Translated from German with the help of AI. The original is the authoritative version.
Liberalism was at its most successful precisely where, following an old saying, it taught people to fish. The latest ideas in the liberal camp, however, forget this historical lesson and hand out fish. Instead of offering rules for joint decision-making, decisionism is in vogue.
Since antiquity, philosophy has tried to ground the moral principles of a successful life, right action, and good government substantively, in the matter itself. The state is legitimate insofar as it realises these standards. This method of justification was long dominant, until it lost importance with the Enlightenment. In the shadow of the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War, awareness of the contingency of one’s own standards sharpened. That led to a rethinking in political theory: the question of right or wrong was set aside for pragmatic reasons and replaced by the insight that peaceful coexistence requires only the agreement that every person may, unmolested by the views of others, believe what she holds to be right. The claim of objective rightness yielded to the freedom of subjective convictions. To avoid sliding into relativism, liberalism grounded state legitimacy procedurally, starting from so-called contract theories. The novelty of this proceduralism was that generally binding and reasonable solutions need no metaphysical grounding but can emerge from the procedure itself.
The search for moral truths was given up in favour of a procedural practice capable of consent. In the face of a reasonable pluralism it was easier to ground an acceptable procedure than an uncontested standard of value. The most influential liberal principles still orient themselves by this formula. Procedural theories offer help in self-help and appeal to the individual. They teach those hungry for answers how to fish; this yields an inherently liberal project and made liberalism historically attractive.
Precisely where liberalism unfolds its greatest strength, in the restraint not to prescribe answers, a new vulnerability opens up. In its own ranks voices multiply that blame proceduralism for the current loss of attractiveness. In this opposition Sven Gerst locates Dark Liberalism. Gerst characterises Dark Liberalism primarily as a break in style. It is, he says, a confrontational variant of liberalism close to populism, one that rejects theoretical abstraction and substantive openness: „Das Politische ist nicht mehr lediglich der neutrale Rahmen für den Ausgleich pluraler Interessen, sondern ein Kampf um hegemoniale Vorherrschaft”.
In paradigmatic sharpness these tendencies can be observed in Hans-Hermann Hoppe in Democracy: The God That Failed. Hoppe’s critique aims not only at single procedural institutions, but at the foundation of liberal legitimacy. Democracy appears to him not as a procedure for the reasonable handling of modern contingency, but as systematic mis-order. Hoppe’s authoritarian elements — the rejection of positive law, the rejection of democracy, and the preference for personalised rule — are the consistent results of his departure from proceduralism.
Natural law in Hoppe is understood as a morally prior order, because it springs from the „Fakten und Gesetze[n] der Natur und der menschlichen Biologie” (p. 58). Alongside private property, natural law contains a „natürliche Hierarchie” that follows from the authority of „größeren erwirtschafteten Vermögens, höheren Mutes, überlegener Weisheit oder einer Kombination davon” (p. 70). Everything supposedly unnatural is rejected on this basis, including democracy and public law. Both appear to Hoppe primarily morally objectionable because they undermine the authority of natural law and would foster moral relativism. Together with his rejection of classical contract theory, which in the history of ideas appeared as the logical consequence of natural law, this marks the turn away from procedural thinking and a return to substantialism. With that, Hoppe takes leave of a liberal procedural order and clings stubbornly to the relic of a liberal metaphysics.
From this follows a selective, negatively defined concept of freedom that resembles the ideas of popular representatives of Dark Liberalism. Characteristic is the focus on property rights and on the economic freedom of a progress-oriented private entrepreneurship. With this is bound the demand to overcome the state and to establish a decentralised, anarchic private society in which precisely these actors hold political power.
From the supposed natural hierarchy in society and family, Hoppe also derives a socially conservative outlook. This sees in plural ways of life an attack on the naturalness of the family, and elevates the social belonging given at birth back to the structural principle of society. This turn away from individualism remains free of any considerations of justice or freedom. And yet hardly any social context contradicts the liberal principle of individual choice more strongly than the one given at birth. The combination of economic libertarianism and cultural conservatism bundles itself ideologically in paleo-libertarianism.
Hoppe grounds his vision of a political order not in its functional superiority, but in its claim to be the ultimate norm. Any restriction to pragmatic arguments would undermine the quasi-religious claim of his ideals. From this substantialism grows a conception of politics that stands against a reasonable pluralism: the political is no longer a process of negotiation among conflicting but equally legitimate goals. Instead, Hoppe proclaims a concept of the good life and meets diverging positions and democratic rights with contempt.
The absoluteness of his concept of freedom turns into an authoritarian restriction of the very freedom he pretends to defend. What begins as the uncompromising securing of individual self-responsibility culminates in the authoritarianism of personal rule. While liberal theory locates the legitimacy of political orders in that freedom which emerges from the reasonable pluralism of open procedures, Hoppe puts an extra-procedural measure of freedom in its place. Political order is bound instrumentally to reach a fixed goal: progress through economic growth and negative freedom. Dissent is pushed into pre-political spheres; the source of legitimacy shifts decisively from procedure to person. Whoever knows the goal need not deliberate; he need only realise it through the power of efficient management.
This result-oriented decisionism devalues the mediation of interests, compromises, and pluralism. As legitimacy measures itself by the result, the way is paved for the authoritarian logic of the Schmittian decider who raises himself above right and law. In Hoppe this shows up in the „natürliche Autorität” of a heroic-meritocratic elite („nobilitas naturalis”, p. 163). The figure embodies a cult of personality in which political order arises from the charisma of individuals. The elite is no longer subject to the law, but its origin.
The attractiveness of charismatic rule shows itself as a characteristic of Dark Liberalism, articulated also in Curtis Yarvin’s call for a CEO monarch as political leadership figure. In this political market logic, the citizen functions only as a consumer of political decisions: he may accept the fish on offer or reject it. The ideal withdrawn from procedure defines what best serves the citizen’s interest. The citizen can without consequence be denied the competence for self-government: „Die Masse der Menschen […] besteht immer und überall aus ›Rohlingen‹, ›Dummköpfen‹ und ›Narren‹” (p. 196f.), who require paternalistic leadership. This heroism distinguishes „guten” from „schlechtem” individualism. Individuality must be earned.
As a final consequence, Hoppe grounds a coercion into freedom that feeds not on the popular will but on the absoluteness of his concept of freedom. A freedom that locates itself beyond progress and growth is not provided for. The education into „wahre” freedom is carried out through meritocratic management of the hierarchy understood as natural. By analogy with repressive tolerance one could speak of repressive freedom. This dogmatism refuses democratic proceduralism and privileges authoritarianism and anti-pluralism. Unfreedom is inscribed into the theory: substantialism, even in its liberally motivated variants, understands freedom as the following of given moral principles and so serves the hungry the fish.
The characterisation of Dark Liberalism as a mere break in style falls short. Its confrontational stance is no rhetorical peculiarity, but a consequence of the shift in the theory of justification. Can liberalism, against this background, appear fighting without undercutting itself? What begins as the defence of freedom marks its inner surrender. As soon as liberalism begins to enforce substantive freedom, it leaves its original mode and hands the fishing over to theory, not to the individual. Liberalism therefore remains tied to procedural thinking: only procedures that recognise reasonable pluralism can ground freedom in a theoretically consistent way. Hoppe’s substantialism overlooks this liberal core of the procedural. Liberal theories must not only be able to ground freedom; they must also design the grounding itself in a liberal way.
Liberal thinking must be committed to the freedom to freedom. On the question of the legitimacy of the state this principle can be redeemed procedurally. Liberal thinking is therefore necessarily abstract and formal, because its origin in the history of ideas is the freedom to argue individually over the good. Therein lies the dialectic of freedom: Every attempt to define it substantively and as generally binding, that is, to ascribe to it a content valid for all, leads in the direction of unfreedom. The centre of liberal thinking is therefore neither economic nor social freedom, neither negative nor positive freedom, but a reasonable pluralism. Freedom finds its highest expression in contingency.
