Online ISSN 2286-0266
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Octavian-Dragomir JORA
Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti
In our four parts intended study, we will try to give a brief account on three of the pivotal perspectives on property as developed and operated by maybe the most coherent and self consistent liberal school of economics and law: the Austrian School (AS). We will deal firstly with what is called “the free market utilitarian position” (as stated by L. von Mises), then with “the natural law based view” (as revealed by M. N. Rothbard), and, finally, with the “a priori of argumentation” (as formulated by H. H. Hoppe). We chose a chain-link type assessment following the intellectual phylogeny in the SA: Rothbard on Mises, Hoppe on Rothbard, the contemporary Austrians on Hoppe, ending with the natural integration of private property within positive economic analysis (J. G. Hülsmann’s property economics). Part III of our study (following bellow) is dedicated to exposing Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics”, the criticisms attracted and the replies provided. Hoppe expanded on the theme of Habermas’s and Appel’s ethics of discourse, arguing that one who concedes to himself and to his fellow arguers the capacity to formulate and understand argumentation, necessarily concedes to himself and to his fellow partners in dialogue the property upon his own corporal resources involved as acting device (self-ownership) as well as upon the goods homesteaded, or produced, or contractually acquired. If the aim of ethics qua science is to rationally argue for rules of non-conflictual order in a world of scarcity, then self-ownership and homesteading are the only principles to be hold without performing selfcontradictions.

ŒCONOMICA no. 3/2009
Keywords: ethics, economics, private property, a priori, praxeology, argumentation
JEL: B41, K11, A12, B53
Trei teorii liberale ale proprietăţii şi fundamentele analizei economice în termeni de proprietate (III – Hoppe şi apriorismul argumentării)