KOL498 | Adolf Reinach and his “On the Concept of Causality in the Criminal Law”
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 498
This is my speech delivered this morning at the 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society: Adolf Reinach and his "On the Concept of Causality in the Criminal Law." It is based in part on Kinsella, "Causation and Aggression," Hoppe, “Property, Causality, and Liability,” and Reinach, “On The Concept of Causality in the Criminal Law.”
This recording is from my own iPhone. Professional video and audio will follow in due course.
[I have now added the video and improved audio. 10/19/2026]
https://youtu.be/50ArhGyTISY
Related
Reinach, “On The Concept of Causality in the Criminal Law”
Kinsella, "Causation and Aggression," in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023)
Based on Stephan Kinsella and Patrick Tinsley, “Causation and Aggression,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 97–112
Kinsella, Causation, Aggression, the Law, and Reinach
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Property, Causality, and Liability,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 87–95, reprinted in Hoppe, The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline, Second Expanded Edition (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2021)
Jörg Guido Hülsmann, “The A Priori Foundations of Property Economics,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 41–68
Larry J. Sechrest, “Praxeology, Economics, and Law: Issues and Implications,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 19–40
Walter Block, “Austrian Law and Economics: The Contributions of Adolf Reinach and Murray Rothbard,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 69–85
Leo Zailbert, “Toward Meta-Politics,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 7, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 113–28
Barry Smith, “An Essay on Material Necessity,” in Philip Hanson & Bruce Hunter, eds., Return of the A Priori (Canadian J. Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 18, 1993): 301–322
Barry Smith and Wojciech Żełaniec, “Laws of Essence or Constitutive Rules? Reinach vs. Searle on the Ontology of Social Entities,” in Francesca De Vecchi, ed., Eidetica del Diritto e Ontologia Sociale. Il Realismo di Adolf Reinach (Milan: Mimesis, 2012): 83–108
Alessandro Fusillo (Italy): Adolf Reinach and his “A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law”
Adolf Reinach’s “The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law”.
My Speech Notes
Adolf Reinach and his “On the Concept of Causality in the Criminal Law”
Stephan Kinsella
Property and Freedom Society
2026 Annual Meeting
Bodrum, Turkey
Sept. 17–22, 2026
1905 a special year: Einstein’s “Miracle Year”:
Photoelectric effect—light comes in packets, launched quantum
Brownian motion—proved atoms
Special relativity—space and time bend with speed.
And E equals mc squared—mass-energy equivalence.
Today let’s talk about a German from the last century with a mustache.
Named Adolf.
No, not the famous one.
Adolf Reinach was born in 1883, died at 33 in 1917 fighting on the German side in WWI.
A brilliant thinker, a phenomenologist and legal theorist, and was the closest pre-war collaborator of the famous phenomenologist Edmund Husserl
He published a number of important works from about 1905 to 1914, when he joined the German army in WWI and was killed in action three years later, in 1917
Today we have two talks on two of his most important works, at least for Austro-libertarians.
Alessandro has spoken already about his 1913 monograph on the a priori foundations of civil law, published when he was about 30 years old.
See also my 2017 PFS talk: KOL225 | Reflections on the Theory of Contract (PFS 2017)
and my topic is inspired by his 1905 dissertation “On the Concept of Causality in the Criminal Law”
Also Einstein’s Miracle Year
this paper was a major inspiration for my article “Causation and Aggression” and for Hans Hoppe’s article “Property, Causality, and Liability,” both published in 2004 in the QJAE and each based on our contributions to the 2001
I can only begin to give an overview of Reinach and some of the insights I and Hoppe have extracted from his dissertation
For more details, see our 2004 papers; + Alessandro’s
His 9-10 year publishing career, all in his 20s, also included interesting and important papers on
William James and pragmatism;
Kant and Hume on causality and necessity;
judgment and the ontology of states of affairs;
the phenomenology of deliberation and its ethical and legal significance;
a critique of Natorp’s psychology; and
a 1914 lecture on phenomenology that distinguishes his realist approach from Husserl’s later transcendental idealism
It is quite incredible that Husserl is still relevant today, a century later; as Einstein is
As Barry Smith, a libertarian thinker and prominent ontologist who has helped to promote interest in Reinach’s work, told me recently, interest in Reinach has been growing in recent years
For example: “There has just been established a working group on the ontology of law, where Reinach is accepted as one fundamental influence.”
“If you follow Adolf Reinach on google scholar, some 920 papers are identified since 2022. …”
Grok thinks this is a bit imprecise, but… good enough for government work, as we say
Part of this is also the continued interest in Searle’s work and increasing awareness of the ways in which Searle’s and Reinach’s ideas overlap.
Reinach: theory of social acts; Searle: speech acts. (Grok)
Reinach is of interest to me, and other Misesian Austrians, because of his work on legal theory, causation, and applications of Kant’s apriori methodology to social theory
It is well known that one significant group of libertarians— Ayn Rand and Objectivists—despised Kant because of his so-called “idealism”
Now as Hoppe has conceded, Kant was a somewhat murky thinker and Rand was perhaps relying on second-hand accounts and interpretations of Kant by the more “idealist” American Kantians
Hoppe, My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher
Bruce Goldberg “Ayn Rand’s ‘For the New Intellectual’” (1961)
Kinsella, “The Undeniable Morality of Capitalism”
But there is a more “realist” school of Kant on the continent
g., the philosopher Peter Janich
Hoppe, My Discovery of Human Action and of Mises as a Philosopher
Kinsella, A Visit with Hoppe: Touch, Janich, AI, Being Interviewed, Bankruptcy, Money and Demonstrated Preference; KOL461 | Haman Nature Hn 119: Atheism, Objectivism & Artificial Intelligence
Mises employed Kantian terminology in his use of apriori concepts
Mises drew on aspects of Kant’s framework that are compatible with realism
As Hoppe has shown in his Economic Science and the Austrian Method, Misesian “Kantian” praxeology is realistic
[SKIP THE FOLLOWING DEPENDING ON TIME]
Not to be confused with Hoppe’s other interesting distinction between right- and left-libertarianism,
that the right is essentially realistic in recognizing differences, natural authority, hierarchies, elites, whereas the left is unrealistic and egalitarian—
and so libertarianism is a realistic “right” libertarianism
Hoppe, A Realistic Libertarianism
[END SKIP]
Interestingly, just as some Kantians (Mises, Hoppe) are realistic, and others more idealistic, after 1913 or so, Husserl turned toward transcendental idealism, and the phenomenology movement split into realists (Reinach, and others), who argued for a world that does not depend on consciousness (Ayn Rand would approve), and transcendental idealists (Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida, and others)
The leading realist phenomenologist, Reinach applied that method to social acts, law, judgment, and motion.
Studies on motion: calls to mind Peter Janich’s aprioristic “protophysics,” e.g. Protophysics of Time; Euclid’s Heritage: Is Space Three-Dimensional?
Before the somewhat recent resurgence of interest in Reinach’s ideas, there had been awareness of and interest in Reinach by various Austrians, including Barry Smith, who has a deep interest in libertarianism, Austrian economics, and ontology
And so it came to be that Guido Hülsmann organized a Mises Institute international symposium on “Reinach and Rothbard” in 2001.
In addition to Guido, the Director, the symposium included presentations by Walter Block, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Larry J. Sechrest, Barry Smith, and myself
Some of these and related articles were published along with others in a symposium issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, in 2004
Two of these, by Hans and myself, focused mainly on Reinach’s 1905 dissertation “On the Concept of Causality in the Criminal Law,” the main focus of my talk today
These are: Kinsella, "Causation and Aggression" and Hoppe, “Property, Causality, and Liability”
INCIDENTALLY: I ended up publishing a previously-unpublished translation of this dissertation, by Danish-American philosopher Berit Brogaard, with the assistance of Barry Smith (who was her PhD advisor), in the first volume of my journal Libertarian Papers, in 2009
Coincidentally, Reinach’s 1913 paper “The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law,” already discussed by Alessandro, is not very accessible
It had been translated by the American philosopher John F. Crosby, and published in Aletheia in 1983. It was recently republished in Adolf Reinach, The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law: Along with the Lecture “Concerning Phenomenology,” John F. Crosby, with a foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre (Ontos Verlag, 2012; now De Gruyter), but a good version is not readily available online
Just last week, Barry Smith put me in touch with the translator, John Crosby, and supported my request for permission to reprint this important paper online in our Property and Freedom Journal.
He said possibly yes,...
