Oscar Grau, “Abandoning Classical Liberalism with Hans-Hermann Hoppe,” Libertarian Institute (Oct. 16, 2025):
Law is a social institution independent of the existence of the state. Law explicitly recognizes the principles of justice, which can only be consistently recognized as universal for all times and places. These principles serve not only to deliver justice, but also to judge the justice of the laws applied in any society. The state usurps law by a combination of force and ideology, monopolizing the final say in society and setting itself up as the final judge of all conflicts and crimes, including those involving the state itself. The state thus becomes both judge and party in its own cases.
Nonetheless, for centuries before the emergence of the modern state, competing and overlapping jurisdictions coexisted in Europe for social life and conflict resolution. This was not because law was not universally understood as a social institution for resolving conflicts or disputes and providing procedures and justifications for punishment or restitution. Rather, it was because different cultural and political circumstances tended to give rise to different judges for different matters of life. In fact, this setup was more effective in promoting peace and enforcing justice than today’s statism.
Laws were considered as given. So it was very uncommon to create or propose any new laws at all. As libertarian philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe recounts, law was considered to be something that existed eternally and was simply discovered:
“People learned what it was. New law was from the very outset considered to be suspicious, because law had to be old, it had to be something that had always existed. Anybody who came up with some sort of new law, was automatically dismissed as probably a fraud. The subjects, the tenants, had a right to resist. That is, they were not subject to their lords no matter what, because, as I said, there existed an eternally valid law, which protected the tenant as much and the landlord, and if the landlord did break this law, then the tenants had the right to resist, up to the point of killing the landlord.”
