Born in Peine, West Germany, he attended the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, and the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, studying philosophy, sociology, history, and economics. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Goethe-Universität in 1974. He was then a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 1976 to 1978. He earned his Habilitation in Foundations of Sociology and Economics from the Goethe-Universität in 1981. He taught at several German universities as well as at the Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center for Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy. In 1986, he moved from Germany to the United States, to study under Murray Rothbard. He remained a close associate until Rothbard's death in January 1995. Hoppe was then Professor of Economics at University of Nevada, Las Vegas until retirement in 2008.

According to a blog posting by Hoppe, he gave a series of speeches at conferences that were organized by Lew Rockwell, Burt Blumert, and Murray Rothbard for the purpose of creating what came to be known as paleo-libertarianism.

Hoppe is a Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and, until December, 2004, the editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. The author of several widely-discussed books and articles, he has put forth an "argumentation ethics" defense of libertarian rights, based in part on the discourse ethics theories of German philosophers Jürgen Habermas (Hoppe's PhD advisor) and Karl-Otto Apel. In 2005, he founded the Property and Freedom Society.

Following in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, Hoppe has analyzed the behavior of government using the tools of Austrian-economic theory. Defining a government as "a territorial monopolist of jurisdiction and taxation" and assuming no more than self-interest on the part of government officials, he predicts that these government officials will use their monopoly privileges to maximize their own wealth and power. Hoppe argues that there is a high degree of correlation between these theoretical predictions and historical data.

In The God That Failed, Hoppe compares dynastical monarchies with democratic republics. In his view, a dynastical monarch (king) is like the "owner" of a country, because it is passed on from generation to generation, whereas an elected president is like a "temporary caretaker" or "renter". Both the king and the president have an incentive to exploit the current use of the country for their own benefit. However, the king also has a counterbalancing interest in maintaining the long-term capital value of the nation, just as the owner of a house has an interest in maintaining its capital value (unlike a renter). Being temporary, democratically elected officials have every incentive to plunder the wealth of productive citizens as fast as possible.

According to Rothbard's theory[1], which Hoppe makes his own, a monopoly has nothing to do with market share, but is an institutional privilege barring "free entry" into the business of producing a particular good or service. As a consequence, such monopolies cannot arise on the free market. Rather, they must always be the result of government policy. Coercive monopolies are bad from the standpoint of consumers because the price will tend to be higher and the quality will be lower than they would be in markets completely free from coordinated coercion. Like Rothbard, Hoppe has conjectured that, in a free market for governmental services, competing private insurance and defense agencies would provide a better quality of protection and dispute resolution than that which currently exists under monopolistic government control.

Austrian theory includes the concept of time preference, or the degree to which a person prefers current consumption over future consumption. During a lecture in his Money & Banking course, Hoppe hypothesized that, because they tend not to have children, children, old people and homosexuals tend to focus less on saving for the future. One of Hoppe's students characterized this statement as derogatory and a matter of opinion rather than fact. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In his lectures, Mr. Hoppe said that certain groups of people -- including small children, very old people, and homosexuals -- tend to prefer present-day consumption to long-term investment. Because homosexuals generally do not have children, Mr. Hoppe said, they feel less need to look toward the future. (In a recent talk at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which Mr. Hoppe says was similar to his classroom lecture, he declared, "Homosexuals have higher time preferences, because life ends with them.")

[The student], Mr. Knight found that argument unwarranted and obnoxious, and he promptly filed a complaint with the university. In a telephone interview on Saturday, Mr. Knight said: "I was just shocked and appalled. I said to myself, Where the hell is he getting this information from? I was completely surprised, and that's why I went to the university about this."

Hoppe's comments triggered an academic investigation which resulted in a "nondisciplinary" letter being issued February 9, 2005 instructing him to "cease mischaracterizing opinion as objective fact." The ACLU agreed to represent Hoppe, and he was defended in an editorial in the The Rebel Yell, the UNLV student newspaper." Carol Harter, president of UNLV, in a February 18, 2005 letter said that "UNLV, in accordance with policy adopted by the Board of Regents, understands that the freedom afforded to Professor Hoppe and to all members of the academic community carries a significant corresponding academic responsibility. In the balance between freedoms and responsibilities, and where there may be ambiguity between the two, academic freedom must, in the end, be foremost." The "nondisciplinary" letter was removed from his personnel file. Hoppe's request for a one-year paid leave (sabbatical) and a letter of apology were denied.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has criticized remarks Hoppe made in his essay, Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State.

In June 2005, Hoppe gave an interview in the German newspaper Junge Freiheit, in which he characterized monarchy as a lesser evil than democracy, calling the latter mob rule and saying, "Liberty instead of democracy!" In the interview Hoppe also condemned the French revolution as belonging in "the same category of vile revolutions as well as the Bolshevik revolution and the Nazi revolution," because the French revolution led to "Regicide, Egalitarianism, democracy, socialism, hatred of all religion, terror measures, mass plundering, rape and murder, military draft and the total, ideologically motivated War." 24.06.05 / "Freiheit statt Demokratie" / Der libertäre Vordenker und bekennende "Antidemokrat" Hans-Hermann Hoppe über seine provokanten Thesen

Hans-Hermann Hoppe's views about immigration , which do not cast libertarianism as requiring open borders, have been controversial within the wider libertarian movement. Walter Block offered arguments against Hoppe's immigration position in a 1999 article, "A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration."

Hoppe has countered his opponents by commenting on their opinions in footnote 23 to Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem :

A second motive for the open border enthusiasm among contemporary left-libertarians is their egalitarianism. They were initially drawn to libertarianism as juveniles because of its "antiauthoritarianism" (trust no authority) and seeming "tolerance," in particular toward "alternative" ... non-bourgeois ... lifestyles. As adults, they have been arrested in this phase of mental development. They express special "sensitivity" in every manner of discrimination and are not inhibited in using the power of the central state to impose non-discrimination or "civil rights" statutes on society. Consequently, by prohibiting other property owners from discrimination as they see fit, they are allowed to live at others' expense. They can indulge in their "alternative" lifestyle without having to pay the "normal" price for such conduct, i.e., discrimination and exclusion. To legitimize this course of action, they insist that one lifestyle is as good and acceptable as another. This leads first to multiculturalism, then to cultural relativism, and finally to "open borders."

Books

• Handeln und Erkennen (Bern 1976)
• Kritik der kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung (Westdeutscher Verlag 1983) ISBN 3-531-11624-X.
• Eigentum, Anarchie und Staat (Westdeutscher Verlag 1987)
• Praxeology and Economic Science (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1988) (no ISBN)
• A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Kluwer Academic Publishers 1989) ISBN 0-89838-279-3. Full Text in PDF format
• Economic Science and the Austrian Method (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1995) ISBN 0-945466-20-X. Full Text in PDF format
• The God That Failed (Transaction Publishers, 2001) Paperback (in English) ISBN 0-7658-0868-4.
• The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (2nd edition, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006) ISBN 0-945466-40-4
• Editor: The Myth of National Defense. Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production. Ludwig von Mises Institute. October 2003. ISBN 0-945466-37-4. Full Text in PDF format With writings by L.M. Bassani, C. Lottieri, M.N. Rothbard, E. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, B. Lemennicier, G. Radnitsky, J.R. Stromberg, L.J. Sechrest, J.R. Hummel, W. Block, and J.G. Hulsmann.
• Translator: Capital and Production by Richard Ritter von Strigl ISBN 0-945466-31-5
• Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Ludwig von Mises Institute. July 2009. ISBN 978-1-933550-52-7.

Interviews

• A 2004 interview with Hoppe
• A 2003 radio interview with Hoppe
• A 1998 interview with Hoppe

Articles

• Full text of Hoppe's 1998 introduction to The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard. (also in PDF format).
• "My Battle With the Thought Police" Hoppe's own account on what happened
• "The Errors of Hans-Hermann Hoppe — Strategies of Liberation?" Dr Oliver Marc Hartwich, October 2005, Open Republic Institute
• In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on D. McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
• Some Brief Comments on Hoppe's Justification of the Private Property Ethic by David Friedman.
• LewRockwell.com: Hoppe's archives at LewRockwell.com
• “Small is Beautiful and Efficient: The Case for Secession”. Telos 107 (Spring 1996). New York: Telos Press.