial spaces through conscious design. Strictly speaking: if every agent x always acts within a context C that structurally exceeds his cognitive capacity (CAA), then an arkhós is nothing more than an agent x with a different normative title, but subject to the same finitude. To “govern the social order” would require precisely what the CAA denies to be possible: a standpoint external to the exceeding context.

3.1 Definition of the Sympoietic Cosmos: From Ontology to the Social Description of Anarchy

To grasp this concept, it is imperative to rescue the term “anarchy” from its Hobbesian connotation of chaos (bellum omnium contra omnes). Peter Leeson (2014) shows that Hobbes fell into a false dichotomy when he assumed that the absence of government is equivalent to the absence of governance. He ignored the capacity of agents to generate enforcement institutions exogenous to the State. From our perspective, anarchy is not a political prescription, but a descriptive category: etymologically (an-arkhos), it denotes the absence of a centralized directing principle.

The Hobbesian conception of anarchy, however, is itself a form of constructivist rationalism: it assumes that order is synonymous with design (taxis) and that the absence of a central designer is, by definition, the absence of order. Hayek’s thought, and the tradition of spontaneous order, invert this premise. True chaos is not the absence of a director, but the result of his intervention: an attempt to turn a sympoietic cosmos into a directed taxis which, in practice, degenerates into an illiberal sympoietic cosmos, incapable of processing information and correcting errors with the same effectiveness as its liberal counterpart, because it reduces precisely the freedom of experimentation and rectification that the CAA requires as the logical condition of adaptation.

For the purposes of this essay, we reclaim the term “anarchy” from this confusion and link it explicitly to the sympoietic cosmos, returning to the already mentioned etymological sense—an-arkhos, absence of a centralized directing principle—that is, the absence of a ruler or a centralized directing principle. Thus, anarchism, in the sense in which it is the goal of anarchists, means “the absence of a ruler or government” (Crowder, 1991, p. 1). In this sense, David Friedman refines the ontological distinction between private governance and the State through a precise operational definition: government is not defined simply by the use of force, but by its character as a “legitimized agency of coercion.” Whereas in the liberal sympoietic cosmos the defense of rights is an individual prerogative or one contractually delegated (without special privileges) and the sympoietic nomos arises from revisable agreements and practices, the State claims a moral and legal asymmetry that tends to freeze that nomos into a unilateral design, typical of an illiberal sympoietic cosmos. As Friedman explains:

Government is defined as an agency of legitimized coercion [...] The special characteristic that distinguishes governments from other agencies of coercion [...] is that most people treat government coercion as normal and proper. The same act that is regarded as coercive when done by a private individual is treated as legitimate if done by an agent of the government (Friedman, 1973/2014, p. 108).

Functional anarchy, therefore, does not imply the absence of mechanisms to counteract violence, but the absence of an institution that possesses a moral monopoly to initiate it under the guise of legitimacy. What I term here the “functional anarchy of the sympoietic cosmos” is thus not a political prescription for the dismantling of institutions, but a descriptive category of social reality. It is the recognition that the “Great Society”—the extended order that Hayek contrasts with the tribal “microsociety”—operates, and indeed can only operate, without a centralized director. Planning and deliberate design (taxis) are bounded phenomena, islands of artificial order floating in the vast ocean of the cosmos, which is, by its very nature, functionally anarchic.

This concept follows directly and irrefutably from the Contextual Action Axiom. If we accept epistemological opacity as an ontological condition—that is, if we admit that the knowledge required for social coordination is dispersed, tacit, contextual, and inherently dynamic—then any arkhos is, by definition, epistemologically blind. The “pretense of knowledge” that Hayek (1988/1989) identifies in the socialist planner is not a moral defect, but a logical error. The planner cannot know what he would need to know for his plan to succeed.

It follows that only an order which leaves room for freedom of action and decentralized experimentation can exploit that dispersion of knowledge. A liberal sympoietic cosmos is precisely one whose nomos protects that minimal freedom of trial and rectification; an illiberal sympoietic cosmos attempts to substitute it with centralized command and thereby, in practice, denies the very conditions of possibility of coordination that the CAA establishes. I shall call liberal that cosmos whose sympoietic nomos expands the sphere of individual agency and institutional competition, exposing norms and organizations to mechanisms of feedback and correction. I shall call illiberal the cosmos in which the nomos is frozen into privileges, monopolies, and mandates. Its direction is not informed guidance, but a “groping in the dark,” as Mises (1922/1981) described it in the context of economic calculation.⁷

Beyond the calculation problem, Leeson adds a crucial incentive dimension for understanding the efficiency of the sympoietic cosmos. Unlike academics or planners who study the social order from a position of theoretical safety, agents immersed in functional anarchy face direct and severe penalties for failures of coordination. This evolutionary pressure forces the discovery of solutions that centralized design (taxis) cannot conceive. Leeson argues that people in situations of anarchy “must live (or die) with the consequences of failing to surmount obstacles […] or of overcoming them.” Given this high-powered incentive structure, “it would be surprising if people in anarchy did not develop effective self-governance mechanisms in a wide variety of difficult circumstances” (Leeson, 2014, p. 3). Order arises not only because information is dispersed, but because the cost of disorder is privately internalized by actors, rather than externalized as under state planning.

Stringham extends this epistemological critique beyond pure economic planning to the very production of rules and governance. Just as the central planner lacks access to dispersed information in order to set prices, the centralized legislator lacks the feedback mechanism necessary to “discover” efficient rules. In an explicitly Hayekian analysis, Stringham argues:

Although Hayek used terms such as discovery to describe the process of common-law judges figuring out the best legal rules, he did not entertain the idea that all rules and regulations be subject to the market test [...] How will a monopolist government best identify problems, and how will it know where to devote scarce resources? How will government measure the costs of additional rules and regulations, and how will it measure the potential burden they impose on subsequent parties? [...] Just as the central planner assumes that without property rights, prices, profits, and markets the government can engage in rational economic calculation, the legal centralist assumes that government, a monopolist legal and regulatory system, can effectively weigh the effects of each rule to prevent problems in markets (Stringham, 2015, p. 16).

Friedman deepens this epistemological and incentive-based critique through his analysis of the “public good trap” in legislative production. In a system of state taxis, “good law” is a public good: it benefits everyone, but the cost of producing it (becoming informed, lobbying, voting) falls on individuals, which rationally leads to its underproduction. By contrast, in the anarchic market for law, law becomes a private good. Friedman argues that, under anarcho-capitalist institutions, “good law ceases to be a public good [...] The producer of a private good receives nearly all of the value [...] and therefore will produce it whenever it is worth more than it costs” (Friedman, 1973/2014, p. 154).

Thus, this liberal sympoietic nomos not only overcomes the Hayekian calculation problem in the legal sphere, but also aligns economic incentives so that agencies of arbitration and protection “discover” efficient rules that maximize the added value for their clients, preventing the imposition of legislation that benefits concentrated interests at the expense of the dispersed majority.

Historical evidence supports this functionally anarchic nature of social order, even in the most sophisticated markets. Up to this point, the argument has moved at the logical and theoretical level: if finite agents operate in opaque and resistant contexts, functional anarchy appears inevitable, and the liberal sympoietic cosmos appears as its most coherent institutional form. What remains, however, is the decisive question: do we have historical examples of complex orders that have operated under these conditions? The extension of this anarchic order to complex markets is exemplified historically by the Lex Mercatoria (Law Merchant). Leeson explains how this polycentric system of customary law arose at the end of the eleventh century to facilitate exchange between socially distant merchants, operating on the margins of state sovereigns. In the absence of a supranational arkhós, merchants developed signaling mechanisms and private arbitration that made possible the commercial rise of Europe. According to Leeson, this system of self-governance was not marginal but foundational: “the commercial revolution of the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, which eventually led to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, could not have occurred without [...] this system” (Leeson, 2014, p. 31). This corroborates that functional anarchy is capable of scaling from microinteraction to complex and heterogeneous networks of international trade.

Along the same lines, Stringham documents how the world’s earliest stock markets, in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, operated and prospered in an environment of technical legal anarchy, where advanced financial contracts not only lacked state backing but were often explicitly illegal. Market participants did not wait for the State’s taxis; they developed a cosmos of private governance. Stringham observes: “Even in areas where government is theoretically available to enforce rules, those rules are often unusable, easy to avoid, or too costly [...] For these transactions, business partners find themselves in what might be considered a de facto lawless state of anarchy” (Stringham, 2015, p. 40). Yet, far from chaos, this absence of arkhós generated robust mechanisms of reputation and contractual enforcement. Therefore, a blind arkhósis is no arkhós at all; it is simply another finite agent, but one endowed with coercive power to impose its ignorance on everyone else’s plans, shaping an increasingly fragile illiberal sympoietic cosmos that can only be sustained at the price of destroying the very freedom it would need in order to correct itself. The liberal sympoietic cosmos, by contrast, is the system that accepts this radical ignorance and evolves decentralized mechanisms (such as prices, reputation, or private arbitration) to navigate it, displaying an evolutionary robustness that the CAA allows us to anticipate in transcendental terms, though not in chronological ones.

Similarly, the ontological resistance of the context⁸—the scarcity of means and, fundamentally, the plurality of wills and plans of other agents—renders any attempt at centralized direction an act of violence. An arkhós must not only knowwhat to do; it must also have the power to do it. This entails the suppression of the ontological resistance offered by the millions of plans of the individuals who make up society. The constructivist assumes that the social world is a passive material, a blank canvas upon which the planner can draw his design. But the social world is an ecosystem of active agents. The attempt to impose a unified taxis on this polyphony of ends is necessarily an attempt to reduce the complexity of human action to the simplicity of a command. Functional anarchy is, by contrast, the acceptance of that polyphony; the liberal sympoietic cosmos is the order that emerges precisely from the interaction of those resistant and divergent plans and from the effective freedom to revise them, whereas their suppression in the name of a single design does not produce order but an increasingly unstable illiberal sympoietic cosmos, condemned—by the very transcendental conditions of the CAA—to erode its coordinating capacity until it neutralizes itself or collapses.

The strongest evidence of the viability and persistence of the anarchic cosmos is found, paradoxically, in the international sphere. Leeson classifies the current international system as a “big-G anarchy” (where the cost of a world government, G, exceeds any marginal coordination benefit). Despite the absence of a formal global hegemon, international trade has flourished—exceeding 9 trillion dollars annually at the beginning of the twenty-first century—sustained by self-governance mechanisms such as international commercial arbitration and modern customary law. Leeson notes that, although supranational bodies exist, the world continues to operate in an effective functional anarchy: “The presence of private institutional arrangements in the international arena [...] allows for a substantial amount of trade despite the absence of world government” (Leeson, 2014, p. 168). This confirms that complex society does not collapse without a global taxis; on the contrary, it prospers thanks to the flexibility of the cosmos.

Therefore, “functional anarchy” is not a political option placed before us, but the basal condition of complex society that follows from the CAA itself: finite agents in opaque and resistant contexts cannot be durably coordinated from a single center. The real political question is not whether “we shall have anarchy or order,” but, given that functional anarchy is the inevitable state of affairs, what kind of institutions are compatible with it? Will we evolve a liberal sympoietic nomos (abstract rules that expand agency and feedback) that facilitates coordination within that anarchy, exploiting freedom as the logical condition of adaptation, or will we attempt to suppress it futilely through a constructivist thesis that crystallizes an illiberal sympoietic nomos, increasingly dependent on state taxis, an attempt that, as Hayek argues in The Road to Serfdom (1944/2008), is doomed to destroy freedom and, ultimately, order itself?⁹ Society is, and always will be, anarchic. The only choice is whether it will be a liberal and relatively prosperous sympoietic cosmos or a failed taxis—an illiberal sympoietic cosmos —a “planned chaos” whose unsustainability follows from the very transcendental conditions of action.

Ultimately, recognizing the functional anarchy of the cosmos means accepting that most social order is invisible to those who operate under the paradigm of legal centralism. As Stringham concludes, citing Thomas Paine, much of the order that prevails among humankind is not an effect of government but has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. Stringham states: “Markets, from beginning to end, are where they are because of private governance. Yet the more fluid private governance is, the fewer people notice it or appreciate its beauty. Private governance often goes unnoticed, but it is what makes markets possible” (Stringham, 2015, p. 8). In the language proposed here, this is equivalent to saying that it is the liberal sympoietic nomos, embedded in a sympoietic cosmos without arkhós, that silently sustains the social coordination the state taxis tends to claim as its own. The next step is almost inevitable: if functional anarchy is the basal condition of complex society and the liberal sympoietic cosmos appears as its most robust institutional configuration, how does Hayek’s defense of a minimal State fit into this picture? It is at this point that Hayek’s theoretical architecture comes into tension with his own political conclusions.

3.2. Hayek’s Internal Contradiction: Minarchist Taxis

It is at this juncture that the relentless logic of Hayek’s system—which describes a liberal sympoietic cosmos —comes into direct and fatal tension with Hayek’s own political conclusions. This tension is not minor, since Hayek himself explicitly warns of the theoretical impossibility of arbitrarily amalgamating both types of order without deleterious consequences. As he states in defining the properties of orders: “One of our main contentions will be that although spontaneous order and organization will always coexist, we cannot yet mix these two principles of order in any way we like” (Hayek, 1973/2021, p. 71). If such mixing cannot be carried out arbitrarily, the imposition of a governmental structure (taxis) upon society (cosmos) requires a justification that goes beyond mere convenience, something that minarchism assumes but fails to derive evolutionarily: it attempts to stabilize a sympoietic cosmos by means of a design that, in practice, pushes it toward an illiberal configuration.

This operational incompatibility was already foreshadowed in his 1944 work. There, Hayek argues that competition and central direction are alternative principles for solving social problems, warning that attempts to combine them do not produce a virtuous synthesis but a functionally inferior system. For Hayek, an incomplete amalgam of the two principles yields outcomes worse than those that would result from consistently relying on either system alone, which calls into question the viability of any institutional “middle way” (Hayek, 1944/2007, p. 85). The discovery of spontaneous order is, in itself, the discovery of functional anarchy. Hayek described this process with unparalleled brilliance, but recoiled at the moment of drawing its definitive institutional conclusion.

By positing the necessity of a minimal State—a monopolistic taxis—as an indispensable guardian of the cosmos (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 209), Hayek commits a kind of “performative contradiction” with his own premises: he introduces a central design that progressively transforms a liberal sympoietic cosmos into an illiberal one dependent on the state monopoly. This contradiction becomes evident in The Constitution of Liberty, where Hayek attempts to resolve the problem of coercion not by eliminating it, but by centralizing it institutionally. He maintains that, since coercion cannot be entirely avoided, the solution adopted by the free society has been to confer a monopoly of coercion on the State, attempting to limit this power exclusively to those cases necessary to prevent private coercion. In so doing, Hayek legitimizes a tool of social engineering under the pretext of minimizing aggression among individuals, assuming that the deliberate creation of a coercive monopoly is compatible with freedom as long as it is self-limited by abstract rules—an assumption that ignores the expansive dynamics inherent in any monopolistic organization of force (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 210).

It is crucial to note that Hayek explicitly recognizes the artificial and teleological nature of government, which contrasts with the abstract and end-independent nature of the market order. Whereas law (nomos)—in its historically grown version, a sympoietic nomos—precedes legislation, government is defined by Hayek as an instrumental organization: “Government, on the other hand, is a deliberate contrivance which, however, beyond its simplest and most primitive forms, cannot be run exclusively by ad hoc commands of the ruler. [...] Its rules will be rules of organization designed to achieve particular ends” (Hayek, 1973/2021, p. 155). By assigning to this “deliberate contrivance” the exclusive function of coercion, an organization oriented toward specific ends is granted the authority to limit an order that, by definition, has none: the liberal sympoietic nomos becomes subordinated to a thesis designed from above.¹⁰

This conflicting duality is evident in The Constitution of Liberty. By acknowledging that a large part of state activity is not the application of general rules (nomos), but the discretionary administration of resources and the issuing of instructions to its own servants, Hayek introduces an organizational logic (taxis) into the core of the free society (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 314). This insertion generates a structural contradiction: the State, defined as an organization aimed at specific ends, is given the power to limit an order that, by definition, lacks such ends. Thus, the liberal sympoietic nomos is subordinated to a thesis designed from above, violating the condition of generality that Hayek himself establishes as a safeguard against arbitrariness.

This distinction is fundamental, for in The Road to Serfdom the concept of the Rule of Law is defined precisely by the restriction of legislation to general and formal rules, excluding any legislation directed at particular persons or that allows the use of coercive power for discriminatory purposes (Hayek, 1944/2007, p. 116). The internal contradiction of minarchism becomes evident here: in order to sustain its own structure, the State must necessarily discriminate (through taxation) and direct specific resources, thereby violating the condition of generality that Hayek himself sets as a safeguard against arbitrariness and pushing the sympoietic nomos toward an increasingly illiberal form dependent on fiscal taxis.

It introduces a constructivist and coercive design agent at the heart of the grown order, an agent that, by definition, cannot be subject to the same evolutionary rules of the sympoietic nomos is supposed to protect, and that tends to transform it into a partial and hierarchical nomos characteristic of an illiberal sympoietic cosmos. Hayek admits that the specific action of government—as opposed to the application of abstract rules—constitutes a fundamental break with the logic of the market. In Volume 2, when discussing “interference,” he concedes that any specific command of authority is intrinsically unjust and disordering, which validates the thesis that the state agent is a foreign body within the cosmos:

Interference, if the term is properly used, is therefore by definition an isolated act of coercion, undertaken for the purpose of achieving a particular result [...]. It is, therefore, always an unjust act in which somebody is coerced [...] and for purposes which are not his own. It is, moreover, an act which will always disrupt the overall order (Hayek, 1976/2021, p. 331).

This minarchism is an unstable utopia, an attempt to domesticate the liberal sympoietic cosmos with the very instrument that, according to its own logic, will inevitably tend to turn it into an illiberal sympoietic cosmos increasingly dependent on state design. Hayek himself, in his moments of greatest candor about the dynamics of power, seems to anticipate the failure of containing the State through mere parliamentary rules if these retain organizational power. In Volume 3, he concedes that entrusting the guardianship of law to elected governors charged with administration leads almost inevitably to the disappearance of legal restraints on discretionary power, suggesting that the instability of his proposal is not an accident but a structural certainty within the institutional scheme he advances (Hayek, 1979/2021, p. 391).

The contradiction becomes sharper when one examines Hayek’s justification for the monopoly of force in the provision of public goods. Despite his defense of spontaneous order, Hayek concedes that coercion is necessary to finance services that the market allegedly cannot provide, thereby closing the door to non-state evolutionary solutions to these problems. In Volume 3, Hayek states: “Nor can it be seriously questioned that where certain services can only be provided if all the beneficiaries are made to contribute to their costs [...], only government should have the right to use such coercive powers” (Hayek, 1979/2021, p. 402). This concession grants the state taxis a foundational legitimacy that shields it from evolutionary competition, freezing institutional development at a specific stage (the modern nation-state) and denying the possibility that the sympoietic cosmos might develop a liberal sympoietic nomos for the provision of public goods without a monopolistic center of power.

This breach with the purity of spontaneous order becomes even more evident when Hayek constructs a dichotomy between coercive measures and purely service-oriented activities. In The Constitution of Liberty, he argues that government may provide services the market would not supply, and that such activities do not in themselves involve coercion, except for the inescapable fact that they require financing through taxation. By accepting the necessity of taxation as a tolerable exception to sustain these activities, Hayek validates the extraction mechanism required to fund the state taxis. This ignores the fact that the method of coercive financing alters the incentive structure and the natural evolution of the market, enabling the growth of a vast administrative State under the justification of providing services that supposedly do not infringe individual freedom (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 332). Moreover, granting coercive power for the “planning” of certain public services gives the State control over the essential means for the pursuit of all private ends. In the chapter “Economic Control and Totalitarianism,” Hayek dismantles the illusion that one can surrender economic control to the State without sacrificing overall freedom: “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served” (Hayek, 1944/2007, p. 126).

If we accept this premise, any parcel of “economic control” or monopolistic provision that minarchism reserves to the State becomes, by definition, an instrument of domination over the vital ends of individuals. It is fair to note that Hayek attempts to soften this contradiction by arguing that the State should not hold the legal monopoly over the provision of services, even while retaining the monopoly of coercive financing. He explicitly warns against the mistaken interpretation that the distinction between public and private sectors justifies reserving certain activities to government by law (Hayek, 1979/2021, p. 406). Despite this warning, by conceding the necessity of coercive financing Hayek cements the dependency of the cosmos on taxis, progressively displacing a liberal sympoietic nomos in favor of an illiberal one and, in practice, hindering the emergence of genuine private competitors in the face of a state provider funded by compulsory levies.

3.3. Overcoming Minarchism: Evolutionary Realism Taken to Its Conclusion

If the Contextual Action Axiom (CAA) is correct as an ontological description of the human condition, and if the sympoietic cosmos constitutes the form of social order compatible with the opacity and resistance that this axiom posits as transcendental conditions of action, then the Hayekian project is determined in its main lines far more precisely than Hayek himself made explicit. The transition from Misesian praxeology to Hayek’s epistemological evolutionism does not describe merely a methodological turn, but the genesis of a complete image of society: an extended, undesigned order composed of finite agents immersed in exceeding contexts, where coordination is achieved through discovery mechanisms rather than deliberate planning.

The first guiding line of this system is the cognitive finitude of the agent. Against the figure of the abstract “sovereign actor,” the CAA and Hayek himself compel us to think of action as the initiative of situated subjects endowed with necessarily limited, tacit, and fallible knowledge. The famous thesis of “dispersed knowledge” is not a mere sociological observation, but the empirical expression of a deeper structure: no agent can encompass the context in which he acts. The market appears, from this perspective, not as a mere device of calculation, but as a discovery procedure that allows finite agents to adjust their plans through impersonal signals (prices, profits, losses) that condense information inaccessible to any individual mind.

The second guiding line is the evolutionary nature of institutions. Language, morality, law, and money are not the product of conscious design, but the result of cultural selection processes in which those rules and practices survive that have, in practice, proved to facilitate cooperation under ignorance. Hayek’s distinction between cosmos and taxis crystallizes this intuition: the extended social order belongs to the former, whereas deliberate organizations—including the State—can only occupy partial and bounded spaces. The sympoietic cosmos takes up and radicalizes this idea by describing the social order as the co-produced result of multiple finite agents, none of whom occupies a position of epistemically privileged command.

The third guiding line is the centrality of feedback mechanisms. In a world governed by epistemological opacity and ontological resistance, social learning is only possible if actions confront differentiated consequences: mistakes that are paid for, successes that are rewarded. In the market, the discipline of profit and loss fulfills this selective function; in customary law, competition among rules and precedents gradually refines those norms that reduce conflict and strengthen cooperation. In the terms of the CAA, these mechanisms are the way in which the exceeding context “responds” to the plans of agents, correcting them without the need for a directing mind.

If we accept these three lines—finite agents, evolutionary institutions, and learning through feedback—the figure of a central arkhós acquires a problematic status. The minimal State, as conceived in Hayekian minarchism, aspires to be at once guardian of spontaneous order and privileged exception to its rules of operation. By granting it a territorial monopoly of force and taxation, it is removed precisely from the feedback discipline that sustains the rest of the cosmos: the provider of security and justice becomes an institutional agent that does not go bankrupt when it errs, nor loses clientele when it provides poor service, because it can socialize the costs of its mistakes. The very structure of monopoly turns it into an epistemic “black box”: it operates in an environment where ontological resistance is cushioned by coercion and where the opacity of its failures can persist for long periods without effective correction.

From the internal logic of the Hayekian project, this asymmetry has profound consequences. If the justification of the market order rests on the impossibility of effective planning under dispersed knowledge, confidence in a minimal State implicitly presupposes that there exists at least one organization capable of situating itself “above” those limitations. The idea of power “limited” by a constitution here reproduces the same constructivist rationalism that Hayek criticizes elsewhere: it attributes to an institutional design—a constitutional text—the capacity to fix stable limits to a monopoly that, in practice, controls the means of interpretation, application, and modification of those limits. Under the lens of the CAA, the constitution is itself part of the exceeding context: its effectiveness depends, ultimately, on the incentives of the agents charged with applying it.

The conclusion that follows is not so much that the minimal State is “undesirable” from particular normative preferences, but that it is incoherent with the very principles of Hayekian evolutionary realism. If no agent can escape finitude, if robust institutions are the result of decentralized processes of discovery and correction, and if monopolies tend to weaken the feedback mechanisms that make learning possible, then the production of security and law must take a form isomorphic to the cosmos it seeks to regulate. In positive terms, this points toward structures of polycentric law and competitive governance; in negative terms, it excludes the figure of an institutional arkhós that situates itself stably outside the evolutionary dynamics governing the rest of society.

In this sense, the move from classical liberalism to an anarchy of spontaneous private-property order—that is, to a de-statized liberal sympoietic cosmos in the sense of lacking a territorial monopoly of coercion, not in the sense of abolishing the innumerable organizations and partial taxis that emerge voluntarily within the cosmos—does not constitute a break with the core of Hayekian thought, but the logical culmination of his own intellectual project once articulated upon the CAA. What is expanded is not the space of “utopia” but the reach of epistemic humility: it is recognized that the model of grown order that Hayek applies to the market, law, and morality must also be extended to the structure of security and justice. Freedom ceases to appear as a space granted within a state-designed framework to reveal itself instead as the ontological precondition of any sustainable social order. The sympoietic cosmos without arkhós is not, in this reading, an ideal projected onto the future, but the logical conclusion of a system that, from its premises, cannot admit any center capable of imposing its ignorance on the whole without contradicting the very structure of contextual human action.

Ultimately, the proposal of a de-statized sympoietic cosmos converges with Leoni’s fundamental observation that there is “more than an analogy between the free market economy and a judicial or jurists’ law, just as there is much more than an analogy between a planned economy and legislation” (Leoni, 1961/1991, p. 22). Both spheres, the economic and the juridical, require for their ontological sustainability the absence of a central planner who would seek to replace the spontaneous process of collaboration with an act of sovereign will.

IV. THE PARADOX OF ANARCHIES: FROM THE ROTHBARDIAN NOMOS OF THESIS TO THE SYMPOIETIC COSMOS

4.1. The Ontological Distinction: Anarchy as Condition, Not as Utopia

Once functional anarchy has been established, in section III, as the ontological condition of the extended order, it may seem tempting to embrace the Rothbardian alternative without further criticism. However, this would entail a categorial mistake: continuing to understand anarchy as a political program to be implemented (a new design), rather than as the underlying reality that minarchism attempts, futilely, to suppress. The cognitive challenge—what Hayek calls “animism,” that is, the tendency to ascribe to “society” or “the State” a unitary will that consciously designs institutions—lies in accepting that the most effective institutions do not require a foundational will, but instead operate on the basis of self-organization.

From this perspective, recognizing the sympoietic cosmos as an ontological condition also implies revising the assumptions with which we describe problems of collective coordination. This semantic recovery is urgent, given that conventional political science has operated under a false dichotomy that blinds institutional analysis. As Ostrom (1990/2015) warns, policy analysts often use formalized models—such as the “tragedy of the commons” or the “prisoner’s dilemma”—metaphorically in order to assume that individuals are hopelessly trapped in a logic of self-destruction. The category error here is to equate open-access regimes (res nullius), where the absence of exclusion generates rational overexploitation, with common-property regimes (res communis), where communities define rules of access and use. By ignoring this distinction, it is implicitly assumed that “if ruin is to be avoided in a crowded world, people must respond to a coercive force outside their individual psyches—a ‘Leviathan,’ to use Hobbes’s term” (Ostrom, 1990/2015, p. 9). Ostrom does not identify with anarchism, but her work shows that the “Leviathan or chaos” dichotomy is empirically false: users themselves can, in numerous contexts, design and enforce rules without recourse to a monopolistic arkhós. Empirical evidence refutes this presumption of self-governance incapacity,¹¹ demonstrating that finite agents, far from passively awaiting exogenous solutions, possess the capacity to transform the incentive structure and generate robust internal governance institutions.

This descriptive distinction is fundamental for disentangling the concept of “law” from state institutions. As Benson (1990/2011) argues, it is a common error to presume that social order requires a centralized coercive authority. Legal history suggests that customary law, when voluntarily recognized, not only precedes but often shows a superior capacityto sustain cooperative orders vis-à-vis authoritarian law. Law imposed from above requires the support of a powerful minority, whereas law developed from below—anarchy in the ontological sense—requires generalized acceptance based on the mutual recognition of obligations.

From this perspective, law does not emerge as an arbitrary command, but as a logical extension of the need to define property rights in a world of scarcity. Benson (1990/2011) deepens this evolutionary account by arguing that the primary motivation for the development of customary law is the desire for individual protection of property and personal security. In the absence of a monopolizer of force, individuals internalize the benefits of establishing clear rules of conduct that reduce conflict and facilitate exchange. Thus, customary law is “voluntarily recognized ... to facilitate interaction by providing a clear set of individual property rules, whose observance allows individuals to avoid conflict” (Benson, 1990/2011, p. 32). This process of legal formation is isomorphic to the market process: it is a decentralized discovery of norms that maximize social coordination, in contrast to authoritarian law which, being imposed exogenously, lacks this mechanism of intersubjective validation.

This perspective is fully consistent with the Hayekian thesis on the primacy of tradition over reason in the formation of institutions. Hayek warns that it is a constructivist error to assume that human reason first designed law or property; causality runs in the opposite direction. Norms of several property and justice emerged from millennia-long processes of group selection, not from legislative decision. As he puts it: “our intellect did not create our moral; rather, human interactions governed by our moral made possible the growth of reason and the capacities associated with it” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 21). Customary law therefore embodies an implicit wisdom superior to that of any statutory code, for it contains accumulated adaptive information that no individual mind could deliberately reconstruct.

At this point, it is useful to fix a terminological distinction: on the one hand, “anarchism” as a political program (an ideal to be implemented); on the other, “anarchy” in the ontological sense, as the underlying structure of social order under the CAA. Put differently: wherever norms arise, are consolidated, and transmitted without a central designer, what we observe is not an institutional anomaly, but precisely the way anarchy operates when understood ontologically. Within the framework of the Contextual Action Axiom (CAA), anarchy is not a political prescription but an ontological condition. As already indicated, in its etymological root an-arkhós refers to the absence of a centralized directing principle. If we accept the epistemological opacity and ontological resistance of the context, the “Great Society” is, by definition, a functional anarchy. No central node processes the totality of information; therefore, the global order is always the unintended result of local interactions. It is precisely this structure—an order resulting from local interactions without a directing center—that this work designates as sympoietic cosmos: the characteristic form that anarchy, understood ontologically, adopts when it is described in terms of an extended order.

The impossibility of a central directing node is not merely a technical matter; it is the core argument of Hayek’s epistemological critique of socialism. In an extended order, the information needed for coordination is irreducibly dispersed among millions of agents. Hayek argues that the pretension to replace this polycentric order with unified direction fails because “the totality of resources which one could employ in such a plan is simply not knowable to anyone” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 85). Thus, functional anarchy is not a defect, but the sine qua non condition for mobilizing an amount of knowledge that exceeds the comprehension capacity of any centralized authority.

A robust empirical example of this condition is what Ostrom, in her analysis of groundwater basin management in California, calls a system of polycentric public enterprise. Instead of a central governmental authority, a complex system emerged in which aspects of both private and governmental activities are involved (Ostrom, 1990/2015, p. 135), achieving sophisticated and efficient management without an omniscient central regulator. This is not an institutional “vacuum,” but a web of multiple coordinated decision centers, many of them public, which nonetheless operate without a single arkhós. It is this polycentric structure—and not the absence of institutions—that is interpreted here as a manifestation of functional anarchy. This polycentric order demonstrates that “it is not necessary that the regulation of the commons be imposed coercively from the outside” (Ostrom, 1990/2015, p. 69), thereby validating the hypothesis that complex coordination is feasible—and often superior—under a decentralized or anarchic architecture in the functional sense of the term. The empirical cases that follow do not illustrate an anarchist utopia implemented ex nihilo, but rather the way in which the sympoietic cosmos—that is, the ontological anarchy of social order—becomes visible even in historical contexts where the State is present but does not occupy the logically relevant place in daily coordination.

As already shown in section III, Leeson and Stringham document that, even under the shadow of the State, complex markets operate on substrates of private governance. The paradigmatic example is the medieval Lex Mercatoria, which, as Benson documents, evolved into a universal legal system not by the edict of sovereigns, but through a “process of natural selection” (Benson, 1990/2011, p. 32). Commercial practices that facilitated efficient interaction supplanted less effective ones, creating an integrated, objective legal body based on reciprocal rights and without the need for state coercion. This order is not something injected from above (taxis), but something that emerges from below (cosmos), precisely because agents internalize the costs of discoordination.

The sustainability of this order, whose primary logic of coordination does not depend on the State, does not rest on utopian benevolence, but on endogenous mechanisms of quasi-voluntary compliance. Ostrom observes, in robust long-lived institutions—such as Spanish huertas or Japanese villages—that participants themselves invest resources in mutual monitoring. In these systems, “monitoring is a natural by-product of using the commons” (Ostrom, 1990/2015, p. 96), and sanctions are typically graduated and applied by peers rather than by external agents. This confirms that stable cooperation is possible when individuals “design their own operational rules ... to be enforced by individuals who are local users or are accountable to them” (Ostrom, 1990/2015, p. 99), thereby refuting the axiomatic necessity of a monopoly of force to secure compliance. In terms of the CAA, these systems show how, under functional anarchy, the ontological resistance of the context—the real costs of conflict—pushes agents to internalize the benefits of clear rules and to monitor their enforcement, without the need for a monopolistic arkhós.

Ultimately, the intellectual transition from an authoritarian to a customary conception of law requires recognizing the structurally extractive nature of state taxis. Benson (1990/2011) argues that “authoritative governmental laws and institutions are likely to do just the opposite [of supporting social order], as their function is to facilitate involuntary transfers rather than voluntary interaction” (pp. 45–46). Whereas in the sympoietic cosmos justice must be “marketable”—offering swift and fair conflict resolution in order to attract parties—the state system imposes structural inefficiencies by breaking the link between the cost of service and its financing. As Benson concludes, authoritarian law imposes a costly, slow, and uncertain system “precisely because it does not face the competitive discipline that forces customary law to serve the consumers of justice” (Benson, 1990/2011, p. 94). Hence, anarchy understood ontologically is not chaos, but the incentive structure in which reciprocity and reputation—rather than the monopoly of force—act as the primary mechanisms of normative compliance. Thus, anarchy, in the sense defended here, does not name a utopia to be reached nor a political program to be imposed, but the ontological condition under which every actually existing social order—including that in which the State claims the monopoly of law—becomes possible within the sympoietic cosmos.

4.2. Rothbardian–Hoppean Anarcho-capitalism as Nomos of Thesis

Having shown, on the basis of the Contextual Action Axiom, that functional anarchy—the absence of an epistemically privileged arkhós—is the ontological condition of all society, and that the sympoietic cosmos of spontaneous order is its necessary consequence, we can now systematically address the Rothbardian–Hoppean system. I will not offer here an exhaustive exegesis of their work, but rather a structural reading from the CAA: what presuppositions about context and reason are implied in their respective normative projects, and what happens when these are subjected to the conditions of finitude and opacity already established. In terms of the CAA, we are dealing with two rival attempts to domesticate normatively the same sympoietic cosmos: one that relies on an open and evolutionary sympoietic nomos (Hayek), and another that aspires to replace it with a closed nomos of thesis (Rothbard/Hoppe), that is, a normative code conceived as complete and definitive, deduced a priori and intended to apply to any possible context. What follows will show that, once the transcendental conditions of contextual action are accepted, the latter does not represent a transcendence of the former, but a return to a form of constructivist rationalism: it reintroduces, under libertarian guise, the very form of rationalism that the CAA declares logically unviable.

The characterization of the sympoietic cosmos —a spontaneous, nomocratic order without arkhós—as “anarchic” inevitably places Hayek’s thought in a tense dialogue with market anarchism, whose most systematic formulation is due to Rothbard. Both thinkers share a deep skepticism toward state power and a grounding in the Austrian School, but their split is philosophical. What is truly at stake is whether law must be understood as a sympoietic nomos—rules discovered in and by context—or as a thesis that reason seeks to fix once and for all, independently of the contextual dynamics described by the CAA. Rothbard’s system is erected on an axiomatic and deontological foundation: an Aristotelian–Lockean natural law. Unlike Hayek’s evolutionary approach, Rothbard is a convinced moral rationalist who holds that human reason is capable of apprehending “natural law” and deducing an ethical code that is objective and universally applicable (Rothbard, 1982/1998, pp. 3–8). That is, he presupposes that it is possible to adopt a standpoint external to context and formulate, outside the sympoietic cosmos, a complete and definitive nomos. Ethics, for him, is not a contingent cultural product but a science whose principles can be discovered with certainty.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe pushes this premise to its epistemological limits, holding that the fundamental statements of economics and ethics do not depend on empirical validation. For Hoppe, economics and ethics do not depend on observation of an evolving cosmos, but are aprioristic disciplines. He argues that “empiricism-positivism [...] proves to be an inconsistent and self-contradictory philosophy” (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 130), since it must presuppose non-empirical knowledge to validate its own postulates. In this scheme, nomos is not discovered in history, but deduced from the immutable nature of action: “nothing can be known a priori about any particular action; but there exists a priori knowledge regarding actions insofar as they are actions” (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 136). Thus, Hoppe’s proposal armors the libertarian thesis against any contextual refutation, elevating rationalism to a status of logical immunity. Although Hoppe concedes that the concrete content of actions and institutions depends on the historical context, he insists that the basic normative structure can and must be established a priori.

This immunity is not a dogmatic whim, but a logical necessity derived from the nature of human learning. Hoppe shows that the “principle of constancy”—the assumption that causal relations between variables are invariant over time—is inapplicable in the realm of human action. Since agents can learn, “their knowledge and actions cannot logically be regarded as determined by a complex of causes operating in a constant manner” (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 300). If knowledge could be predicted causally, we would not be learning but executing a predetermined program. Hence, attempting to validate ethical or economic norms by empirically observing a cosmos in a constant flux of learning is a category error; only an a priori theory can establish the unbreakable limits—such as private property—within which sympoietic learning can occur without self-destruction.

From the standpoint of the CAA, this tends to relegate the opacity and resistance of the moral context to the background: norms cease to appear as hypotheses subject to testing in the sympoietic cosmos and instead present themselves as timeless deductions, only indirectly affected by experience. From this premise follow the axioms of self-ownership and the non-aggression principle (NAP), according to which any initiation of physical force is intrinsically illegitimate, aggression being “the only and single crime” (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 51). Hoppe attempts to go beyond Rothbard’s natural-law approach through his argumentation ethics, seeking a justification that is logically undeniable. His argument is that anyone who attempts to dispute the right of self-ownership falls into a performative contradiction, since “nobody could propose anything, nor could anyone be convinced of any proposition by argumentative means, if each individual’s right to exclusive use of his physical body were not already presupposed” (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 159). Hoppe refines this argument by emphasizing that ethical justification cannot depend on consequentialist results (characteristic of ex postcontextual analysis), but must be an a priori propositional justification. Any ethics other than that of private property falls into a performative contradiction at the very moment of being argued, since “anyone attempting to justify any norm would already have to presuppose the exclusive right of control over his body as a valid norm simply in order to say ‘I propose such and such’” (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 342). From the CAA’s perspective, this can be interpreted as the recognition that the very structure of communicative interaction (the sympoiesis of discourse) requires an underlying substrate of inalienable property rights for it even to begin. For Hoppe, this is not an evolutionary norm subject to cosmos selection, but a transcendental precondition of human communication. In asserting that “any socialist ethic is indefensible” (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 171) because its argumentative defense must presuppose the private property it denies, Hoppe crystallizes nomos into a timeless logical structure, entirely impermeable to the contingency of sympoiesis. The strength of the argument—and the reason it cannot be dismissed lightly—lies in the fact that it detects something real: certain minimal normative presuppositions of argumentative practice. The disagreement, from the CAA, is not with that core, but with the claim to fix on its basis a complete code immune to contextual correction.

From this viewpoint, the State is defined not by its efficiency failures but by its criminal nature: it is the only institution that obtains its revenues through coercion and maintains a “coercive monopoly of force and of ultimate decision-making power over a given territorial area” (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 172). It is crucial to note that, under this optic, the constraints operating on the State are categorically different from those of the market. While the size of a firm in the sympoietic cosmos is limited by voluntary demand and cost competition, the State operates outside these market constraints. As Hoppe notes, the State cannot be regarded as constrained by cost competition [...] since it is able to shift its higher costs onto competitors through taxation or regulation (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 53). Its growth thus does not depend on efficiency in social coordination, but on the manipulation of public opinion to generate legitimacy for expropriation. This makes it a parasitic entity whose expansion is restrained by public opinion (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 54) rather than by economic feedback, situating it ontologically outside the error-correction cycle characteristic of sympoiesis. Hoppe radicalizes this definition by equating the State ontologically with socialism. In his framework, socialism is not merely a system of central planning, but any “institutionalized interference or aggression against private property and private property rights” (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 10). Under this view, “there can be no socialism without a State, and as long as there is a State there is socialism” (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 177). This implies that every state action, regardless of its utilitarian or evolutionary justification, is an act of institutionalized aggression against natural owners (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 182), thereby eliminating any possibility that the State might function as a benevolent arkhós within a liberal order. Rothbard reinforces this by characterizing the State as an entity that systematically violates the property rights it is supposed to defend (Rothbard, 1978/2006, p. 27). Therefore, the only consistent stance for Rothbard is its total abolition, on the grounds that any monopoly of force will inevitably use that power to expand its jurisdiction at the expense of individual freedom (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 173). In this reading, every State is necessarily anti-sympoietic: it introduces a monopolistic arkhós that disrupts and distorts the processes of spontaneous coordination within the sympoietic cosmos.

Yet it is precisely here that the aprioristic critique of Hayek reveals, in light of the Contextual Action Axiom, its own structural fragility, and where an analysis consistent with the CAA must be particularly careful. In accusing Hayek of timidity for not defending the immediate abolition of the State, the Rothbardian strand implicitly assumes that the legal order is an object of intellectual design. Context ceases to function as a selective instance, and the sympoietic nomos is reduced to the mere application of a thesis previously deduced by reason. Rothbard’s system, grounded in the deduction of a legal code a priori, commits the same epistemological error that Hayek identified in legal positivism: constructivist rationalism. Although Rothbard imagines the application of his code through contractual arrangements and private agencies, the form of his theory remains that of a taxis: a closed, perfect, and universally valid system, deduced by the solitary reason of the philosopher and proposed as a normative mold for social reality like a mold over clay, independently of the contextual conditions that the CAA has shown to be ontologically inescapable.

From the perspective of the Contextual Action Axiom, this is impossible. A finite agent—the libertarian philosopher—cannot anticipate the infinite variety of conflicts and contexts that will arise in the sympoietic cosmos. In the terms already established, it is an attempt to transform a sympoietic nomos—open, revisable, and polyphonic—into a closed thesis that aspires to escape permanent testing by context. Rothbard’s “anarchy” is, paradoxically, an attempt to legislate the outcome of interaction before the interaction takes place; it is a libertarian taxis that ignores the need for continuous discovery inherent in the sympoietic cosmos.

Hayek rejects this natural-law approach because he regards it as a fiction based on the erroneous belief that reason can construct, a priori, a complete set of rules of conduct (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 112). In CAA terms, Hayek is right to insist that no individual can situate himself outside historical context in order to dictate, from an alleged “arkhós point of view,” a complete catalogue of norms. His error does not lie there, but in believing that a state taxis can guard the sympoietic nomos without deforming it. For Hayek, moral and legal rules are “discovered” through a process of cultural evolutionary selection proper to a sympoietic nomos, not “designed” axiomatically. The validity of private property does not lie in its syllogistic derivation, but in the fact that groups which adopted it proved more prosperous than those that did not (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 16). In CAA terms, that greater prosperity is the empirical trace of better adaptation to the opacity and resistance of context. Whereas Rothbard sees law as a prescriptive product of reason, Hayek sees it as a descriptive institution of custom. This difference is crucial: for Hayek, reason itself is a product of cultural evolution and cannot set itself up as an external judge of tradition (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 112); in the terminology of the CAA, reason always operates from within the sympoietic cosmos and never from a supposed arkhós vantage point.

As argued in detail in section III, Hayek’s defense of the minimal State generates a structural tension with his own ontology of the cosmos. Nonetheless, his historical defense of the minimal State as an indispensable “maintenance mechanism,” charged with enforcing a nomos it did not create (Hayek, 1960/2011, p. 209), collapses under the weight of his own analytical categories. As established, a taxis (the State) is an artificial and teleocratic order, whereas the market is a nomocratic sympoietic cosmos. Hayek’s proposal to entrust a taxis with protecting the rules of a cosmos produces an unsalvageable contradiction. It amounts to introducing an arkhós that purports to administer from the outside a sympoietic nomos which, by definition, can only be sustained if it remains exposed to contextual experimentation and correction. By its very nature, the state institution cannot be neutral; it operates under a logic of command that is antithetical to the adaptation of the cosmos. By monopolizing force, the State inevitably imposes its thesis upon the sympoietic nomos, becoming an agent of teleocratic disorder. This contradiction becomes evident in the theory of public goods, the last refuge of minarchism.

Hoppe dismantles the distinction between private and public goods—the cornerstone of Hayekian state justification—by calling it completely illusory. He argues that “there is no clear-cut dichotomy between private and public goods” (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 8), since any good may shift categories depending on individuals’ subjective evaluation. More devastating still is his critique of the state provision of security. By removing security from the market, the State eliminates the only rational mechanism for determining how much to produce: profit-and-loss calculation. Without such a mechanism, the allocation of resources to security becomes “arbitrary and necessarily involves countless wasteful misallocations from the consumer’s point of view” (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 22). Thus, Hayek’s attempt to secure nomos through a state monopoly is not only morally inconsistent but economically blind, incapable of responding to contextual variations in the demand for protection. By delegating the production of security to a state monopoly on the pretext of market failure, economic rationality is replaced by the arbitrariness of public management (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 202). For Hoppe, even security and law must be subjected to market competition, since “the state monopoly of the production of security and justice must necessarily lead to higher prices and lower quality” (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 240), a conclusion that directly challenges the need for an external arkhós to maintain order.

Evaluated from the CAA, a structurally decisive conclusion emerges. Hayek’s critique of Rothbard’s method is correct: the Rothbardian system is constructivist and suffers from a “fatal conceit.” Yet Rothbard’s political conclusion—market anarchy—is more consistent with the principle of spontaneous order than Hayek’s minarchism. Rothbard arrived at a pro-sympoietic cosmos conclusion (decentralization of the arkhós) by an anti-sympoietic route (a rationalist nomos of thesis), whereas Hayek developed the appropriate ontology of the sympoietic cosmos and of the evolutionary nomos, but stopped halfway at the institutional level by retaining a minarchist arkhós. Although Ostrom’s work (1990) shows that self-organization is possible, assuming that a unified legal code can be rationally generated at scale is a mistake. The polycentric arrangements studied by Ostrom can be interpreted precisely as manifestations of a sympoietic nomos: local, contextual rules constantly tested within the cosmos, not imposed by a central thesis.

Within the framework of the Contextual Action Axiom, what has been called here “Hayekian anarchy” can be more accurately described as a liberal sympoietic cosmos: not the image of a market supervised by a minimal State—a contradictory utopia—but that of a social order without arkhós, governed entirely by a sympoietic nomos. Purged of Rothbard’s constructivist error and Hayek’s own minarchist error, Hayek’s conceptual apparatus logically leads to this liberal sympoietic cosmos as the only institutional environment compatible with the opacity and resistance of context: an order in which freedom is not administered from an arkhós, but emerges as a functional condition of the cosmos itself. It is an order in which law, justice, and protection form part of the same sympoietic nomos, emerging from a competitive discovery process and validated not by a priori axioms but by their evolutionary functionality in a context of irreducible uncertainty. The challenge is no longer to choose between Hayek and Rothbard, but to use Hayek’s evolutionary realism, rearticulated by the CAA, to show that Rothbard’s libertarian intuitions can only be sustained when subjected to the logic of sympoietic cosmos and nomos, renouncing their claim to aprioristic thesis.

From the standpoint of the Contextual Action Axiom, the Rothbardian–Hoppean system is thus relocated and subordinated. Its central intuitions—private property, rejection of the State, critique of socialism—are not refuted but absorbed and reinterpreted as contextual hypotheses within a broader framework: that of sympoietic cosmos and nomos. Wherever Rothbard and Hoppe seek to fix an a priori nomos of thesis, the CAA shows that every norm can only be justified as the result of a process of contextual selection under opacity and resistance. Any attempt to challenge this result must first deny these transcendental conditions of action; but in doing so, it simultaneously undermines both the Hayekian critique of socialism and the Rothbardian critique of the State. In this strong sense, the CAA and the sympoietic cosmos do not compete with Rothbard/Hoppe: they contain them logically and surpass them.

4.3. The Liberal Sympoietic Cosmos and the Evolutionary Nomos: Synthesis and Institutional Proposal

The true transcendence of the dichotomy therefore does not lie in choosing between Hayek’s inconsistent minarchism and Rothbard’s rigid constructivism, but in carrying the Hayekian method—corrected and extended by the CAA—to its ultimate consequences. The alternative is not “another” anarcho-capitalism, but what I call here the sympoietic cosmos. This is not merely a matter of relabeling a political program, but of shifting the focus from the “correct content” of a legal code to the structural conditions under which norms emerge, are corrected, and are maintained. In this sense, the sympoietic cosmos is not an “anarcho-capitalism 2.0,” but an ontological framework within which different institutional configurations can be evaluated and revised. Unlike rationalist anarcho-capitalism, the sympoietic cosmos does not “decree” private law nor claim to deduce ex ante the complete catalogue of legitimate norms; it creates the conditions for law to evolve endogenously. It rests on the notion of sympoiesis (“making-with,” co-production), recognizing that order is collectively generated by situated agents who correct their errors through institutional feedback mechanisms (profit and loss, reputation, arbitration, competition among providers of justice and protection).

In this model, nomos (law) ceases to be a static axiom and becomes an adaptive technology refined in the very process of resolving conflicts under conditions of opacity. The superiority of a spontaneous anarchy of order over the State—and also over attempts to “legislate” anarchy a priori—does not lie in its better fulfillment of a predefined moral code, but in its qualitatively superior capacity for information processing. Because there is no arkhós monopolizing coercion and blocking the error signal, the sympoietic cosmos allows inefficient norms to be discarded and efficient ones to be imitated, in an evolutionary selection dynamic that no rational design can replace without destroying the contextual information that makes it possible. In later sections, this intuition will be developed in specific domains—polycentric law, free banking, competitive security, decentralized provision of collective goods—to show how the sympoietic cosmos can be articulated institutionally without recourse to an arkhós.

In short, the Rothbardian critique is correct in its political diagnosis (the State is an intrinsically extractive and illegitimate institution), but fails precisely where the CAA becomes unavoidable: at the epistemological and methodological level. The Rothbardian/Hoppean remedy—an aprioristic nomos of thesis that seeks to fix once and for all the content of law—is incompatible with the opacity and resistance of context that anarcho-capitalism itself presupposes when speaking of economic calculation and learning. The response consistent with human finitude is not to replace the state legislator with the libertarian philosopher-legislator, but to abolish the very position of universal legislator so as to allow the sympoietic cosmos to unfold its own adaptive intelligence.

As already foreshadowed in section III, from the CAA the liberal sympoietic cosmos is not just one more option on the ideological menu, but the only institutional configuration strictly compatible with the transcendental conditions of contextual action. The Rothbardian–Hoppean framework is thus relocated and subsumed: it preserves valid intuitions (centrality of private property, economic critique of the State), but formulates them in a methodologically inferior language—that of the nomos of thesis—which the CAA and the sympoietic cosmos can absorb and reconstruct without loss. Any attempt to refute this result must first deny the opacity and resistance of context; but in doing so, it undermines the very assumptions on which both the Hayekian critique of socialism and the Rothbardian critique of the State rest.

Against this background, it no longer makes sense to debate in terms of “more” or “less” State within the classical aprioristic framework. If the CAA is correct, every social order inevitably develops within a sympoietic and under an evolutionary nomos. The issue is not whether the State can be “domesticated,” but the extent to which the theoretical frameworks that justify it—including thesis-based anarcho-capitalism—respect or violate the conditions of possibility of that grown order. Precisely for this reason, the next inevitable step is no longer to try to justify a new arkhós, but to develop in detail the concrete institutional implications of a liberal sympoietic cosmos—in law, banking, security, and the provision of collective goods. The relevant axis ceases to be “how much State” and becomes instead “which institutional arrangements best fit the logic of the liberal sympoietic cosmos,” that is, which are capable of operating under functional anarchy without relapsing into the illusion of an all-seeing arkhós.

V. SELF-OWNERSHIP AND PRIVATE PROPERTY IN THE APRIORIST PARADIGM

In this section I reconstruct the proprietary core of the apriorist paradigm—self-ownership and original appropriation in Rothbard, reinforced by Hoppe’s praxeological grounding—in order subsequently to subject it to the scrutiny of the Contextual Action Axiom (CAA) and of the sympoietic cosmos/nomos framework. The aim is not to deny its central libertarian intuitions, but to examine whether the logical-ontological structure of these theses withstands the conditions of finitude, opacity, and contextual resistance already established in the preceding sections.

4.1. Self-Ownership and Original Appropriation in Rothbard: Structure and Presuppositions

In Murray N. Rothbard’s ethical–political system, self-ownership and original appropriation (homesteading) constitute the axiomatic core of libertarianism. The entire normative edifice rests on two basic theses: (i) each person is the exclusive owner of his or her own body, and (ii) unowned external goods legitimately become the property of whoever first occupies and transforms them through labor (Rothbard, 1978/2006, pp. 33–43; 1982/1998, pp. 29–34, 47–49). In what follows I reconstruct these theses in their strongest and most charitable formulation, temporarily bracketing my own framework, in order later to contrast them with the CAA.

To understand the perceived need for this axiomatic grounding, it is useful to note that Rothbard develops his theory as a direct response to what he regards as the insufficiency of economic utilitarianism. Rothbard argues that free-market economists, in seeking to remain wertfrei (free of value judgments), fall into a logical trap: they cannot advocate freedom of exchange without first affirming the justice of the property titles being exchanged. If an economist defends the exchange of a good X for a good Y, he is implicitly assuming that the holders of those goods are their legitimate owners; otherwise, he would be endorsing the trade of stolen goods (Rothbard, 1974/2000, pp. 89–90).

From Rothbard’s own perspective, this criticism is devastating for utilitarian orthodoxy: lacking a theory of justice in property, such economists end up uncritically accepting whatever definition of property the State happens to impose at a given time. This leads them to a paradoxical position in which the defense of the “market” could compel them to validate morally abhorrent situations, such as slavery, so long as the State has legally recognized titles of property in persons. As Rothbard notes, “Surely, any backing of a “free” slave market indicates the insufficiency of utilitarian concepts of property and the need for a theory of justice” (Rothbard, 1974/2000, p. 95).

Rothbard formulates self-ownership as a natural-rights axiom: every human being, by the mere fact of being human, has the moral right to “own” and control his or her own body, free from the coercive interference of others. From within his classical iusnaturalist framework, this axiom is presented as a morally universal truth, anchored in the “nature of man” rather than in mere positive conventions or contingent agreements. This right is justified through a normative reflection on the logically possible alternatives for assigning control over human bodies. In For a New Liberty, Rothbard distinguishes three scenarios: (a) each person owns himself (universal self-ownership); (b) a class A owns the bodies of a class B (slavery); or (c) everyone owns equal shares of everyone else’s body (participatory communism) (Rothbard, 1978/2006, pp. 33–35).

The two non-libertarian alternatives are, in his view, self-contradictory or impracticable. Slavery implies dividing human beings into “full persons” and “sub-persons,” denying to the latter the very rights that are claimed as natural for the former, thereby contradicting the alleged universality of human rights. Participatory communism presupposes that no one owns himself, but that all are co-owners of everyone else: every action would require the unanimous consent of humanity, rendering social life and even survival impossible (Rothbard, 1978/2006, pp. 34–35).

In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard refines this logical argument by taking the premise of universal co-ownership to its ultimate praxeological consequences. If each person is assumed to have an equal share in the property of all others, the right to life and action cancels itself out, since no one would have autonomous authority to perform vital functions without the prior permission of the global community. Rothbard concludes: “If one were to follow the rule of total collective property, mankind would perish instantly. Whatever this may be, it is also not a human ethic” (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 46). The communist alternative thus fails not only for reasons of economic efficiency; it also collapses as an ethical system by contradicting the biological and physical conditions necessary for the survival of the human actor. In this initial formulation, context remains virtually empty: the problem is posed as a choice among logically possible configurations of control over bodies, rather than as a response to a historically situated nomos.

In the face of these options, Rothbard concludes that universal self-ownership is the only coherent allocation “compatible with the nature of man”. All other configurations entail systematic exploitation (the dominant class lives parasitically off the dominated) or a degree of practical inoperability incompatible with the preservation of human life (Rothbard, 1978/2006, p. 35).

Starting from self-ownership, Rothbard introduces original appropriation as the criterion of justice with respect to external goods. The problem, as he formulates it, is to determine who is the legitimate owner of natural resources and produced goods. The Rothbardian answer adopts a radicalized version of the Lockean principle: the first user who occupies and transforms a previously unowned resource—through labor and value-creating use—acquires a full and exclusive property title over it (Rothbard, 1978/2006, pp. 40–43; 1982/1998, pp. 32, 47–49).

In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard develops this thesis through the example of Robinson Crusoe. In a world initially “empty of institutions,” Crusoe is the owner of his own body (self-ownership) and, by working a portion of the island—cultivating land, gathering fruits, hunting animals—he becomes the legitimate owner of the goods and of the portion of land effectively transformed (Rothbard, 1982/1998, pp. 33–34). It is crucial to note that, in analyzing Crusoe’s situation, Rothbard establishes an ontological distinction between freedom of will (free will) and physical power. Crusoe’s natural freedom to adopt values and ideas is inalienable, but his power to act is limited by natural (physical) laws. Freedom must not be confused with omnipotence. Rothbard clarifies that Crusoe’s inability to perform physically impossible acts (such as leaping across the ocean) is not a limitation of his freedom, but of his power. Freedom, in the political and social sense, is defined strictly as the absence of interpersonal molestation or invasion—a distinction that avoids conflating positive definitions of freedom with material capacities (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 33).

Rothbard illustrates the inseparability of personal labor and transformed matter through the paradigmatic case of artistic creation. If we consider a sculptor who shapes a work of art from clay and other materials, ownership of the final product is not a mere legal convention, but a logical deduction from self-ownership. The sculpture is, in effect, an extension of the creator’s own personality, who has “mixed his labor” with the raw material. Rothbard argues that denying the sculptor’s right over his work leaves us with only two unacceptable alternatives: either the work can be appropriated by any stranger (theft), or it belongs to the world as a whole (communism). With respect to this latter option, Rothbard is blunt about the inherent injustice of collective expropriation: “By what right do they appropriate to themselves the product of the creator’s mind and energy? [...] Surely, it is a rare person who, with the case put thus, would say that the sculptor does not have the property right in his own product” (Rothbard, 1974/2000, pp. 99–100).

When Friday appears, two distinct levels of rights assignment emerge:

• Rights over one’s own person: each individual holds an absolute title over his body, which excludes any legitimate claim to enslave, assault, or use it without his consent.

• Rights over external resources: the only just way to acquire previously unowned goods is through original appropriation: the first to occupy and use the resource (and only to the extent that he actually uses it) becomes its legitimate owner (Rothbard, 1982/1998, pp. 45–49).

Rothbard insists that original appropriation cannot consist merely in a verbal declaration (“I claim the entire island”), but must be an act of effective labor upon concrete resources. He pejoratively labels the claim to property based on mere discovery or verbal decree the “Columbus Complex”. This fallacy consists in believing that the first discoverer of a new land may legitimately claim an entire continent simply by having reached its shores. Against this, Rothbard maintains that natural law limits property strictly to what has been transformed: “Columbus or Crusoe would have had to use the land, ‘cultivate’ it in some way, before they could be said to own it [...] their true domain could extend no further than the power of their own reach” (Rothbard, 1982/1998, pp. 34, 47). Consequently, any claim over virgin lands that exceeds the area effectively worked constitutes an illegitimate aggression against future settlers who might come to transform the remaining areas (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 64).

This limitation of property to what has been effectively transformed also serves Rothbard to refute the Georgist thesis, according to which land, as a gift of nature, ought to belong to humanity as a whole. In his reading, the Georgist alternative suffers from an insurmountable moral and practical defect: there is no rational justification for a newborn in Pakistan to have a pro rata property right in a plot of land in Iowa that has been transformed into a wheat field by a local farmer. Rothbard questions the morality of depriving the first user—the pioneer or homesteader—of his title in favor of a collective abstraction: “It is difficult to see the justice of depriving him of ownership in favor of people who have never gotten within a thousand miles of the land and who may not even know of the existence of the property over which they are supposed to have a claim” (Rothbard, 1974/2000, p. 102).

Moreover, Rothbard emphasizes that production is impossible without the cooperation of the soil. If private ownership of the underlying land is denied, the individual’s right to own the fruits of his labor is ultimately denied, since labor is inextricably mixed with the soil (Rothbard, 1974/2000, p. 103). Property is generated by “extending” control over one’s body into the external world through transformative action. Any title that does not derive from this original chain of appropriation and voluntary transfers (contracts, gifts, inheritances) is considered illegitimate in his system and therefore voidable (Rothbard, 1982/1998, pp. 34, 47–48, 52).

Finally, self-ownership and homesteading are integrated into a general conception of rights as property rights. There is, for Rothbard, no conceptual separation between “human rights” and “property rights”: the right to life, liberty, or physical integrity is simply the right of the individual to control his own body and the goods he has justly acquired (Rothbard, 1978/2006, pp. 51–53; 1982/1998, pp. 113–114). To shield this proprietary conception of rights against equivocal moral interpretations, Rothbard adopts the restrictive definition proposed by James A. Sadowsky. Under this view, to assert that someone has a “right” to perform an action means solely and exclusively that it would be immoral to employ physical force to prevent him from doing so. This sharply separates the sphere of political justice (the legitimate use of defensive violence) from the sphere of personal morality:

When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property [...] is necessarily a moral use (Rothbard, 1982/1998, p. 24).

The result is a system in which every aggression (crime) is defined as the non-consensual invasion of another’s sphere of property—whether over the body or over external goods—and in which any coercive redistribution of resources is assimilated to a systematic violation of the principle of self-ownership and of the legitimate chain of property transfers. However, Rothbard’s theory of justice in property does not amount to a mere validation of the status quo. On the contrary, it establishes a rigorous criterion for the rectification of illegitimate property titles. If a current title originates in aggression (theft or coercive state concession) and the original victim or his heirs can be identified, justice requires the restitution of the property to its true owners, without compensation for the current holder. In cases where the State has confiscated land in order to grant it to private favorites (as under feudalism or in certain oligarchic concessions in the developing world), Rothbard concludes that the titles must be voided and the property reverted to the peasants or workers who actually work it and who are, under the homesteading principle, its true owners. Conversely, if no identifiable victims exist, the current possessor—provided he is not himself the aggressor—becomes the legitimate owner under the principle of first user of a good that, for all practical purposes, lacked an owner (Rothbard, 1974/2000, pp. 107–112). The result is an internally coherent normative system that offers criteria for acquisition, transfer, and rectification of titles. The question raised by the CAA is not its internal consistency, but whether the categories of “ownership of self” and “first occupation” are ontologically well formulated once they are situated within a sympoietic cosmos and an evolutionary nomos.

4.2. Hoppe and the Aprioristic Grounding of Self-Ownership and Private Property

Hans-Hermann Hoppe explicitly places himself within the Misesian–Rothbardian tradition, but seeks to provide libertarian theory with a more rigorous epistemological foundation. His project combines Misesian praxeology—an aprioristic theory of human action—with a normative theory of private property in which self-ownership and original appropriation are justified as necessary conditions for avoiding conflict in a world of scarce resources (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 158–159). Whereas Rothbard explicitly appeals to classical natural law, Hoppe aims to derive the same institutional core—self-ownership and homesteading—without recourse to a theory of “human nature,” but rather from the formal conditions of action and argumentation.

In A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, Hoppe begins from two central intuitions. First, that every agent acts by using his body as a necessary means to achieve ends; the body is therefore a scarce resource, liable to conflict. Second, that external goods are also scarce and can be the object of incompatible uses by different agents. From this dual fact—action and scarcity—he infers the need for norms assigning titles of exclusive control over bodies and resources, if systematic violence is to be avoided (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 130–135).

Unlike Rothbard, whose defense of self-ownership is formulated primarily in the key of natural law, Hoppe insists that his argumentation is praxeological and ultimately aprioristic in character. The question is not merely “which distribution of rights is morally desirable,” but “which kind of norms can be rationally justified among agents who argue.” In his account, any theory of justice must confront a problem of compatibility: which rules for the allocation of control over scarce resources can be universally accepted without generating practical or performative contradictions? (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 154–158).

Hoppe’s answer is that self-ownership and original appropriation constitute the “natural position” from which a system of rules can be justified without contradiction. The factual starting point is that each individual already finds himself in control of his own body—no one can move, speak, or argue in someone else’s name without using his own body—and that recourse to violence in order to dispute that control implies a relation of exploitation (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 21, 158–169).

Thus, at the normative level, self-ownership is the rule that recognizes and institutionally “freezes” this state of affairs: each person is the only legitimate holder of his body, and any non-consensual interference constitutes aggression. Formally, this is expressed as the rule that the first user of one’s own body—the agent himself, who already exercises de facto control over it—is its legitimate owner. The alternative—that others hold original titles over one’s body—would amount, according to Hoppe, to institutionalizing the exploitation of those who produce by those who appropriate the fruit of that production (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 159).

With respect to external resources, Hoppe extends the same temporal principle: in the absence of a prior holder, the first user who occupies and transforms a good acquires a better title than any later claimant. In case of conflict, the rule of temporal priority (“first user, first in right”) provides an objective and universalizable criterion for resolving disputes, whereas any distribution based on “egalitarian” or “needs-based” criteria would, in practice, entail the systematic expropriation of those who have invested their labor in the resources (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 168–170).

This structure allows Hoppe to define capitalism and socialism in juridical rather than purely economic terms. Capitalism is the system in which self-ownership and original appropriation determine property titles; socialism is any scheme in which original holders of resources are dispossessed (totally or partially) by a third party that decides on the use of those resources without being their first occupant or legitimate contractual successor (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 18, 29, 164–165). In his own self-interpretation, this is a “non-ideological” characterization of both systems, derived directly from the initial allocation of property rights.

Hoppe’s attempt to endow these norms with an aprioristic foundation is fully articulated in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property. There he insists that the justification of property rights cannot be empirical or strictly utilitarian, because the very practice of arguing about norms already presupposes certain rules of non-aggressive control over the bodies and speech of the interlocutors. To argue is to employ one’s own body and time in a communicative interaction in which others are reciprocally recognized as agents capable of controlling their bodies without coercion (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 342). This line of reasoning is what Hoppe calls the Ethics of Argumentation, which I will analyze in detail in section VI. In this section, what matters is only the structural core of his proposal: that the practice of argumentation already presupposes the basic bundle of property rights that his theory seeks to justify.

For this reason, he maintains, any norm that denies self-ownership or allows systematic aggression against others’ bodies would be performatively contradictory: the proponent would be using his own body as if it were his while simultaneously denying the right of others to do the same. By the same token, a norm that denied the validity of original appropriation would imply that actors who have already used scarce resources might be expropriated in favor of newcomers who have not made prior use of those resources, thereby reintroducing a relation of exploitation incompatible with the claim to impartial justification (Hoppe, 1993/2006, pp. 342–344).

In sum, Hoppe rearranges and reinforces the Rothbardian scheme:

1. He begins from a praxeological description of action under conditions of scarcity.

2. From this, he derives the need for rules assigning exclusive control over bodies and resources.

3. He identifies self-ownership and original appropriation as the only rules compatible with the very practice of rational argumentation.

The resulting theory aims to be at once a theory of justice and an extension of praxeology: property rights are not contingent conventions, but conditions of possibility for a social order in which conflict is resolved argumentatively rather than violently. The CAA will take up precisely this ambition—to conceive of rights as conditions of possibility for order—while shifting the focus away from an aprioristic catalogue of titles toward the contextual conditions under which the sympoietic nomos selects, corrects, or discards proprietary institutions.

4.3. Limits of the Apriorist Paradigm of Property in Light of the CAA and the Sympoietic Cosmos/Nomos

If the Contextual Action Axiom (CAA) holds that every action is the interaction of a Finite Agent (subject) with a Surplus Context (object/environment), then the Rothbardian–Hoppean architecture of self-ownership and original appropriation appears as ontologically ill-posed. Its flaw does not lie in any alleged lack of libertarian radicalism, but in three errors of logical structure: (i) confusing the phenomenological possession of the will with juridical property; (ii) reifying the acting subject by treating him as if he were an alienable good; and (iii) committing an illegitimate logical leap (non sequitur) from the normative status of the body to the intersubjective institution of external property. In what follows I address these three errors progressively: first, the metaphor of self-ownership; then, the illegitimate leap from body to world; and finally, the specific problem of original appropriation and the “hooking” of the material substrate. Formulated from the standpoint of the CAA and situated within the framework of the sympoietic cosmos and nomos, the diagnosis can be put as follows: from the alleged “ownership” of one over oneself it does not follow, either logically or morally, that there is a single necessary regime of private property over the world. Contemporary critical literature on self-ownership and original appropriation—both in liberal and egalitarian registers—converges, through diverse routes, on this same structural intuition.¹²

In the CAA, the starting point is not a catalogue of “natural rights,” but the minimal structure of all praxis: a finite agent always acts from within a context that exceeds him epistemically and ontologically. This context is not merely physical, but also normative–institutional: a web of rules, expectations, practices, and meanings that I designate as sympoietic nomos. The nomos is sympoietic because it does not emanate from a single will (there is no arkhós), but is co-produced by the interaction of multiple finite agents exposed to conditions of scarcity and need. The sympoietic cosmos is the extended order that emerges from this normative co-production: a web of institutions, prices, rights, and expectations that no individual has designed, yet which structures everyone’s possibilities of action. In this framework, property is neither an axiomatic datum nor a metaphysical emanation of the person, but an evolutionary social technology that the nomos has discovered in order to reduce the resistance of the surplus context and make intertemporal planning possible.

The first fracture in the apriorist paradigm appears when the notion of “self-ownership” is subjected to the conceptual discipline of the CAA. Analytically, the problem is not whether we “really own ourselves,” but which configuration of rights, duties, and liberties agents reciprocally assign to one another with respect to their bodies (Waldron, 1993, pp. 195–196). Hohfeldian analysis makes it clear that to speak of property is to invoke a specific bundle of incidents: use, exclusion, enjoyment of fruits, and, above all, transferability (alienability). From the CAA’s standpoint, the latter is crucial: what distinguishes property from other forms of relation to things is precisely its capacity to be separated from the subject and transferred to others. A property institution is, praxeologically, a device that allows agents to divest themselves of objects, exchange them, donate them, abandon them.

But the will and consciousness of the Finite Agent are ontologically intransferable: they are not pieces of the context, but the very pole from which the context is constituted as such. No agent can “sell” his willing in the same sense in which he sells a plot of land or a share of stock. Even in a supposedly “voluntary” contract of slavery, the slave’s obedience to the master’s orders still depends, moment by moment, on his decision to obey or resist. The will cannot be converted into an object of the context without destroying the subject/object distinction that makes action possible. Penner formulates this from another angle when he notes that the language of need and the protection of basic goods is insufficient to derive any determinate bundle of property rights, since it specifies neither “the extent nor the character of the need, nor what a fair minimum of property to which people would be entitled might be” (Penner, 1997, p. 204). The CAA reinforces this intuition: neither the factuality of the body nor the urgency of need transform consciousness into a thing capable of being owned.

Read in this light, the Rothbardian thesis of self-ownership appears as a powerful normative metaphor, but a conceptually misleading one. Recent critical literature converges, from different theoretical backgrounds, on this underlying diagnosis: in order to speak strictly of “property,” one must import into the sphere of the person the very same bundle of incidents that characterize property over things—exclusion, use, transfer—with the resulting perplexities. Fried makes this explicit by showing that the idea of self-ownership is built precisely on this transposition: the agent “owns” himself in the same sense in which he might have maximal private ownership in a thing, such that there would be “no significant moral difference in kind” between depriving me of my ability to play softball by taking away my knees and depriving me of my ability to play the market by taking away my money.¹³ Lippert-Rasmussen, for his part, has argued that there are no rights over one’s own body that are “fact-insensitive”: any plausible regime of bodily rights depends on contextual considerations concerning costs, burdens, and effects on third parties.¹⁴ In terms of the CAA: supposed self-ownership, once taken as full proprietary dominion, fails ontologically (it reifies the person) and normatively (it cannot be formulated as an absolute, fact-insensitive bundle without effacing the burdens it imposes on others). In CAA’s key, this amounts to saying that self-ownership, taken literally, breaks the structural asymmetry between subject and context: it turns the agent into an object among objects, thereby dissolving the very category of action as a relation between a subjective pole and a resistant world. For this reason, self-ownership can at most be sustained as a normative metaphor, not as a basic ontological category.

In light of the proposed axiom, the agent is his living body in action; he does not “have” his body as one has an external tool. The relation is one of practical identity and inalienable phenomenological possession, not of transferable property. By applying the category of property—which carries the note of alienability—to consciousness, the apriorist paradigm destroys the subject/object distinction that is fundamental for contract theory.

A second insufficiency arises when one attempts to derive aprioristically, from this factual bodily control, a specific regime of external property. Hoppe seeks to anchor self-ownership in the unavoidable use of the body in arguing (Hoppe, 1989/2010), but this strategy involves a variant of the naturalistic fallacy: from the fact that an agent uses his vocal cords, it does not follow, without normative mediation, that he holds a juridical title erga omnes.

The problem, put starkly, is that factual control over one’s own body does not itself determine any particular pattern of distribution over the external world. The structure of the problem can be stated as follows: knowing who in fact controls his own body tells us nothing, by itself, about who ought to own the external world or about the effective degree of freedom each individual enjoys. A subject may retain intact his sphere of bodily control and yet be completely surrounded by a material environment already owned by others, which would in fact condemn him to dependence. The real normative weight thus lies in the rules that assign ownership of external resources, not in the slogan that “each person owns himself.” Van der Vossen formulates this precisely: “our concept of acts of original appropriation need not do the justificatory work of a theory of property rights” (Van der Vossen, 2009, p. 367). Put differently: the justificatory work is done in the structure of the nomos that assigns the world, not in the prior affirmation of self-ownership. Part of recent egalitarian literature has reached structurally equivalent conclusions regarding the “thinness” of self-ownership as a foundation for world-ownership.¹⁵

The CAA allows these critiques to be systematized. The agent’s body is both the starting point and the limit of action, but what turns the factuality of bodily control into a juridical norm is always an elaboration of the sympoietic nomos. The scarcity of the body and of resources generates resistance and potential conflict, but the norm that resolves that conflict—a bundle of rights over the body or over things—is not “inscribed” in the atoms of the individual: it is an intersubjective construction, a technology of the nomos designed to reduce friction and make cooperation possible. For this reason, as Waldron stresses, once the justification of property is seriously formulated in terms of need, reciprocal burdens, and the suffering of the excluded, facts cease to be irrelevant: they become constitutive of the question of legitimacy (Waldron, 1993, pp. 207, 210, 214). Lippert-Rasmussen converges from another idiom: a regime of bodily rights that is “insensitive to facts” is morally implausible (Lippert-Rasmussen, 2008, pp. 86–90).

A third line of critique, fully compatible with the CAA, directly affects original appropriation—that is, the step from “I” to “this”: from control over the body to the fixing of titles over the world. Even if one were to accept self-ownership as a metaphorical device, the leap from “I control my body” to “I have full and permanent right over this piece of land” remains logically illegitimate. Becker has shown that the first occupation argument, as it is commonly formulated, justifies at most a liberty right to appropriate, but not a claim right binding on third parties (Becker, 1977/2014, p. 30). From the fact that an agent has physically occupied a resource, it does not follow that others are duty-bound, as a matter of justice, to refrain indefinitely from interfering. Physical occupation may generate a liberty for momentary use, but not a complete structure of property.

Waldron insists that the act of “mixing labor” with matter is merely a physical description of a unilateral action, not an automatic transmission of rights vis-à-vis third parties (Waldron, 1993, p. 210). The Lockean tradition, read rigorously, recognizes that the unilateral character of physical action is insufficient to ground exclusionary rights in a shared world. Sreenivasan reconstructs this point in detail: the metaphor of “mixing labor” only holds if accompanied by a Sufficiency Condition that substitutes for others’ consent; appropriation is not valid by the mere fact of the agent’s action, but only “as long as the sufficiency condition is satisfied” (Sreenivasan, 1995, p. 115). That is: property rights do not emanate from the subject toward the object by an irradiation of “personality,” but depend on maintaining certain conditions of access and opportunity for the rest of the community. The decisive question is nomological (concerning the nomos), not metaphysical.

The CAA clarifies the structure of this problem. Every act of original appropriation is an interaction between an agent and a context that already contains, in potential, other wills. The agent can fence, transform, cut off; but the transition from that unilateral transformation to the multilateral obligation of non-interference requires an institutional decision of the sympoietic nomos. Becker reinforces this idea by noting that the metaphor of “mixing labor” lacks autonomous justificatory force: it is unclear why physical alteration of the environment should generate a moral right of exclusion rather than, say, social recognition, gratitude, or some other response (Becker, 1977/2014, p. 40). Whereas genuine creation ex nihilo might—in principle—justify absolute domain (there are no prior claims on the matter), human action is always fabrication out of pre-existing materials (ex aliquo). As Sreenivasan underscores, in all fabrication “there is always a prior question concerning the maker’s entitlement to the materials from which she begins” (Sreenivasan, 1995, p. 75).¹⁶ To ignore this distinction and imagine that willing over one’s own body automatically extends to external matter is, from the CAA’s point of view, a category mistake that invalidates any purported aprioristic “deduction” of original appropriation.

At this point, the critique naturally extends to historical–entitlement theories in the Nozickian vein, which share the general structure of the problem with Rothbard/Hoppe. Sreenivasan shows that, by omitting a principle of acquisition that resolves the problem of the material substrate, such theories collapse into arbitrariness: they presuppose, without argument, “that things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them” (Sreenivasan, 1995, pp. 124, 128).¹⁷ The Rothbardian–Hoppean apriorist paradigm replicates this structure: it starts from self-ownership and occupation/labor as if these sufficed to “hook” the world onto subjects, without explaining why one person’s action legitimately cancels others’ freedom of access in a context of shared scarcity. The CAA reveals this presumption to be ontologically false: objects do not “enter” the field of action already attached to subjects, but only through institutional decisions of the nomos.

The debate over need reinforces this diagnosis. Penner and Cockburn show that although human need and scarcity are morally pressing, they do not by themselves determine a unique pattern of rights (Penner, 1997, p. 204; Cockburn, 2016, pp. 60–62). From the CAA’s standpoint, facts of need and scarcity delineate the space of the problem—the pressure that the surplus context exerts on agents—but do not ex ante fix the concrete form of the proprietary regime. Van der Vossen emphasizes that concrete acts of appropriation can only be specified “against the background of a general justification of property rights,” such that it is that normative background and its practical aims—and not mere scarcity—that determine which regimes are admissible (Van der Vossen, 2009, pp. 362–364).

Waldron and Cockburn add an institutional layer to this argument. Those institutions that appear most directly to challenge property rights—invocations of necessity as a defense to trespass, adverse possession, certain practices of forced rehousing or eviction moratoria—do not constitute an “alternative regime,” but adjustment mechanisms within an already existing property order (Cockburn, 2016, pp. 57–59, 68–72).¹⁸ They are valves through which the sympoietic nomos absorbs extreme pressures without thereby abandoning the basic structure of property. In CAA terms: need and scarcity enter the nomos as parameters for calibrating the institution of property, not as a sufficient grammar for generating a determinate regime ex nihilo.

Fried’s critique is situated on the same axis, but expressed in the language of Coasean reciprocity. Every property right, he reminds us, simultaneously delimits others’ liberties: “All property rights necessarily infringe the liberties of others, as all entail reciprocal burdens on others, and in a world of scarcity such burdens are often substantial” (Fried, 2004, pp. 73–74).¹⁹ Hence, self-ownership is compatible with a broad range of institutional arrangements regarding “who owns what”: wherever we place the entitlement, we sacrifice one party’s interests for the other’s. From the CAA’s vantage point, this means that the principle of self-ownership is normatively too thin to determine by itself a pattern of rights over the world; the real “normative magic” lies in the architecture of the nomos, not in the thesis that “I own myself.”

If this literature is integrated through the prism of the CAA and of the sympoietic cosmos/nomos, the conclusion becomes clear. Several works in political philosophy have argued that self-ownership is normatively “too thin” to fix a regime of world-ownership, “too plastic” to rule out vastly different institutional arrangements, and at the same time “too rigid” when formulated as an absolute, fact-insensitive bundle of rights over one’s body.²⁰ Waldron has shown that any theory which systematically ignores the need and suffering of the excluded remains incomplete (Waldron, 1993, pp. 207–214). Becker and Sreenivasan show that original appropriation does not logically follow from self-ownership or from the physical act of mixing labor with matter (Becker, 1977/2014, pp. 30, 40, 43; Sreenivasan, 1995, pp. 75, 115, 124, 128). Van der Vossen and Cockburn make explicit that facts of need and scarcity are compatible with alternative institutional architectures (Van der Vossen, 2009, pp. 362–367; Cockburn, 2016, pp. 60–72).

All this converges on the CAA’s central thesis: there is no direct logical bridge from the alleged “ownership” of one over oneself to a single, necessary regime of external property. The apriorist attempt fails because it begins from an ontologically mistaken premise—the reification of consciousness as an ownable object—and because it ignores the fact that property is, ultimately, a historical and functional solution devised by the sympoietic nomos to a coordination problem under scarcity. The sympoietic cosmos does not need logical acrobatics in order to support private property. It defends it rather as the social technology which, under particular historical conditions, has proved superior in minimizing the resistance of the surplus context and enabling planning by finite agents. In terms close to Van der Vossen, if the practice of property rights ceased to fulfill its “essential purpose of making people better off,” it would thereby discredit itself (Van der Vossen, 2009, p. 366); in the language of the CAA, a nomos that does not reduce the resistance of the context ceases to be functional and is displaced evolutionarily. This does not relativize private property; it strengthens it by tying it to its effective performance within a context of scarcity and constant testing, rather than resting it on an ontological fiction about the subject’s “ownership” of himself.

From this perspective, the distinction elaborated in earlier sections between a liberal and an illiberal sympoietic cosmos also comes into sharper focus—a distinction formulated in section IV in terms of orders that maximize or block trial-and-error correction under functional anarchy. Both are extended orders, but only the former succeeds in articulating a nomos that maximizes reciprocal spheres of agency under scarcity. Under the CAA, freedom does not appear as a contingent value, but as a transcendental condition for the functioning of the cosmos: an order that freezes agency, blocks the testing and correction of errors, and turns property into a rigid device of domination exposes itself, in the medium term, to being displaced by institutional arrangements that better reduce the resistance of the surplus context. The superiority of the liberal–proprietary nomos is therefore epistemic and evolutionary, not aprioristic.

Abandoning the pretension to “deduce” property from self-ownership does not entail renouncing liberalism, but freeing it from its apriorist logical fragility and from the performative contradictions that, ironically, beset those who purport to ground ethics in the bare pragmatics of discourse. The CAA and the notion of sympoietic cosmos and nomos make it possible to re-situate the defense of private property in the terrain where it truly has force: not as a metaphysical extension of the I, but as the result of an institutional discovery process through which the extended order finds, critiques, and reforms those rules that best manage finitude, need, and scarcity.

VI. THE ETHICS OF ARGUMENTATION IN LIGHT OF THE CONTEXTUAL ACTION AXIOM AND THE SYMPOIETIC COSMOS/NOMOS

In the Hoppean framework, the so-called Ethics of Argumentation is presented as an explicit attempt to provide libertarianism with a final, apodictic justification. Hoppe is not content with defending private property and the non-aggression principle as merely reasonable or useful normative hypotheses; his aim is to show that the set of libertarian norms is the only ethical system that can be argumentatively justified without contradiction, whereas every rival ethic self-destructs performatively in the very act of being defended. This ambition runs through both chapter 7 of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989) and the essay “On the Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property,” later collected in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993/2006). In what follows I will argue that this claim to apodictic foundation cannot be sustained once the transcendental conditions of the Contextual Action Axiom (CAA) and the notion of sympoiesis cosmos/nomos are introduced: the Ethics of Argumentation rests on a partial truncation of action and context that prevents its normative conclusions from being necessary. What follows will show that, once the transcendental conditions of the CAA—finitude, opacity, and resistance of context—and the distinction between sympoietic cosmos and nomos are brought into view, the Ethics of Argumentation can only be read as a partial formalization of a certain liberal nomos, not as the supreme tribunal of practical reason.

6.1. The Ethics of Argumentation: Apodictic Foundation of Libertarianism

Hoppe explicitly situates himself in the camp of moral cognitivism: he maintains that ethical judgments are truth-apt and that objectively correct norms exist, in open opposition to emotivism and non-cognitivism (Ayer, Stevenson, etc.), which reduce morality to the expression of preferences or emotions. For Hoppe, an ethics worthy of the name must answer the question “Which norms can be justified?”, and justification, in turn, is an intrinsically rational process that takes place in the context of argumentation.

The methodological starting point is the idea of the “a priori of argumentation.” Here Hoppe draws directly on Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, who had developed a “transcendental pragmatics” according to which every claim to truth or validity presupposes certain communicative norms (an ideal speech community, absence of coercion, the possibility of reciprocal criticism, etc.). Hoppe accepts this basic intuition—that to argue already implies a minimal ethics—but radically reorients it: instead of culminating in a program of deliberative democracy or an open discursive ethics, he aims to derive a strictly libertarian code of private property as the necessary content of that argumentative a priori.

To structure this move, Hoppe distinguishes between two levels: the “a priori of action” (of Misesian origin) and the “a priori of argumentation.” Just as praxeology holds that one cannot deny the concept of action without already acting (which grants the action axiom its apodictic status), Hoppe claims that one likewise cannot deny the meaning of arguingwithout already engaging in an argument. Both—action and argumentation—constitute, for him, “intertwined strands” of a priori knowledge: argumentation is a subclass of action, but epistemologically, reflection on validity and truth only becomes explicit in argumentation, which therefore acquires primacy for ethical justification (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 154–156). Hoppe understands this “a priori” in the same sense as Misesian praxeology: as propositions whose negation is impossible without presupposing them in the very act of negation. The impossibility of disputing that one is disputing is, for him, analogous to the impossibility of acting while denying that one acts.

To grasp the epistemological reach of this primacy, it is crucial to see how Hoppe shields the argumentation axiom from empirical or logical refutation. Like the action axiom, the capacity to argue is not an observable hypothesis but a transcendental precondition of knowledge. Hoppe spells out this logical impossibility of denial as follows: “One cannot deny that this is so [...] for one cannot argue the case that one cannot argue. Nor can one dispute knowing what it means to make a truth claim without implicitly claiming at least the negation of this proposition to be true” (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 341). In this way, the validity of libertarian ethics does not depend on the subjective acceptance of the interlocutors, but on the inescapable logical structure they assume upon entering discourse. According to Hoppe, any deviant ethical proposal is falsified not by empirical reality but by the reality of actually proposing it (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 400).

From here Hoppe defines argumentation as a specific form of cooperative action oriented to the search for truth and the justification of validity-claims. It is not just any verbal interaction, but an exchange in which the parties: (a) formulate propositions that can be rationally accepted or rejected; (b) recognize the interlocutor as an agent capable of judgment; and (c) commit themselves, at least provisionally, to resolving their differences by reasons and not by physical violence. Argumentation therefore implies an ideal of non-aggression for the duration of the exchange and the assumption that, in principle, participants can reach agreement on “universalizable” norms (Hoppe here rereads both the Golden Rule and the categorical imperative within his own framework).

The central thesis of the Ethics of Argumentation can be formulated thus: certain norms are necessarily presupposed in every act of arguing and, therefore, enjoy an a priori justification; any norm that contradicts them is argumentatively indefensible because it incurs a performative contradiction. On the basis of this “a priori of argumentation,” Hoppe claims to derive the core of the libertarian program. The inferential scheme he proposes can be summarized—according to its own internal logic—as follows (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 158–160):

1. Argumentation presupposes the exclusive control of each participant over his own body. In order to propose, listen, reply, or even understand an argument, each agent must be able to use his body (brain, vocal cords, hands for writing, etc.) as an “instrument” under his exclusive control in that context. To deny this control while arguing is, in fact, to presuppose it.

2. Argumentation presupposes a principle of non-aggression while the exchange lasts. If one of the participants resorts to physical violence to silence the other, the very concept of argumentation dissolves: there is no longer an exchange of reasons but an act of imposition.

3. Argumentation presupposes an objective criterion for resolving conflicts over scarce resources.²¹ Every act of argumentation is temporally located action that requires occupying space, using material resources, reserving time, etc. For the exchange to be possible without permanent conflict, there must be prior rules specifying who may use which resources, when, and how.

The first of these points translates, in Hoppean terminology, into self-ownership. If an interlocutor were to argue that “no one has an exclusive right over his own body,” he would be asserting a thesis whose content contradicts the very conditions realized by his act: he would be using his body as if it were his in order to state that it is not. This friction between what is said and what is done is what Hoppe calls a “performative contradiction”: a proposition which, though grammatically well-formed, self-destructs when enacted in the context of a given speech act (Hoppe, 1989/2010, p. 159).

The second and third steps allow the justification to be extended to original appropriation and private property in external resources. Since argumentation takes place in a world of scarcity—if goods were superabundant, conflict would be impossible and, therefore, there would be no need for norms—there must be a criterion for assigning exclusive rights over objects other than one’s own body. Hoppe maintains that only the first-occupant principle (Lockean homesteading) is compatible with the presuppositions of argumentation: anyone who today debates the justice of property titles is already, in fact, using previously appropriated resources (a room, instruments, technology, time) without asking “everyone” for their consent; if he denied the legitimacy of original appropriation, he would be forced to question the use of the very resources he employs in order to argue. That denial would be, again, performatively self-contradictory: in the act of discussing it, he would be presupposing precisely what he denies—namely, that it is licit to acquire exclusive control over previously unowned resources through acts of use and transformation (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 160–162).

The logical necessity of temporal appropriation—the principle that “first in time is first in right”—is derived from the survival condition necessary for any argument-user. If this principle were denied in favor of rights for “late-comers,” a praxeological impossibility would arise, since no one could act or survive while waiting for the consent of indeterminate future owners. Hoppe illustrates the absurdity of denying the temporal “before–after” distinction in the allocation of rights as follows:

The proof also offers a key to an understanding of the nature of the fact-value dichotomy: Ought-statements cannot be derived from is-statements. They belong to different logical realms. It is also clear, however, that one cannot even state that there are facts and values if no propositional exchanges exist, and that this practice of propositional exchanges in turn presupposes the acceptance of the private property ethic as valid (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 345).

Methodologically, Hoppe interprets his procedure as a specialized version of the “dialectically necessary” method described by Alan Gewirth, but correcting—so he claims—the error of starting from the concept of action rather than that of argumentation. In his reading, Gewirth fails to explain why the goods an agent necessarily values in acting are universalizable and claimable as rights against others; universalization, Hoppe argues, only appears with the structure of argumentation, where validity-claims are addressed, at least ideally, to any possible interlocutor (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 155–156, n. 117).

Finally, Hoppe distances his position from the classical natural-law tradition without entirely breaking with it. He acknowledges that his ethics shares with the iusnaturalists the conviction that universal moral norms exist, but insists that his point of departure—the concept of argumentation, and not “human nature” in the broad sense—allows him to avoid the conceptual indeterminacies and ambiguities about the role of reason that, in his view, affect much of that tradition. The result is intended to be an apodictic foundation of libertarianism: an ethics of self-ownership, original appropriation, and non-aggression that would not only be compatible with Misesian praxeology, but could not, moreover, be denied without destroying the conditions of possibility of any rational discussion about questions of justice (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 156–159; 1993/2006, pp. 344–345). From the standpoint of the CAA, the issue is no longer whether this foundation is logically coherent on its own terms—it largely is—but whether the ontological premises that support it adequately capture the contextual structure of action and social order.

6.2. The Ethics of Agumentation in Light of the CAA and the Sympoietic Cosmos: Limits and Blind spots

From the CAA and the sympoietic cosmos/nomos taxonomy, the critique can be articulated on four levels: (i) the unwarranted shift from an intersubjective ethics of argumentation to a monological homesteading scenario; (ii) the confusion between discursive inconsistency and political obligation; (iii) the constructivist drift that ignores the evolutionary genesis of norms; and (iv) the structural indeterminacy of original appropriation in contexts of shared scarcity.

Hoppean Ethics of Argumentation purports to offer the normative culmination of the apriorist paradigm: from the performative conditions of all argumentation one would derive, with apodictic necessity, self-ownership, original appropriation, and a regime of strict private property as the only legal order compatible with the very act of discussing. Hoppe does not merely claim that the non-aggression principle and the ethics of private property are reasonable normative hypotheses; he explicitly maintains that “the ethics of private property” is the only one that can be defended without contradiction in the course of argumentation, whereas every rival ethic self-destructs performatively. In his interpretation, developed mainly in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989/2010, chap. 7) and in “On the Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property” (1993/2006), the very practice of arguing about justice already presupposes the truth of libertarian principles: anyone who argues is thereby taken to have recognized in fact everyone’s self-ownership, the legitimacy of original appropriation, and the invalidity of any redistributive scheme that contradicts them.

This interpretation has been systematized by N. Stephan Kinsella, who insists that the force of Hoppe’s reasoning does not lie in persuading others of a new morality, but in making explicit what is already assumed when one engages in an exchange of reasons: “anyone who participates in an argument implicitly presupposes the self-ownership right of the other participants in the argument, for otherwise the other could not freely consider and accept or reject the argument proposed” (Kinsella, 1996, p. 315). Hence Kinsella concludes that “anyone who denies that rights exist contradicts himself since, by his very engaging in the cooperative and conflict-free activity of argumentation, he necessarily recognizes the right of his listener to be free to listen, think, and decide” (Kinsella, 1996, p. 315).²²

From the vantage point of the Contextual Action Axiom (CAA) and of the distinction between sympoietic cosmos and nomos—in their liberal and illiberal variants—this claim must be hierarchically reordered. The CAA holds that every human action is the interaction of a finite agent with a context that exceeds her, epistemically opaque and ontologically resistant. From this it follows, as shown in previous sections, that no arkhós can encompass or control the extended social order, which emerges as a sympoietic cosmos: a grown, not designed, order. The sympoietic nomos denotes the normative stratum of that cosmos: the systems of rules, institutions, and legal practices that channel action and make coordination under ignorance more or less possible. Within this backbone framework, Ethics of Argumentation can be reconstructed as a partial description of certain requirements of internal coherence characteristic of a liberal sympoietic nomos, but no longer as the unique apodictic foundation of every possible legal order.

The first weak point of the Hoppean project surfaces precisely where it claims to rest on discourse ethics. Put differently, Hoppe takes a structure that requires a real and ideal community of interlocutors—the communication community—and translates it into a solitary narrative of an individual who, in isolation, relates to nature and from there “radiates” rights outward. He borrows from Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas the basic intuition of transcendental pragmatics: to argue is not merely to emit sounds, but to participate in a cooperative practice that presupposes minimal communicative norms (mutual recognition, absence of coercion, openness to criticism, etc.). But instead of embracing the intersubjective implications of that intuition, he reorients it toward a solitary figure: the homesteader in a hypothetical “state of nature” who, by mixing his labor with the soil, “generates” valid property titles prior to and independently of any communication community.

This operation—which Hoppe takes to be a straightforward unfolding of the logical conditions of argumentation, even when he insists that “one cannot argue the case that one cannot argue” and that every propositional practice already presupposes the ethics of private property (Hoppe, 1993/2006, pp. 341, 345)—in effect turns an intersubjective communicative structure into a monological device for generating rights.

Habermas formulates the principle of universalization (U) precisely to block this monological drift. The validity of a norm, he argues, does not depend on an individual’s inability to contradict it with himself in the abstract, but on whether all those affected by its consequences can rationally accept them: “A norm is valid only if the consequences and side effects that its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of the interests of each individual can be accepted by all concerned” (Habermas, 1983/1990, p. 65). Applied to original appropriation, this means that it is not enough to show that the homesteader cannot performatively deny a certain control over the goods he uses while arguing; it is also necessary that those excluded from those goods—the non-owners—can, at least in principle, assent to the consequences of their exclusion. In a finite world, the norm “whoever gets there first acquires an absolute right over the material substrate” can hardly pass this universalization test.

Apel goes further in diagnosing here the fallacy of “methodological solipsism.” Drawing on Wittgenstein’s argument against private language, he maintains that no isolated person can “follow a rule” in the full sense of the term, much less institute valid rights outside the horizon of a public language-game. The ethics presupposed by logic—and, by extension, by argumentation—necessarily refers to a real and ideal communication community; only within it does it make sense to speak of “validity” rather than mere strategic efficacy. In his words: “the ethics of argumentation, which makes logic and science a duty, is only automatically presupposed if we desire logical argumentation at all” (Apel, 1973/1980, p. 261).²³

It follows that property claims generated by a subject who interacts only with nature, without reference to those who also depend on the same substrate in order to survive and to continue arguing, lack the “intersubjective validity” that defines a nomos. As Apel emphasizes, members of the communication community are committed to considering “all the potential claims of all potential members [...] as potential ‘claims’ that can be communicated interpersonally,” such that “all human ‘needs’ are ethically relevant” (Apel, 1973/1980, p. 277).²⁴

Read through the CAA, this diagnosis is strengthened: there is no “pre-normative” moment in which a lone individual founds law through his sheer linkage with matter. Every action, including the appropriation of a resource, takes place in an already normatively loaded context—a sympoietic cosmos of inherited practices, expectations, and rules—and becomes “property” only when some communication community recognizes it as such. The subject–object relation (labor–land) does not exhaust the genesis of property; the subject–subject relation, mediated by discourse, is ineliminable. Ethics of Argumentation, however, tends to erase this second axis by moving straight from the formal conditions of speech to a complete legal code without passing through the mediation of an actually practiced nomos. In doing so, the Hoppean EA turns the a priori of argumentation into a kind of “metaphysical button” that, once pressed, would automatically produce full-fledged rights, dispensing with the concrete nomos in which those rights acquire meaning.

A second blind spot emerges when Hoppe attempts to bridge the gap between discursive inconsistency and political obligation. The core of his proof consists in showing that certain principles—self-ownership, original appropriation, private property—are “argumentatively indefensible” in their denial: whoever rejects them, he claims, falls into a performative contradiction. From this, Hoppe infers that any theory rejecting those principles is irrational and that libertarians are therefore justified in coercively defending the order that follows from them.

Here Michael Huemer’s critique of hypothetical social contracts becomes directly applicable. Huemer grants that there are arrangements it would be “unreasonable” to reject, but denies that such unreasonableness suffices to generate real obligations or rights to coerce: “The unreasonableness of rejecting an arrangement does not suffice to generate an obligation to comply with the arrangement. [...] The mere fact that an arrangement is fair or rectifies moral arbitrariness does not typically render it morally permissible to coerce people into accepting the arrangement, nor does it impose on individuals an obligation to accept the arrangement” (Huemer, 2013, pp. 44, 51).²⁵

Transferred to the Hoppean context, this means that even if we concede ad arguendum that someone who denies self-ownership incurs a performative contradiction by taking part in argumentation, it does not follow that the libertarian is thereby automatically authorized to impose by force a particular property regime in the contextual world. Performative contradiction, understood as a form of discursive “unreasonableness,” does not cancel the space for political dissent nor by itself generate positive duties of obedience. It is one thing to show that a position is rationally weak; it is quite another to justify a coercive apparatus designed to impose the pattern of rights that position rejects.

The CAA, which conceptualizes every action—including argumentative action—as situated in contexts of opacity and resistance, underscores this gap: the move from logical coherence in discourse to the legitimacy of coercive norms in the sympoietic cosmos requires additional steps that Ethics of Argumentation simply presupposes. Indeed, Huemer is skeptical toward any “grand moral theory” that purports to deduce complete political programs from a few axioms: “I do not know the correct general moral theory, and I don’t think anyone else does either. [...] Here, I shall simply announce that I will not assume any comprehensive moral theory, and I think one should be very skeptical of any attempt to arrive at sound conclusions in political philosophy by starting from such a theory” (Huemer, 2013, pp. 14–15).²⁶ The Hoppean project seems to fit precisely into the class of theories that contextualist intuitionism seeks to avoid.

A third critical axis opens when Hoppe’s aprioristic ambition is confronted with Hayek’s critique of constructivist rationalism. Hoppe interprets his procedure as an extension of Misesian praxeology: from the “a priori of action” one moves to the “a priori of argumentation,” and from there to the ethics of private property. The result, he claims, is an apodictic foundation of libertarianism, capable even of resolving the fact–value dichotomy: normative statements would not be derived from brute facts of nature, but the very existence of propositional practices would presuppose acceptance of the ethics of private property as valid (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 345).

This construction assumes, however, that reason is capable of legislating the legal order from the top down, designing a complete code from a few formal conditions of discourse. Hayek, by contrast, insists that our moral traditions “developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product [...] these moral traditions exceed the capacities of reason” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 10). The mind does not design the moral order; it is itself a product of a cultural evolution that selects rules according to their contribution to survival and cooperation, not to their logical elegance: “mind is not a guide but a product of cultural evolution” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 21).

The CAA formalizes this intuition by emphasizing the epistemic opacity and ontological resistance of context: no theory—including praxeology—can legitimately claim to encompass a priori all the relevant conditions of social coordination. Hence, by seeking apodictic certainty where only an evolutionary and contextual justification is possible, the Hoppean project falls into precisely the “fatal conceit” Hayek denounces: “The attitude which we have described as constructivist rationalism... derives from the conception that man has created all his institutions and culture by the use of reason and that he must therefore be able to change them at will to satisfy his desires... This view is not only factually false but, if acted upon, leads to the destruction of freedom and of the order of civilization itself” (Hayek, 1973/2022, pp. 53–54). The CAA does not deny the existence of formal structures of action or argumentation; what it rejects is the claim that a finished institutional code can be designed from them while ignoring the opacity and resistance of context that only evolutionary processes can adequately explore.

The critical distinction between self-ownership and ownership of external resources reinforces this line of objection. While control over one’s own body can be accepted as a condition of agency—and thus as an inescapable presupposition of all argumentation—the extension of that control to the physical world does not enjoy the same logical immediacy. Contemporary literature has highlighted that it is perfectly coherent to affirm self-ownership and ownership of artifacts while combining them with an initially egalitarian title to raw natural resources (Cunliffe, 2000, p. 5). From this angle, the unilateral original appropriation defended by Hoppe appears less as a logical conclusion from the “a priori of argumentation” than as a contingent institutional option characteristic of a liberal sympoietic nomos, contestable in light of alternatives that demand compensation for those excluded from access to a shared material world.

The implication is direct: the a priori of argumentation may support some form of personal imputation and property in artifacts, but it does not fix in advance a unique pattern of title to the natural substrate.

Classic egalitarian critiques, such as Herbert Spencer’s, illustrate this blind spot with striking clarity. In his dialogue between a colonist and a cosmopolitan, Spencer concedes that the colonist’s labor adds value to the soil and that this added value may justly be his; but he denies that his right over the substrate itself follows from that: “...all your manipulations will fail to make that soil yours, which was not yours to begin with [...]. This extra worth which your labour has imparted to it is fairly yours [...]. But admitting this, is quite a different thing from recognising your right to the land itself” (Spencer, 1851/2000, p. 178).

From the perspective of the CAA, this observation is crucial: human action always operates upon a prior context that “belongs” originally to no one, such that any appropriation necessarily involves a nomological decision about who is excluded and on what terms. Lockean homesteading, as adopted by Hoppe, tends to conflate the act of improvement—product of human agency—with the appropriation of the pre-existing substrate, which is precisely what is at issue. Given the CAA’s insistence on the ontic reality of the shared context, this conflation becomes untenable: no agent can unilaterally make “his own” that upon which other agents structurally depend in order to continue existing and acting.

Frank van Dun offers a path of conceptual clarification well suited to this contextual approach. He proposes understanding property not as mere factual control over things but as “justifiable control”: “‘property’ means justifiable control, that is, argumentatively justifiable control; therefore, property can only be determined as the result of an argument about the justifiability of a person having possession or control of one or another means of action” (van Dun, 2009, p. 20).

Property in this sense does not arise from the subject–object relation alone, but from the intersubjective process through which a communication community recognizes or refuses the legitimacy of certain claims to control. This fits Hayek’s conception of law as a system of abstract rules designed to protect legitimate expectations, rather than as the mere consecration of brute facts: property norms demarcate domains of action in order to avoid conflict and facilitate cooperation; “the insight that ‘good fences make good neighbours,’ that is, that men can use their own knowledge in the pursuit of their own ends without colliding with each other only if clear boundaries can be drawn between their respective domains of free action, is the basis on which all known civilization has grown” (Hayek, 1973/2022, p. 139).²⁷

From this perspective, the “libertarian legalism” van Dun criticizes becomes suspect: the tendency to present “the” libertarian position on any topic in the form of absolute general rules, as if the theory could behave like a legislator dictating a complete code ex ante. “In my view,” he writes, “the key figure for a libertarian theory of law is a judge, not a legislator” (van Dun, 2009, p. 32).²⁸

In CAA terms, this means that the sympoietic nomos cannot be the product of an aprioristic design, but of an ongoing process of contextual adjudication in a sympoietic cosmos of real conflicts. Ethics of Argumentation, in seeking to derive from the structure of speech a closed set of substantive norms (absolute self-ownership, unrestricted homesteading, full and irreversible private property), falls precisely into the error of legislating where only the discovery and adjustment of rules in light of experience is appropriate. The CAA instead requires the figure of the judge embedded in concrete contexts: someone who applies abstract rules, but always in the face of facts that general theory cannot fully anticipate.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl add a further layer of critique by recalling that property is not primarily a right to “things,” but to productive action. Following Ayn Rand, they maintain that “the right to property is a right to action... it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequence of producing or earning that object” (Rasmussen & Den Uyl, 1991, p. 115). From this standpoint, the legitimacy of title derives not from mere chronological contact with matter—“being first”—but from the teleological link between an agent’s creative action and the resulting material configuration.

When they discuss how original property in unowned resources is acquired (marking a tree, felling it, fencing a valley, cultivating land, etc.), they conclude that “there is no ‘ready-made metaphysical principle’ to decide which of these is appropriate” (Rasmussen & Den Uyl, 1991, p. 122) and that, therefore, the concrete specification of the rule depends on contextual agreements that resemble, in the limit, a “social contract” (Rasmussen & Den Uyl, 1991, p. 124).

Hoppe’s claim that Lockean homesteading is the only norm compatible with non-aggression thus clashes head-on with this structural indeterminacy. That indeterminacy is not an accidental defect, but the trace of the fact that acquisition norms have been discovered within a sympoietic cosmos through trial and error, rather than emanating from a single “metaphysical principle” deducible from the act of speaking.

Faced with this diversity of possible criteria for linking persons and resources, Kinsella attempts to salvage the uniqueness of the libertarian solution by asserting that “Only the first alternative, that of Lockean homesteading, establishes an objective (or, as Hoppe calls it, intersubjectively ascertainable) link between a particular person and a particular scarce resource” (Kinsella, 1996, p. 316).²⁹

From the perspective of the CAA, however, the objectivity of a rule cannot be measured by its chronological simplicity, but by its capacity to be accepted and applied in a sympoietic cosmos where agents with limited information and diverse ends must coordinate their expectations. Any rule that can be formulated in general terms, publicized, and used to adjudicate conflicts in a predictable way may aspire to such intersubjective objectivity. There is nothing in the logical structure of argumentation that forbids a nomos from adopting, for example, combinations of labor, occupancy, respect for customary uses, environmental constraints, or compensation mechanisms as criteria for legitimizing property.

The CAA thus shifts the criterion of objectivity: it is not a matter of chronological simplicity (being first), but of a rule’s capacity to be incorporated, applied, and revised within a nomos operating under radical ignorance.

This reevaluation also requires repositioning the “performative contradiction” argument. In its strongest form, Hoppe uses it to claim that denying self-ownership or private property is logically impossible: anyone who does so would be using his body and certain resources as if they were his while asserting that they are not (Hoppe, 1989/2010, pp. 159–162). This idea is forceful against theses that deny en bloc the need for any scheme of personal imputation or any kind of rule over scarce resources: indeed, anyone who argues presupposes some control over his body and some access to material means.

But once this minimum is acknowledged, extending the result to a specific legal code no longer enjoys the same apodictic status. Kinsella’s own estoppel theory—which holds that an aggressor cannot coherently object to the use of defensive force because, in initiating aggression, he has manifested that he considers the use of force legitimate (Kinsella, 1996, p. 318)—can be integrated without difficulty into an CAA framework as a technique for blocking illiberal objections. What does not follow is that the only coherent way to exercise such defensive force is to preserve intact a particular model of homesteading or a specific historical configuration of rights.

At this point, the distinction between liberal and illiberal sympoietic nomos becomes decisive. Ethics of Argumentation claims to have shown that any order denying the triad self-ownership–original appropriation–strict private property is “performatively impossible.” Yet the history of the sympoietic cosmos displays the existence of relatively stable illiberal orders—from slave empires to real-world socialisms—that, while deficient from a liberal perspective, are not impossible in the logical sense.

The CAA allows for a more precise judgment: such illiberal nomos are compatible with contextual action only at the cost of generating growing tensions with the transcendental conditions of opacity and resistance, which translate into inefficiency, repression, stagnation, and in many cases collapse. They are not “logical absurdities,” but evolutionarily inferior configurations compared to liberal sympoietic nomos which—by approximating self-ownership, protecting private initiative, and facilitating contractual experimentation—prove more adaptive in the long run.

This contextual reading also forces confrontation with the real history of property, which Hoppe tends to ignore when speaking of ideal chains of peaceful appropriations. The CAA, committed to the ontic reality of context, cannot treat as neutral datum a proprietary status quo largely forged through conquest and dispossession. Spencer summarizes this with stark bluntness: “violence, fraud, the prerogative of force, claims of superior cunning: these are the sources to which these titles can be traced” (Spencer, 1851/2000, p. 176).

An ethics that refuses to recognize this “original sin” easily slides into legitimating historical privilege under the mask of argumentative coherence. By contrast, a liberal sympoietic nomos consistent with the CAA must include mechanisms of rectification, compensation, or reform that take seriously the unjust origin of many current positions, especially where appropriation has rested not on wealth creation but on expropriation.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl offer a powerful conceptual tool here by contrasting an “exploitation model” with a “creationist model” of wealth. According to the latter, “there is no such thing as pre-existing (that is, pretransformed) wealth. Property, wealth, and any object qua object are not beings in rerum natura... Rather, they are essentially related to the mental and physical efforts of individual human beings” (Rasmussen & Den Uyl, 1991, p. 117).

Defending titles built on dispossession—or on mere occupation without productive transformation—betrays this creationist foundation and puts the nomos at odds with its own liberal logic, which demands that holdings be legitimized by their creative contribution, not by naked force or historical inertia. Ethics of Argumentation, by focusing almost exclusively on first occupation of the substrate, runs the risk of sliding, paradoxically, into a “fixed pie” imaginary that the CAA and the sympoietic cosmos continually refute through innovation and growth.

Finally, Hayek’s conception of the epistemic dimension of property and the market reinforces the repositioning of Ethics of Argumentation within the CAA system. Plural property is not simply a division of control over things, but the mechanism that allows us to employ dispersed knowledge that no one possesses in its entirety. The conflict between those who defend the market order and those who demand a deliberate arrangement of human interaction is based, according to Hayek, on “a factual error [...] concerning how knowledge of these resources is generated and used” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 7).

To validate property solely on the basis of argumentative coherence is to ignore its function as an information operator within a sympoietic cosmos that no single agent can fully know. At the same time, Hayek stresses that property rules are neither immutable nor dropped ready-made from the sky: “where the boundary is to be drawn [...] will usually not be a decision that can be made arbitrarily [...]. If new problems arise as a result of changes in circumstances [...] the task will be to find a solution which will serve the same general purpose as the other rules which we take for granted” (Hayek, 1973/2022, pp. 140–141).

This implies that even within a liberal sympoietic nomos, the concrete contours of property remain open to revision in light of new contextual conditions—something incompatible with the aprioristic rigidity of the Hoppean model.

In sum, the CAA and the sympoietic cosmos/nomos taxonomy do not destroy Ethics of Argumentation, but they do reorder it hierarchically. Self-ownership, original appropriation, and private property cease to appear as inescapable deductions from the structure of the act of arguing and instead become historically concrete expressions of the more fundamental need to coordinate the actions of finite agents in opaque and resistant contexts.

Ethics of Argumentation retains value as a formalization of certain coherence requirements that tend to characterize liberal sympoietic nomos: it reinforces the idea that without some recognition of personal imputation, without rules for scarce resources, and without a minimal non-aggression baseline, the very practice of arguing collapses. But its claim to being a final foundation evaporates: it appears instead as a local theory of liberal order, absorbed into a broader framework that explains both the emergence of liberal orders and the ultimately unfavorable fate of their illiberal rivals within the anarchy of the grown order.

Within this repositioning, the function of moral philosophy approaches the one Habermas attributes to discourse ethics: not that of legislating substantive contents from the philosopher’s armchair, but that of safeguarding procedures for testing and revising norms in the public forum (Habermas, 1983/1990, p. 122). A liberal sympoietic nomos is then justified not because its code can be deduced a priori from the conditions of speech, but because, within the sympoietic cosmos, it has proven to be the configuration that best exploits dispersed information, reduces violence, and allows the coexistence of incompatible life-projects under a common framework of abstract rules.

To accept this result is, at bottom, to embrace the Hayekian lesson that closes the circle: “our moral traditions [...] constitute a separate tradition [...] of astonishing importance in enabling us to adapt to problems and circumstances far exceeding our rational capacities” (Hayek, 1988/1989, p. 10). The CAA translates that intuition into a formal principle; the sympoietic cosmos describes the playing field on which it unfolds; the liberal sympoietic nomos embodies, until further notice, the best evolutionary response we have found. Hoppean Ethics of Argumentation may continue to occupy a relevant place within that web, but only insofar as it renounces its claim to be the supreme tribunal of reason and accepts its status as a piece—important, yet partial and revisable—of an order that no philosopher has designed and that, according to the CAA, can only be understood as the always provisional result of the interaction of finite agents in a sympoietic cosmos.

VII. CONCLUSION

The path traced throughout this inquiry allows us to affirm that the traditional dichotomy between designed order and chaos is false; the real ontological alternative lies between a sympoietic cosmos recognized as such and the untenable fictions of centralized control. When the liberal traditions are subjected to the scrutiny of the Contextual Action Axiom (CAA), it becomes evident that the finitude of the agent and the opacity of the context are not technical obstacles to be overcome, but the transcendental conditions that define the horizon of all political and legal praxis.

In this sense, Hayekian minarchism collapses not for lack of good intentions, but due to structural incoherence: attempting to safeguard a spontaneous order by means of a monopolistic arkhós is to introduce an agent of taxis that, by definition, lacks the epistemic capacity to manage the ontological resistance of the environment without deforming it. Yet with equal force, the CAA dissolves the claims to finality of the Rothbardian–Hoppean apriorist paradigm. The aspiration to deduce a complete and immutable legal code from the formal conditions of speech or from axioms of metaphysical self-ownership ultimately reveals itself as a sophisticated form of constructivism. To ignore the mediation of the evolving nomos and the need for contextual validation of norms is to reinstate the figure of the Universal Legislator, now dressed in the garb of the libertarian philosopher.

Overcoming these dead ends does not lead to nihilism, but to a robust affirmation of the liberal sympoietic cosmos. This is not a teleological utopia, but the only institutional configuration that does not go to war with the reality of our constitutive ignorance. If Ethics of Argumentation and property rights retain their relevance, it is not as a priori dogmas emanating from the void, but as normative technologies that have shown, in the long process of trial and error characteristic of the extended order, their superior capacity to coordinate divergent plans and reduce the friction of shared existence.

Ultimately, to embrace functional anarchy as an ontological condition and the liberal nomos as an evolutionary response entails a renunciation of fatal arrogance in all its forms, both that of the state bureaucrat and that of the moral deductivist. Social order is neither decreed nor deduced; it is discovered and cultivated in the interaction of agents who, renouncing omniscience, accept freedom not as a gift from authority, but as the overriding functional necessity of a world that always exceeds us.

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1. This necessity to re-situate the Misesian agent finds a profound theoretical resonance in the epistemological research program of Gabriel Zanotti (2009). By undertaking a parallel effort to ground praxeology in a realist philosophical anthropology (Thomistic-phenomenological), Zanotti assumes intersubjectivity and fallibility as starting conditions, effectively overcoming the solipsistic isolation of both the neoclassical model and extreme apriorism. This approach converges significantly with the present work; just as Zanotti resorts to phenomenology to validate the universality of economic theory beyond pure logic, the Contextual Action Axiom radicalizes this very finitude to derive ontological-political consequences. Both perspectives agree that the agent is structurally situated within a reality that resists pure abstraction, thereby establishing a shared foundation for understanding the limits of centralized design.

2. This critique of the alliance between coercive power and the pretension of true knowledge aligns closely with the insights of Zanotti’s later work (2008). Influenced by Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism, Zanotti denounces the formation of a ‘sacred scientific empire’ wherein the State imposes demarcation criteria (health, education, science) by force. This diagnostic parallels the argument presented herein regarding the invalidity of the arkhós: while Zanotti grounds the limit of power in an imperative derived from Popperian fallibility—the duty not to impose conjectures upon individual conscience—this essay extends that logic to the ontological level. Both lines of reasoning converge on the conclusion that the opacity of the context and the finitude of the agent render the centralized imposition of ‘truth’ not only unethical but structurally incompatible with the reality of the social order.

3. This conception is grounded in the subjectivist distinction between physical goods and projected satisfaction, where the agent’s fallibility is an essential component of utility theory in a world of disequilibrium. In this regard, O’Driscoll and Rizzo point out that the relationship between market commodities and the satisfaction of needs is not automatic, but depends on a perception of causality that may be mistaken, thus vindicating the theoretical relevance of the “imaginary goods” identified by Menger within the structure of human action in real time (O’Driscoll & Rizzo, 1985/1996, p. 47). This perspective is congruent with Ludwig Lachmann’s morphological approach, according to which the generic concept of capital has no measurable counterpart among material objects, but is a reflection of the “entrepreneurial appraisal” of those objects. Lachmann emphasizes that physical goods—such as port facilities or machinery—do not constitute capital in virtue of their intrinsic physical properties, but by virtue of their “economic functions,” a status they acquire only when the consensus of entrepreneurial minds regards them as capable of generating a future income stream (Lachmann, 1956/1978, p. xv).

4. Menger notes that cognitive finitude (error and ignorance) is precisely what prevents the formulation of “strict laws” in empirical realism. Even if self-interest were the only motive, the agent’s fallibility would exclude “strict regularity” in real phenomena, forcing theory to adopt an exact, rather than merely empirical, orientation (Menger, 1883/1934, p. 74).

5. I use arkhós here to refer not only to the State as a concrete organization, but to any claim to occupy an epistemic and coercive position superior to that of the rest of the agents, capable of imposing a central design upon the sympoietic cosmos.

6. The term Sympoietic Cosmos is a neologism formed from kósmos (κόσμος, “order,” “world”) and sympoiesis / sympoiētikós (συμ-ποίησησις / συμποιητικός, from σύν, “with, together with,” and ποιεῖν, “to make,” “to produce”). It literally designates a “co-produced order”: an extended social order that emerges from the interaction of multiple finite agents without a central arkhós. The use of this terminology is intended to highlight both its Greek root and its technical character, in contrast with taxis (designed order) and distinct from autopoiesis (αὐτός + ποίησις, self-production).

7. Mises uses this metaphor to illustrate the impossibility of rational resource allocation in a socialist economy. He argues that, without private ownership of the means of production and without market prices, there is no mechanism of economic calculation to serve as a compass for decision-making. Consequently, any attempt to coordinate complex and time-consuming production processes would lack a rational foundation, becoming mere “steps in the dark” (Mises, 1922/1981, p. 101). The original English reads: “Without it [economic calculation], all production by lengthy and roundabout processes would be so many steps in the dark.”

8. Friedman offers a crucial nuance regarding the stability of this order without central command. The anarchic cosmosdoes not necessarily depend on a utopian shared morality, but on what game theory refers to as a Nash equilibrium derived from commitment strategies. In a mature system of private protection agencies, respect for rights and arbitral decisions is maintained by the “discipline of constant dealings.” Friedman argues that agencies have incentives to agree ex ante on common norms and tribunals in order to avoid costly conflicts, generating a stable equilibrium in which violence is the uneconomic exception rather than the rule: “War is very expensive and [the agencies] are profit-making corporations, more interested in saving money than in saving face” (Friedman, 1973/2014, p. 112).

9. Stringham warns that this constructivist suppression is not only inefficient, but often crowds out superior private solutions that would emerge spontaneously in the sympoietic cosmos. By imposing a regulatory taxis, the State eliminates the incentives for the discovery of governance: “The government’s best option is to crowd out the rules that private governance providers would have supplied; or worse, the government may impose rules far beyond the optimum and thereby drag markets down” (Stringham, 2015, p. 199).

10. The tension between aprioristic certainty and the openness to complexity was presciently addressed by Zanotti (1991) in his attempt to build a methodological bridge between Mises and Lakatos via Machlup. There, Zanotti proposed flexibilizing the ‘protective belt’ of praxeology through testable auxiliary hypotheses, anticipating the need to integrate complexity and Hayekian ‘pattern prediction’ into the core of Austrian theory. This methodological opening serves as a crucial precedent for the present work, which radicalizes that insight toward an ontology of situated action (CAA). By acknowledging that theoretical constructs must account for the ontological resistance of the context, both approaches move away from rigid constructivism to embrace the opacity inherent in complex systems as a defining feature of the social order.

11. This dichotomy finds a technical correlate in the distinction Ostrom draws between formal laws and “working rules.” Whereas state law may exist only on paper (de jure), the effective social order is governed by working rules, defined as those “actually used, monitored, and enforced when individuals make decisions” (Ostrom, 1990/2015, p. 51). For Ostrom, one should not speak of a rule unless most of the people whose strategies it affects “know of its existence and expect that others will monitor behavior and sanction noncompliance” (Ostrom, 1990/2015, p. 51). Thus, “ontological anarchy” is not anomie, but the prevalence of working rules that are common knowledge and endogenously enforced, regardless of their status in formal legislation.

12. For a sample of this critical discussion on self-ownership, need, and original appropriation, see, among others, Fried (2004), Lippert-Rasmussen (2008), Waldron (1993), Penner (1997), Van der Vossen (2009), Cockburn (2016), Becker (1977/2014), and Sreenivasan (1995).

13. Original quotation: “The core idea is that agents own themselves in just the same way that they can have maximal private ownership in a thing. [...] No significant moral difference in kind exists between eliminating my ability to play softball by taking my knees away and eliminating my ability to play the market by taking my money away” (Fried, 2004, p. 71).

14. Original quotation: “Against Self-Ownership: “There Are No Fact-Insensitive Ownership Rights over One’s Body” (Lippert-Rasmussen, 2008, p. 86). See also: “I want to rebut the libertarian self-ownership thesis, understood as a freestanding, fact-insensitive moral principle” (p. 87).

15. An influential development of this argument from an egalitarian perspective can be found in Cohen (1995), who emphasizes that the principle of self-ownership is compatible with very different configurations of “world-ownership” and, by itself, does not fix a unique pattern of external rights.

16. Sreenivasan develops this critical distinction at length: “This difference reflects the fact that making, in the technical sense, always begins from pre-existing materials. For with making, unlike with creation, there is always a prior question concerning the maker’s entitlement to the materials from which she begins” (Sreenivasan, 1995, p. 75).

17. Sreenivasan notes that this assumption enters entitlement theory “completely unargued,” citing Nozick’s claim that “things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them” (Sreenivasan, 1995, p. 124).

18. In Southwark L.B.C. v. Williams, a paradigmatic case on the occupation of vacant housing, Lord Denning warned that recognizing homelessness as a defense against trespass would mean that “If homelessness were once admitted as a defence to trespass, no one’s house could be safe. Necessity would open a door no man could shut” (Southwark L.B.C. v. Williams, [1971] CA 617, 744, cited in Cockburn, 2016, p. 56). Cockburn reconstructs how this fear—that necessity might “undermine” the security of the property regime—leads to compromise solutions: the relevance of necessity is not denied outright, but channelled through limited doctrines (exceptional defenses, adverse possession rules, legal spaces for property outsiders) that mitigate extreme cases without automatically transforming the property regime (Cockburn, 2016, pp. 57–59).

19. Original quotation: “All property rights necessarily infringe the liberties of others, as all entail reciprocal burdens on others, and in a world of scarcity, such burdens are often substantial. [...] First, wherever we put the entitlement, we will sacrifice one party’s interests for the other’s” (Fried, 2004, pp. 73–74).

20. Here various analyses of self-ownership and bodily rights converge: for example, the critique of the “thinness” of self-ownership as a foundation for a pattern of world-ownership (Cohen, 1995), the reconstruction of the reciprocity of burdens in every property right (Fried, 2004), and the thesis that there are no fact-insensitive rights over one’s body (Lippert-Rasmussen, 2008).

21. Hoppe emphasizes that argumentation does not occur in an abstract void of “floating” propositions, but is a category of action that requires the use of scarce physical means. This indissolubly links the search for truth with private property. Without the recognition of this exclusive control over the physical means necessary for arguing, the activity itself would collapse. Hoppe makes the point in categorical terms: “No one could possibly propose anything, and no one could possibly become convinced of any proposition by argumentative means, if a person’s right to make exclusive use of his physical body were not already presupposed. [...] Furthermore, it would be equally impossible to sustain argumentation for any length of time and rely on the propositional force of one’s arguments if one were not allowed to appropriate in addition to one’s body other scarce means through homesteading action [...] and if such means and the rights of exclusive control regarding them were not defined in objective physical terms” (Hoppe, 1993/2006, p. 342).

22. Original quotation: “Thus, anyone who denies that rights exist contradicts himself since, by his very engaging in the cooperative and conflict-free activity of argumentation, he necessarily recognizes the right of his listener to be free to listen, think, and decide” (Kinsella, 1996, p. 315).

23. Original quotation: “In my opinion, the overcoming of methodological solipsism illustrates that the ethics presupposed by logic can also answer the question as to if and why logic and even science itself should exist [...]. The ethics of argumentation, which makes logic and science a duty, is only automatically presupposed if we desire logical argumentation at all” (Apel, 1973/1980, p. 261).

24. Original quotation: “In my opinion, the members of the communication community (and this implies all thinking beings) are also committed to considering all the potential claims of all the potential members [...] As potential ‘claims’ that can be communicated interpersonally, all human ‘needs’ are ethically relevant. They must be acknowledged if they can be justified interpersonally through arguments” (Apel, 1973/1980, p. 277).

25. Original quotation: “The unreasonableness of rejecting an arrangement does not suffice to generate an obligation to comply with the arrangement. [...] The mere fact that an arrangement is fair or rectifies moral arbitrariness does not typically render it morally permissible to coerce people into accepting the arrangement, nor does it impose on individuals an obligation to accept the arrangement” (Huemer, 2013, pp. 44, 51). Note: the combined quotations are drawn from chapter 3, sections 3.3.3 and 3.4.3.

26. Original quotation: “I do not know the correct general moral theory, and I don’t think anyone else does either. The reasons for my skepticism are difficult to communicate, but they derive from reflection on the problems of moral philosophy and on the complex, confusing, and constantly disputed literature about those problems [...]. Here, I shall simply announce that I will not assume any comprehensive moral theory, and I think one should be very skeptical of any attempt to arrive at sound conclusions in political philosophy by starting from such a theory” (Huemer, 2013, pp. 14–15).

27. This distinction resonates deeply with Hayek’s conception of law as a system of abstract rules designed to protect legitimate expectations, rather than as the mere consecration of physical facts. Hayek criticizes the positivist and constructivist view that seeks to define law and property solely as commands of will or brute physical facts. For him, the essential function of rules of just conduct—including property rules—is the delimitation of protected domains in order to avoid conflict and facilitate cooperation. As he explains in the first volume of his work: “The insight that ‘good fences make good neighbours,’ that is, that men can use their own knowledge in the pursuit of their own ends without colliding with each other only if clear boundaries can be drawn between their respective domains of free action, is the basis on which all known civilization has grown” (Hayek, 1973/2022, p. 139).

28. Original quotation: “I am a reluctant reader of articles in which ‘the’ libertarian position on, say, lying, making false accusations [...] is spelled out legalistically in terms of absolute general rules [...]. In my view, the key figure for a libertarian theory of law is a judge, not a legislator” (van Dun, 2009, p. 32).

29. Original quotation: “Only the first alternative, that of Lockean homesteading, establishes an objective (or, as Hoppe calls it, intersubjectively ascertainable) link between a particular person and a particular scarce resource” (Kinsella, 1996, p. 316).