Murray Rothbard 9781501301599, 9781441142092

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Series Editor’s Preface

Murray Rothbard was an economist, historian, political and moral philosopher, and legal theoretician. Rothbard’s work in these diverse social science disciplines was unified by a passionate and resolute commitment to libertarianism. The particular brand of libertarianism that Rothbard espoused may be characterized as ‘anarcho-capitalism’. Whereas conventional libertarianism implies a belief that only a minimal state which does no more than provide a basic framework of the rule of law and the protection of private property rights may be justified, anarchocapitalism implies a belief that even the legal system may be provided privately without the need for a coercive collective authority. Hence, anarcho-capitalists envisage a society where the traditional role of government is wholly subsumed by private, profit-making enterprises and all social relationships are ultimately founded upon consent. Rothbard’s unique intellectual contribution was to build this system of thought from many pre-existing but previously disparate strands and to develop it to its logical (some would say extreme) conclusion. Rothbard’s starting points, then, were the well-established notions of methodological individualism, natural rights theory and individual self-ownership. But Rothbard showed that if we wish to take methodological individualism, natural rights theory and individual self-ownership seriously – that is, if we really believe that the individual is the relevant unit of analysis, that all individuals have basic rights that cannot be violated and that all people have a complete right of ownership over their own persons – then the justification for government

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falls away. It is argued that taxation, for example, cannot be reconciled with the belief that each individual is inviolate with a complete right of self-ownership. According to Rothbard, then, government can only be ‘justified’ if we abandon the notion that individuals have the right to determine what to do with their own bodies, a step Rothbard believed to be unconscionable. In this outstanding work, Professor Gerard Casey of University College Dublin sets out Rothbard’s thought in the context of Rothbard’s life and times. Casey shows that, perhaps unusually for an academic, as well as being an exceptional scholar, Rothbard was a colourful character and also a committed political activist, being deeply involved in the Libertarian Party and a number of libertarian think tanks during his lifetime. Professor Casey also considers the influence and reception of Rothbard’s work, and its enduring relevance. This volume makes a crucial contribution to the Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series by presenting the ideas of one of the most important libertarian thinkers in an accessible and cogent form. It is a book that will prove indispensable to those unfamiliar with Rothbard’s work as well as more advanced scholars. John Meadowcroft King’s College London

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr David Gordon for allowing me access to unpublished Rothbard material, and for his overall encouragement and support; to Mr Brian Ó Cathnia, Fr John McNerny, Dr Brendan Purcell, Dr David Gordon and Dr Ciarán McGlynn for reading and commenting on early drafts of the material. They can claim the credit for forcing me to say what I had to say more clearly and perspicuously while being absolved of responsibility for what I have said and for any remaining stylistic infelicities or terminological obscurities; to Dr John Meadowcroft, general editor of the Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series for allowing me to make my contribution to the series; to the School of Philosophy in University College Dublin, and its then head, Dr Brian O’Connor, for relieving me from my teaching responsibilities in the academic year 2007–2008, which created the time and opportunity for me to do the basic research for this book.

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Chapter 1

Intellectual Biography

It wasn’t like Murray Rothbard to die. Nothing he ever did was more out of character, more difficult to reconcile with everything we knew of him, more downright inconceivable. Murray dead is a contradiction in terms. (Joseph Sobran, in Rockwell 1995, 38)1

Introduction The character of some thinkers, such as St Augustine and Søren Kierkegaard, comes through in everything they write; their intellectual hearts are, so to speak, displayed prominently on their sleeves. Other thinkers, such as St Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza, reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. Murray N. Rothbard – economist, historian, political and moral philosopher, legal theoretician, political activist, polemicist and, above all, libertarian – can be firmly located in the Augustinian/Kierkegaardean camp. To read him is to know him, not just whatever he happens to be writing about. Everything he wrote is invested with his personality and his character. The citation from Joseph Sobran heading this chapter elegantly testifies to Rothbard’s vitality and those lucky enough to have known Rothbard personally concur with Sobran’s view. Those who didn’t have the privilege of knowing Rothbard personally have available to them some sound and vision recordings of him in action and these should be listened to and watched in order

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to get a flavour of the man. Let’s take the opening of one of these talks, on ‘Keynes the Man: Hero or Villain?’ This begins: ‘First of all, I’d like to launch a pre-emptive strike [audience laughter] against any critics . . . who might accuse this talk of being ad hominem. In the first place, the ad hominem fallacy is that . . . instead of attacking the doctrine of a person, you attack the person, and that’s fallacious and that doesn’t refute the argument. I’ve never been in favor of that. I’ve always been in favor of refuting the doctrine and then going on to attack the person! [raucous audience laughter]’ (Rothbard 1989).

Family and Education Murray Newton Rothbard was born to David and Rae Rothbard on 2 March 1926. His father was a Polish immigrant who had arrived in the USA in 1910; his mother, Rae Babushkin, immigrated to the USA in 1916. The environment in which the young Rothbard was reared in Manhattan and Broadway leaned decidedly towards the left of the political spectrum. Rothbard himself maintained that the members of the Jewish community in which he lived were largely either Communist or Communist fellow travellers (see Rockwell 2000, 337). I grew up in New York City in the 1930s in the midst of what can only be called a communist culture. As middle-class Jews in New York, my relatives, friends, classmates, and neighbors faced only one great moral decision in their lives: should they join the Communist Party and devote 100 percent of their lives to the cause; or should they remain fellow travelers and devote only a fraction of their lives? That was the great range of debate. I had two sets of aunts and uncles on both sides of the family who were in the Communist Party. The older uncle was an engineer who helped build the legendary Moscow subway; the younger one was an editor for the Communistdominated Drug Workers Union . . . (Rockwell 2000, 6)

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David Rothbard was determined not to be held back by any traces of immigrant insularity. He learnt English as quickly as he was able and assimilated rapidly to American culture and, despite the broadly Communist and left-leaning inclinations of his community, he adopted such basic American political values as an appreciation of free enterprise, a desire for small government and a respect for private property. Rothbard was proud of his father’s rejection of the social and communist orthodoxies dominant in their community. At a time when it is a biographical commonplace to assume that our hero’s development took place by means of a rejection of suffocating and constricting parental values, it is refreshing to note that Rothbard was all his life close to both his parents, especially to his father. He flourished in his home environment and found himself broadly sympathetic to his father’s political principles. One thing above all else that he took from his father was a belief in the value of free enterprise and a love of liberty. At an early age, Rothbard’s own independence of mind was clearly evident. Samuel Francis notes, ‘What carried Murray through his childhood immersion in a communist culture and bore him through the hundred political and ideological battles of his life was his own character. It was impossible to know him for long without recognizing the moral iron beneath his flesh’ (Rockwell 1995, 64; see Rockwell 2000, 6 and Modugno Crocetta 1999, 6–10). Despite being intellectually able, or perhaps because he was intellectually able, Rothbard didn’t appreciate the public school system in which he was initially enrolled. In addition to the mental torture of being subjected to inferior instruction, Rothbard was also physically bullied. Given his natural inclination towards independence, it is hardly surprising that one of his teachers commented on his ‘combative spirit’. That combative spirit was to become characteristic of the mature Rothbard. To stand out from the crowd, to set oneself apart from the group, is always a dangerous path to take, and when one is young and vulnerable, it takes courage to walk on this path. In his exceptionally mean-spirited (and factually inaccurate) obituary of Rothbard,

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William F. Buckley Jr referred to what he termed Rothbard’s ‘contrarian spirit’ (Buckley 1995). The suggestion here is that Rothbard opposed simply for the sake of opposing and that had the prevailing ethos been libertarian, Rothbard would have adopted an anti-libertarian stance. It is simply not true that Rothbard was inhabited by a contrarian spirit. Combative? Certainly. Pugnacious? Indeed. A man who enjoyed a good argument? Without a doubt. Contrarian? No. The little bit of truth in Buckley’s remark lies in its muddled misidentification of a distinctive Rothbardian character trait, namely, his ability, from the earliest age, to determine his own line, his own position, and to question seemingly unquestionable orthodoxies. If one thing characterized Rothbard all his life it was this fundamental independence of mind. Eventually, for his mental and physical protection, he was taken out of public school and sent to the private Riverside School in Staten Island (see Flood 2008a). Here he flourished, experiencing a sense of intellectual and physical freedom. After two years at Riverside, Rothbard was sent to Birch-Wathen School in Manhattan where, in a generally leftliberal environment, he became the token conservative. It wasn’t the last time in his life that he would be the odd man out. By the time he left school, Rothbard was a convinced conservative, opposed to socialism, communism, and the Roosevelt New Deal. His sympathies at this period in his life – his midteens – lay with the ‘Old Right’, a movement which had begun in opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal and later came to be characterized by its anti-statist and anti-interventionist approach to politics (see Woods 2007 and Payne 2005). He was never to lose his affection and enthusiasm for those stalwarts of the Old Right – John T. Flynn, Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, H. L. Mencken, Garet Garrett, Robert Taft, Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov – and towards the end of his life, after some tactical flirtations with the Left, he returned to a rejuvenated old-style conservatism. The United States’ wartime semi-socialist regime convinced Rothbard, if he needed convincing, of the evils of militarism and deepened his opposition to

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the collectivist tendencies engendered by the spirit of war. To be opposed to interventionism in the time of war is to risk being branded as a traitor. The Old Right was under tremendous pressure from the dominant leftward-leaning interventionism of the period and in the end, though it survived the War, with the deaths of Taft and Garrett in the 1950s, it had ceased to be a force to be reckoned with (Rockwell 2000, 4). In 1942, at the age of 16, Rothbard enrolled at Columbia University. Given his future career as an Austrian economist and given the notorious antipathy of Austrian economists to the mathematization of economics, there is a delightful irony in Rothbard’s having been at one time a statistics major. He graduated from Columbia with a BA in mathematics and economics in 1945 and he received his MA in economics and mathematics in 1946. In 1956, after some travails with his dissertation supervisors, Rothbard finished his PhD dissertation which was subsequently published in 1962 as The Panic of 1819. In this book, Rothbard argues that the first major economic crisis in the newborn republic was brought about by the monetary interventions of the Bank of the USA. One of Rothbard’s superiors in the Economics Department at Columbia was Arthur Burns, later to become the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The mysterious nature of banking was to be a topic of perennial interest to Rothbard. He continued to tear away the veils shrouding this mystery in his The Mystery of Banking (Rothbard 1983a) and The Case against the Fed (Rothbard 2007b), making a strong case for the intrinsically fraudulent nature of fractional-reserve banking and the morally hazardous and inflationary character of central banking. Now, more than ever, at a time of turmoil in the world’s financial systems, is his prescience to be admired. The atmosphere at Columbia could best be described as a kind of relaxed leftism. Republicans were thin on the ground: ‘At Columbia College, I was only one of two Republicans on the entire campus, the other being a literature major with whom I had little in common’ (Rockwell 2000, 6). In the Columbia bookstore, Rothbard came across Frank Chodorov’s Taxation

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is Robbery (Chodorov 1947).The effect of this pamphlet on Rothbard was electric; he would never be the same again. Around this time, Rothbard came into contact with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), which was his first encounter with organized libertarianism. The FEE had been founded by Leonard Read in 1946 and had a small staff of free-market economists. From this time on, Rothbard immersed himself in whatever libertarian literature was available. We find him reading Garet Garrett, Isabel Paterson, Albert Jay Nock, Herbert Spencer, Henry George2, Henry Louis Mencken and Ludwig von Mises.3 Harold W. Luhnow, head of the William Volker Company and the associated Volker Fund, was a major supporter of the FEE. The Volker Fund arranged for Ludwig von Mises to teach as a visiting professor at New York University (NYU). Mises also became a part-time staff member at the FEE and so, inevitably, Mises and Rothbard met (see Gordon 2007a).

Rothbard Meets Mises Rothbard was hugely impressed by Mises’s Human Action (Mises 1996) and he became a regular member of and participant in the Mises seminar in 1949, a seminar that continued in operation for most of Mises’s time at NYU. Once introduced to Austrian economics, something he had heard nothing about in his economics education to date, he quickly became an expert in the subject. Herbert Cornuelle, liaison officer of the Volker Fund, suggested to Rothbard that he might write a student primer of Austrian economics, a kind of Mises-made-simple. Rothbard began to work on the book in 1952. Just over ten years later, with the support of the Volker Fund, Man, Economy, and State was published – not, after all, a Mises-made-simple but a complete treatise on Austrian economics that, by general consensus among Austrians, is second only to Human Action in its scope and brilliance. Despite the hugely powerful influence of Mises on Rothbard’s intellectual development, it is important to note that Rothbard’s

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conversion to libertarianism was primarily a moral-political conversion rather than simply a consequence of economic reflection. Gary North goes so far as to maintain that ‘By 1963, [Rothbard] had grown discontented with economic analysis as an end in itself’ (Rockwell 1995, 71). Logical consistency eventually forced Rothbard towards an acceptance of anarchism – the rejection of state power and control – for once one accepts the proposition that the state is justified for the provision of even limited services, for example, legal and security services, on the basis of a kind of social contract, nothing prevents the extension of that social contract to all manner of things – roads, postal services, social welfare, and so on. Rothbard realized that there is and can be no sustainable midpoint between statism and anarchism; that being the choice, there was only one way for him to go (see Gordon 2005).4

Early Writings and Political Activity Some of Rothbard’s early work was published in small newsletters such as The Individualist Newsletter and The Vigil. Early in his career, he developed a taste for political journalism, which he cultivated right throughout his life.5 In The Vigil, Rothbard set out a distinctive libertarian position on current affairs. One particular aspect of his work in this newsletter was what we might now call the topic of ‘corporate welfare’, the overlap of government interests with the interests of large corporations, a topic to which the worldwide financial upheavals that began in 2007 gives renewed point. Although an atheist and a secularist, Rothbard became associated with Faith & Freedom, writing under the pseudonym Aubrey Herbert.6 This association is an example of Rothbard’s tactical willingness to make allies in the cause of liberty wherever he could find them. It was in the pages of Faith & Freedom that Rothbard first gave vent to his arguments against domestic (US) collectivism and the interventionist tendencies of the US

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abroad. In so doing, he was continuing the work of the Old Right. For Rothbard, the enemy was statism, not some particular subtype of it such as Communism. He makes this point very clearly in a letter written to George Resch in 1961: One school of thought identifies that ‘enemy’ as socialism or statism in all its forms. To this school, Communism is simply one wing of socialism and a wing which, certainly in the United States, is of almost zero political importance. Since socialism and statism in numerous forms, has been greatly on the rise in this century, and is indeed dominant in the modern world, this school of thought tends to regard the ‘battle’ as being largely, if not wholly ideological: as an effort to turn men’s minds from an acceptance of statism to one of liberty. . . . The second school of thought . . . believes that in addition to and over and above the problem of socialism is the problem of Communism, that the world Communist movement (or ‘conspiracy’ as they like to call it ) poses a uniquely diabolic threat which must be met, and which must be given even greater priority than the problem of socialism. It is important to realize that this school shifts the priority of focus from ideas to persons, for the persons of Communists now take on a Luciferian quality which must be combatted in a physical more than an ideological way. (Rothbard 1961) His refusal to regard Communism as the enemy, rather than statism or socialism, was to be a major point of division between Rothbard and his erstwhile conservative allies. Echoing the thoughts of Lysander Spooner, Rothbard castigates the state for arrogating to itself the right to a monopoly of violence. If racketeering is a crime, it is not any less criminal if the racketeers call themselves the state. Llewellyn Rockwell makes the key point that ‘Rothbard’s political thought is simple at its core but astounding in its application. He believed that common moral strictures, and standards of evaluation, should apply to the state. If theft is wrong, it is wrong. The same goes for

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murder, kidnapping, lying, and fraud. They are as wrong for the state as for everyone else’ (Rockwell 1995, 117–18; see Rothbard 1958a, 115). In a 1955 article, ‘The Real Aggressor’, writing under his pseudonym, Rothbard limned the essential elements of his positions on non-aggression, on the state and on international relations, positions that were not to change essentially for the rest of his life. Rothbard’s work at this time, particularly his non-interventionist stance, attracted the hostile attention of some Cold Warriors, in particular William Henry Chamberlin. It is more than ironic that Rothbard, who always considered himself to be on the extreme right end of the political spectrum, should be attacked by ex-communist-sympathizers-turnedconservative for being too left wing! To say that Rothbard’s political positions were unpopular is to be guilty of a hyperbolical understatement. Among the policies he advocated were the dissolution of the American Empire (by which he meant the United States’ dissociation from Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico), the abandonment of the UN by the US, and genuine disarmament talks with the USSR. In the 1956 presidential election, Rothbard supported the Democrat Adlai Stevenson over the Republican Eisenhower. The reason is simple enough. Although both candidates were New Dealers domestically, they differed drastically on foreign policy, Eisenhower being a vigorous Republican internationalist while Stevenson opposed the draft and wanted an end to nuclear arms tests. Rothbard’s support of Stevenson was too much for the readers of Faith & Freedom who had come to believe that Rothbard was a communist and the magazine’s editor, Bill Johnson, told Rothbard after the election that his column was being dropped. Rothbard was puzzled to know how someone who attacked the government and defended the individual could be a communist but the reality is that in time of war, hot or cold, fine distinctions go by the wayside – the truism that the first casualty of war is truth remains true. Rothbard’s discovery of Mises and his attendance at the Mises Seminar was a source of joy to him. Other seminar attendees

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included Percy Greaves, Bettina Greaves, George Reisman, Ralph Raico, Bill Petersen and Felix Wittmer. There were also others who attended, who are known to us only by their unflattering nicknames, such as The Lawyer and, even more intriguingly, by the latter-day non-politically correct title of ‘The Mongolian Idiot’. Rothbard notes that whereas in Mises’s earlier career, his disciples had tended to veer towards the political left, the members of the Mises’s New York Seminar pushed towards the political right. Under the stimulus of the Mises Seminar and his discovery of Austrian Economics, Rothbard’s intellectual output of the late 1950s or early 1960s was to culminate in 1962 in his magisterial Man, Economy, and State. Despite his deep and abiding admiration for Mises, Rothbard’s work in economics was not just Misesmade-simple. Gary North notes, ‘In many areas of economic theory, he extended the work of Ludwig von Mises. In other areas, he abandoned it. Murray was not a Mises clone; he was an innovator who stood on the shoulders of a giant’ (Rockwell 1995, 70). In an interview given in 1990, Rothbard himself remarks ‘Joe Salerno once gave a talk in which he said Man, Economy, and State is more Böhm-Bawerk7-oriented than Mises’s Human Action. I never thought of it that way, but it may be true’ (Rothbard 1990, 2).

Rothbard – Right and Left The Old Right being defunct, Rothbard’s relationship to the New Right, centred on William F. Buckley’s National Review, was tense and, as it turned out, tenuous. Given Rothbard’s deeply rooted anti-war beliefs, it is difficult to see how he could find a congenial intellectual home among those for whom a military confrontation with the USSR was an ever-present option and, one suspects, although this suspicion may be unfair, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Rothbard was not impressed with the Communists’ military capacity, still less with their long-term

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ideological commitment to Communism. He believed that the communist system was innately incoherent and its self-inflicted demise inevitable and he wrote to Buckley to this effect in 1956. Just as his support for Stevenson in the presidential election of 1956 precipitated his departure from Faith & Freedom, it also contributed to his break with the Buckley Right. Following his anti-war and isolationist star, Rothbard forsook the New Right and allied himself with the New York Chapter of the League of Stevensonian Democrats, working three to four days a week for the League in their Manhattan office. For someone of Rothbard’s deep-rooted right-wing inclinations, this might seem to be a peculiar, indeed, indefensibly incoherent choice. Some critics accuse Rothbard of vacillation. David Steele writes, ‘His political life became an erratic succession of alliances, each one enthusiastically pursued for a few years, then angrily abandoned, with his erstwhile confederates anathematized . . . ’ (Steele 2000, 51). On the other hand, his fellow Mises Seminar participant Ralph Raico noted, Rothbard was always ‘totally inner-directed, in every way his own man, guided always by values that were an inseparable part of him – above all, his love of liberty and of human excellence’ (Rockwell 1995, 2) and wasn’t to be constrained in his action by mere labels. It was characteristic of him that he would cooperate with whoever he believed could advance the cause of liberty, whatever label that might be attached to his erstwhile co-workers. If opposition to war were to be found among left-wingers, then to the left-wingers he would go. In an interview he gave in 1972, he said, ‘I was one of the people who originated the idea of an alliance with the New Left. . . . I don’t think of an alliance with the New Left as living in communes with the Black Panthers. I thought of it as participating with the New Left in anti-draft actions or in opposition to the war. I conceived of a political rather than an ideological alliance’ (Rothbard 1972b, 3; see Payne 2005). Although some purport to see something sinister in Rothbard’s alliance with the Left, Paul Gottfried writes that Rothbard ‘was also the truest antiCommunist of my acquaintance, not in the vulgar sense of

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parroting Cold War liberal slogans, but in the deeper existential sense of defying any form of democratic centralism’ and he notes that this anti-war-fuelled alliance with the Left concealed the fundamental differences between Rothbard and his would-be allies on ‘patriotic, cultural, and economic issues’ (Rockwell 1995, 50; see Rothbard 1966). Llewellyn Rockwell also denies that Rothbard vacillated politically. ‘Some people say that Rothbard’s politics were all over the map. That is not true. He set the political standard as liberty itself, and worked with anyone who pursued it. At the height of the Vietnam War, for example, when the official Right was countenancing mass murder, he looked to the New Left as a vehicle for stopping this most vicious form of statism. But as the Cold War ended, Rothbard was overjoyed to reunite with the remnants of the Old Right’ (Rockwell 1995, 117; see Gordon 2007a, 96, 109).

Rothbard in Brooklyn and Las Vegas The year 1962 witnessed the collapse of the Volker Fund, which had been a source of financial support to Rothbard for a significant period of time. He was making what living he could from this Fund and from work obtained from other organizations: the FEE, the Earhart Foundation and the Princeton Panel. He needed a regular income and eventually obtained a position at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, teaching two days a week. ‘For many years, he taught economics at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, working in a dingy, windowless office on the fifth floor, surrounded by Marxists. He never once complained, except to wonder why an engineering school couldn’t make the elevator work’ (Rockwell 1995, 106). He was to continue in this position until 1985, when he went to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas as a distinguished professor where he enjoyed for some 10 years an appropriate academic environment. Rothbard’s failure to find a position befitting his intellectual stature and achievements for most of his life eerily mirrors the life history of his

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mentor, Mises, who, similarly, held a significant academic position for only a short period in his life. It is hard to disagree with the judgement of Hans Hermann Hoppe that despite his belated recognition by the University of Las Vegas, Rothbard ‘remained an outsider in academia throughout his life’ (Rockwell 1995, 35). Somewhat less sympathetically, Mark Skousen is inclined to attribute the blame for Rothbard’s academic exile to Rothbard himself. Comparing the careers of Milton Friedman and Rothbard, two men who shared similar backgrounds, similar educational experiences and a similar desire to introduce sound economics to the world, he remarks that whereas Friedman ‘took a position at the University of Chicago and wrote for scholarly journals’, eventually being awarded the Nobel Prize, Rothbard ‘was determined to be an outsider writing books for little-known libertarian publishers and teaching at an unknown engineering school’ (Skousen 2000, 53).

Power and Market, For a New Liberty, The Ethics of Liberty Power and Market: Government and the Economy was published in 1970 (Rothbard 1970a). Originally intended to be part of Man, Economy, and State, its publishers had demurred at its inclusion in that book primarily, it would appear, because of its anarchist implications. Power and Market is a potent early expression of part of Rothbard’s political philosophy and contains themes that were to be practically and theoretically developed in For a New Liberty (2006b) and The Ethics of Liberty (2002). For a New Liberty resulted from an invitation from the publishers Macmillan after Rothbard was the subject of much publicity following his publication of two articles in the New York Times in 1971. Koch Industries gave Rothbard a research grant to enable him to write The Ethics of Liberty. Of this book, Rothbard later said, ‘It was supposed to be a reconciliation of libertarianism with conservative culture and personal ethics, what is called paleolibertarianism today. But as

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I worked on it, it turned into an Anarcho-libertarian treatise. By the early sixties, conservatives had become pro-war and the whole idea of reconciling us with them had lost its attraction for me’ (Rothbard 1990, 3).

Think Tanks, Institutes and Journals It was an ambition of Rothbard to have a think tank that would be a powerhouse for libertarian thought. Together with Burton Blumert, he founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1976, which published the Journal of Libertarian Studies from 1977 until 2000. Rothbard was a founding member of the Cato Institute’s Board and is generally credited with suggesting the Institute’s name; nevertheless, his association with the Cato Institute was stormy and it eventually came to an end in 1981. According to Hoppe, Rothbard was ‘forced out by the chief financial backer as too “extreme” and “intransigent”’ (Rothbard 2002, xxxvi; see Raimondo 2000, 211–56). In 1982, Llewellyn Rockwell founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute and Rothbard was offered and accepted the position of vice-president. Here, at last, Rothbard found a receptive institutional setting in which he, and other libertarians, could flourish. From the Ludwig von Mises Institute came the Review of Austrian Economics in 1986, the Austrian Economics Newsletter and a major book-publishing programme devoted to the publication of new works and the re-publication of old classics.

Libertarianism and Conservatism The relationship between libertarians and conservatives can often be fraught. Whatever about some other libertarians, many of whom adopt hostile attitudes towards custom, habit and tradition and, in particular, towards religion, this was not Rothbard’s position. In an essay on Frank Meyer, who sought a rapprochement between the conservative’s reverence for tradition and the libertarian’s love of liberty, he wrote: ‘[C]ustom must be

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voluntarily upheld and not enforced by coercion . . . people would be well advised (although not forced) to begin with a presumption in favor of custom . . .’ (Rothbard 1981, 359). One point of tension between conservatives and libertarians is precisely this question of coercion but once it had been granted that one should not be coerced into observing customs or traditions Rothbard was more than happy to go along with much of conservative thought. In a late essay, Rothbard wrote: ‘Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific value, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions’ (Rothbard 1994, 1–2). In 1972, when the Libertarian Party came into being, Rothbard was initially unenthusiastic: ‘I really don’t think . . . that a libertarian party at this stage of our development is anything but foolhardy’ (Rothbard 1972b, 3). Despite his serious reservations, he joined the Party in 1973. His involvement in the Libertarian Party would consume an inordinate amount of his time and energy until he left the party in 1989, a decision which, he says, ‘I not only have never regretted but am almost continually joyous about’ (Rockwell 2000, 102). One of the things about the Libertarian Party that irritated him was the ‘general flakiness and counterculturalism of a large section of the LP rankand-file’ (Raimondo 2000, 214). Although Jewish by birth and upbringing, Rothbard was atheistic on religious matters. Despite being a Jewish atheist, Joseph Sobran notes, ‘his sympathies were Catholic’ (Rockwell 1995, 39). In his later work, his enthusiasm for the late Scholastics – in Rothbard’s view, the precursors of Austrianism – gave rise to some speculation that he was about to convert to Catholicism. In the end, whatever may have been his inclinations, he didn’t do so. In line with his cultural conservatism, he adopted a generally sympathetic attitude towards religion and was scathing in his views on the knee-jerk hostility to religion typical of the

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left-libertarian, believing it to be based upon ignorance. In a 1990 letter to Justin Raimondo Rothbard wrote: ‘I am convinced that it is no accident that freedom, limited government, natural rights, and the market economy only really developed in Western civilization. I am convinced that the reason is the attitudes developed by the Christian Church in general, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. . . . even though I am not a believer, I hail Christianity, and especially Catholicism as the underpinning of liberty’ (cited in Raimondo, 325, 326). Joseph Salerno makes the valuable point that ‘Murray recognized the positive role in bolstering liberty in the U.S. played by liturgical Christianity. This brand of Christianity . . . emphasizes personal salvation through participation in the Church’s liturgy and denies that the Kingdom of God can be established on earth by the puny efforts of man. . . . a formal religion, specifically Christianity, is necessary as the natural repository of the traditional moral rules that are necessary to reinforce and complement a classical liberal or libertarian legal code in order for a real market society to survive and flourish’ (Rockwell 1995, 80). As we have seen, Rothbard had always been a cultural conservative. The temporary alliance with the Left on the anti-interventionist platform was a tactical expedient. When the opportunity arose, Rothbard was very happy to ally himself with old-style conservative rightists, such as those of the Rockford Institute. This alliance led to the founding of the John Randolph Club, which held its first conference in 1992. Rothbard was relieved to be back in the company of the Right, a position from which he had started and never really left. ‘He found the company of conservatives far more personally congenial than the company of Libertarian Party activists who, as a group, tended to be boorish’ (Raimondo, 278).

Rothbard – Economist and Libertarian Walter Block contends that, as an economist, Rothbard made contributions to utility theory, the theory of business cycles, public

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goods and monopoly, monetary theory, trade, banking and economic methodology (Rockwell 1995, 19; see Gordon 2005). These topics are dealt with in his monumental Man, Economy, and State (Rothbard 2004) and elsewhere. As an historian, he produced four large volumes, Conceived in Liberty (Rothbard 1975a; 1975b; 1976; 1979; see Rothbard 1990, 3) dealing with liberty in the American tradition and completed, shortly before his death, two extensive volumes of economic history. (Rothbard 1995a; 1995b) His moral and political philosophy can be found in Power and Market (Rothbard 1970a), For a New Liberty (Rothbard 2006b), The Ethics of Liberty (Rothbard 2002) and in many articles. His political and polemical activism is evident from the astonishing mass of occasional material that he produced, some of it collected in Making Economic Sense (Rothbard 2006a) and still more of it in The Irrepressible Rothbard (Rockwell 2000). Of all that he did, I think it fair to say that Rothbard is best known for being a libertarian. Here, his contributions were immense. Characterizing libertarianism as the ‘philosophy of absolute individual rights based on natural law’, Wendy McElroy identifies Rothbard as a system builder who put together systematically elements that were not necessarily uniquely his. In the popular mind, libertarianism is sometimes conflated with libertinism. Rothbard remarks, ‘Libertarianism is logically consistent with almost any attitude toward culture, society, religion, or moral principle. In strict logic, libertarian political doctrine can be severed from all other considerations; logically one can be – and indeed most libertarians in fact are: hedonists, libertines, immoralists, militant enemies of religion in general and Christianity in particular – and still be consistent adherents of libertarian politics’ (Rockwell 2000, 101). Of course, Rothbard is not commending these attitudes and practices. A libertarian can be ‘a moocher, a scamster, and a petty crook and racketeer in practice, as all too many libertarians turn out to be. Strictly logically, one can do these things, but psychologically, sociologically, and in practice, it simply doesn’t work that way’ (Rockwell 2000, 101).

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Rothbard himself, however, was a man of the utmost personal probity. Paul Gottfried tells us that Rothbard was ‘an explicit cultural and moral traditionalist who held no brief for “lifestyles,” particularly if their advocates sought to impose their quirks as civil rights’ (Rockwell 1995, 49–50). Gary North concurs. Describing Rothbard as ‘a brave and brilliant man of iron’ he goes on to note ‘He did not advocate libertinism in the name of libertarianism. He was the husband of one wife. He understood that widespread antinomian self-indulgence will eventually produce a social catastrophe. He believed deeply that a society without civil government must rest heavily on selfgovernment and that self-government is not a powerful personal motivation in a person who is debauched sexually, chemically, or both’ (Rockwell 1995, 72). Joseph Salerno completes the picture: ‘[F]or Murray, liberty was not an arid abstraction to be discoursed on and debated at interminable length on the Internet, nor was it an ultimate cultural value to be “lived” by ingesting recreational drugs, indulging in sexual promiscuity, and shedding the bonds of family, church, and community. Rather, Murray loved liberty as a necessary (but by no means sufficient) cause of the American culture and society that he cherished, celebrated, and called his own’ (Rockwell 1995, 79; see also Herbener in Rockwell 1995, 87 and Denson, in Rockwell 1995, 104). Given his prolific production of academic and popular material, his engagement over many years in political activism, and his combative (not contrarian) personality, it would be surprising if Rothbard had not aroused resentment and envy. And so it was. In his review of Raimondo’s biography of Rothbard, An Enemy of the State (Raimondo 2000), Rockwell lists the following standard critiques that Rothbard’s life and works attracted – he wasn’t consistent; he wasn’t original; he was just an ideologue; he exercised no lasting influence; he should have eschewed popular writing and political activism; he did no serious economic work after the mid1960s; he did no serious scholarly work after the late 1970s; he abandoned libertarianism to become a leftist in the 1960s; he abandoned libertarianism to become a conservative in the late

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1980s and 1990s; he abandoned libertarianism for the Christian Right; he was objectively pro-communist; he was uncritically accepting of Mises; he departed from Mises – and so on. Of course Rothbard wasn’t perfect – what human being is? – but even he, with all his prodigious energy, couldn’t have been guilty of all these charges. In the end, Rothbard was a realist – not in the cynical ethical sense of that term but in the philosophical sense of accepting that the world exists and has the nature that it has, and man too exists and has the character that he has and that there can be real knowledge of both natures. In a word, he exhibited what Joseph Salerno terms ‘piety’, that is a proper attitude of respect for reality, an admission that outside the self we find ‘nature, broadly construed to include the specific natures of different entities including man; history or the reality and meaningfulness of past lives and event; and the contemporaneous existence of other humans’ (Rockwell 1995, 77). Intellectually incisive, prodigiously prolific, exhaustingly energetic, witty and possessed of a shining integrity, Murray Rothbard died on 7 January 1995.

Notes 1

2

3 4

In writing this chapter I have relied primarily upon Raimondo (2000), Rockwell (1995) and Gordon (2007a). A significant amount of Rothbard’s early writing was a response to his reading of Henry George. He found the Georgists’ defence of free trade congenial but disagreed with their proposal for a single tax on land. Mises is the subject of a volume in this series. Not everyone was enamoured of Rothbard’s move towards anarchism. George Reisman, author of the colossally sized Capitalism, is very critical of this move. Although he holds up Mises as the defender of capitalism, Hayek and Friedman are said to lack Mises’s ‘logical consistency and intellectual breadth’ (Reisman 1990, 5). Further down the scale are some ‘lesser defenders’ of capitalism and ‘Much worse, Rothbard, who was widely regarded as the intellectual leader of the younger generation of the Austrian school and of the Libertarian party as well, was a self-professed anarchist . . .’ (Reisman 1990, 5).

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See Rockwell (2000) for an exhilarating collection of such material. Rothbard adopted this name which he modelled on that of the nineteenth- century English voluntaryist and libertarian, Auberon Herbert. After Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk was perhaps the next most important member of the Austrian School of economics.

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Chapter 2

Rothbard – Libertarian

All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty. (Rothbard 2002, xlvii) Rothbard . . . devoted his professional career to developing a case for a radically libertarian or ‘anarcho-capitalist’ vision, captured positively in the pure theory of an unhampered market economy . . . and negatively in his critique of any and all forms of government intervention. . . . More than a pure theorist, Rothbard was a political economist in the broadest sense, one who engaged in revisionist history, naturalrights ethics, and ideological pamphleteering to further buttress his case for anarchism. (Prychitko 1997, 434)

Introduction Wendy McElroy claims that Rothbard created the modern libertarian movement inasmuch as ‘modern libertarianism is an identifiable structure of interconnected beliefs, and Rothbard was the first theorist to make those connections complete’ (McElroy 2000). In her view, Rothbard was a system builder who put together in a unique fashion elements that did not necessarily originate with him. The elements which she believes Rothbard integrated into a coherent whole include a ‘basic Aristotelian or Randian approach; the radical civil libertarianism

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of 19th century individualist-anarchists, especially Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker; the free market philosophy of Austrian economists, in particular Ludwig von Mises, into which he incorporated sweeping economic histories; and, the foreign policy of the American Old Right – that is, isolationism’ (McElroy 2000). Joseph Stromberg concurs with McElroy’s claim, making the point that while others had contributed various bits and pieces to the libertarian project, Rothbard attempted a grand synthesis of all that was worth preserving and carrying forward: ‘Before Rothbard there had been classical liberals teetering on the edge of anarchism. There had been free-market anarchists. There had been Austrian School economists. There had been upholders of natural law and natural rights. There had been “isolationists,” revisionist historians, and proponents of a critical sociology of the state. Murray Rothbard’s goal was a grand synthesis of all these forms of knowledge. The result was a powerful vehicle of political understanding and the intellectual weaponry with which to begin the process of fundamental change’ (Rockwell 1995, 45). In agreement with McElroy and Stromberg on Rothbard’s standing as a systematic thinker in general is Hans-Hermann Hoppe who writes: ‘Rothbard was above all a systematic thinker. He set out from the most elementary human situations and problem – Crusoe-ethics – and then proceeded painstakingly, justifying and proving each step and argument along the way to increasingly more complex and complicated situations and problems’ (Rothbard 2002, xxii–xxiii). In Hoppe’s opinion, Rothbard reunited economics and ethics, especially by integrating marginalist economics (Austrian) with natural law political philosophy, the resultant integrated entity being libertarianism. ‘Rothbard’s unique contribution is the rediscovery of property and property rights as the common foundation of both economics and political philosophy, and the systematic reconstruction and conceptual integration of modern, marginalist economics and natural-law political philosophy into a unified moral science: libertarianism’ (Rothbard 2002, xi).

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From a European perspective, there is something quintessentially American about Rothbard – in the way he spoke, the way he wrote, in the issues he chose to focus on. David DeLeon, writing on the theme of anarchism in America notes that while the nineteenth-century American anarchist Lysander Spooner and others explicitly influenced Rothbard, the social context of the United States was such that most anarchists were the ‘automatic product of the American environment’ (DeLeon 1978, 127). What was perhaps distinctly un-American about Rothbard was his stand for principle over pragmatism. He took the Austrian economics he learned from Mises, especially the centrality of laissez-faire to economic well-being, and combined it with the New England radicalism of Spooner and, in so doing, pushed the tenets of Austrianism to their logical conclusion. Of his American anarchist predecessors he wrote: ‘Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker were unsurpassed as political philosophers and . . . nothing is more needed today than a revival and development of the largely forgotten legacy they left to political philosophy’ (Rothbard 2000c, 205). Whereas thinkers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the early Herbert Spencer had realized the incompatibility of the state with liberty and morality and had asserted the right of the individual to escape the grasp of its encircling tentacles, ‘It was left to Spooner and Tucker to adumbrate the way in which all individuals could abandon the State and cooperate to their own vast mutual benefit in a society of free and voluntary exchanges and interrelations’ (Rothbard 2000c, 205–6; see Gordon 2007, 13). The presentation of the essentials of Rothbard’s thought in this chapter is organized under four headings: Rothbard – Praxeologist, Rothbard – Natural Law Ethicist, Rothbard – Enemy of the State, and Rothbard – Defender of Liberty.

Rothbard – Praxeologist Since the present volume is one in a series devoted to a consideration of conservative and libertarian thinkers, I am going to

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focus primarily on Rothbard’s contributions to political theory. I shall not discuss in any great detail the technical aspects of Austrian economics or Rothbard’s specific contributions to that discipline. Apart from two sections of this chapter1 and Chapter 3 (which contains a reasonably extensive review of Rothbard’s work on the history of economics) readers will find very little in this volume on such notions as time preference, on theories relating to the origin and nature of money, on banking, on entrepreneurship, on capital theory or on the structure of production.2 In the latter part of the nineteenth century, two very different methodological approaches to economics emerged in Europe. Adherents of the German Historical School (including Adolf Wagner, Karl Knies and Gustav Schmoller) approached economics as if it were a branch of history that could not be subsumed under universal atemporal laws of operation. Opposition to this point of view emerged among some Austrian thinkers, beginning with Carl Menger, who was professor of Political Economy at the University of Vienna for almost 30 years (1873–1903)3. Those who allied themselves with Menger and his systematic, theoretical approach to economics came to be called ‘Austrian’, which is as much as to say ‘provincial’, as compared with the presumably cosmopolitan inhabitants of Berlin. The Austrians (to begin with, Menger and his two original disciples, Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk) held that it was possible to discern in the processes of economics, theoretical structures that were not merely historically variable and that it was the task of economics as a discipline to articulate such invariable structures. Ludwig von Mises, a second-generation Austrian economist, adopted the term ‘praxeology’ to name the general, formal theory of human action of which economics was a particular exemplification and Rothbard followed his lead in this matter. Methodological Individualism As a branch of praxeology, Austrian economics is centred on human action and human action, whatever else it may be, is

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ineluctably particular.4 You cannot take a dog for a walk or post a letter in general; it has to be this particular dog, now, in this particular park and this particular letter to this particular person posted in this particular box. Collectives have a secondary mode of existence but ontologically they are simply a network of relationships among individual human beings. A family is a set of human beings related by genetics, upbringing and environment. A football team is a set of human beings related by a particular purpose which is determined by the constitutive rules of the game and the organizational rules of the governing association. If we like, we can say that the family did that or that the football team did this but to speak in this way is to make use of a useful shorthand. In the end, only individual human beings act (see Shand 1984, 4–6). Rothbard draws out methodological individualism as the first implication of the concept of human action. ‘The first truth to be discovered about human action is that it can be undertaken only by individual “actors.” Only individuals have ends and can act to attain them. There are no such things as ends of or actions by “groups,” “collectives,” or “states,” which do not take place as actions by various specific individuals’ (Rothbard 2004, 2). Although football teams or universities or society are not completely non-existent, for Rothbard they certainly do not possess a mode of reality over and above that of the individuals and the relationships among those individuals who constitute them: ‘[T]o say that “governments” act is merely a metaphor; actually, certain individuals are in a certain relationship with other individuals and act in a way that they and the other individuals recognize as “governmental.” The metaphor must not be taken to mean that the collective institution itself has any reality apart from the acts of various individuals’ (Rothbard 2004, 3). It should come as no surprise to discover Rothbard’s mentor, Mises, supporting the principle of methodological individualism (Mises 1996, 41–3). He postulates the common objection to the principle that human beings are always part of a greater social whole, that it is impossible to conceive of man as an

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isolated individual, that language is a social phenomenon, and that reason could only emerge ‘within the framework of social mutuality’ (Mises 1996, 41). Mises responds that the evolution of reason, of language, of cooperation are all of them the outcome of a process of change in individuals. Mises is quite willing to ascribe a measure of real existence to groups and even to grant them a determining role in human history. ‘Methodological individualism, far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation’ (Mises 1996, 42). Are Mises and Rothbard at loggerheads on this matter? No. Just as Rothbard does, Mises too asserts that ‘all actions are performed by individuals’ and that ‘a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members’ actions’ (Mises 1996, 42). What determines an action to be merely the act of an individual or, on the other hand, to be the act of a group – a state – is the meaning that is ascribed to that action. ‘The hangman, not the state, executes a criminal. It is the meaning of those concerned that discerns in the hangman’s action an action of the state’ (Mises 1996, 42). To recognize collectives is to exercise an act of understanding, not perception. Collective wholes ‘are never visible; their cognition is always the outcome of the understanding of the meaning which acting men attribute to their acts. We can see a crowd. . . . Whether this crowd is a mere gathering . . . or an organized body or any other kind of social entity is a question which can only be answered by understanding the meaning which they themselves attach to their presence. And this meaning is always the meaning of individuals’ (Mises 1996, 43).5 Economics and the a priori In any discipline, methodological considerations are not usually regarded as the most exciting matters that can come up for discussion. Nonetheless, if any discipline is to be successful, it is

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vital to get the method of approach correct. We have seen that the Austrians began by rejecting the historical, atheoretical approach of the German School. Somewhat later, they were forced to reject attempts to subsume human activities under a model of science derived from the example of the so-called hard physical sciences. In contrast to the German Historical School, the Austrians believed that there were laws governing human action and that these laws could be found and articulated; on the other hand, because of the unique nature of the object of study – man and his intentional actions – the Austrians were compelled to defend the claim that the mode of discovery of those laws was fundamentally different from that of the physical sciences.6 In an early paper, Rothbard distinguishes between the methods appropriate to physics and allied sciences and the methods appropriate to economics. In physics, the ultimate assumptions cannot be verified directly, because we know nothing directly of the explanatory laws or causal factors. Hence the good sense of not attempting to do so, of using false assumptions such as the absence of friction, and so on. But false assumptions are the reverse of appropriate in economics. For human action is not like physics; here, the ultimate assumptions are what is clearly known, and it is precisely from these given axioms that the corpus of economic science is deduced. False or dubious assumptions in economics wreak havoc, while often proving useful in physics. (Rothbard 1997c, 102) There can be no doubt that the outstanding theoretical advances in the physical sciences in the last two hundred years have sparked both admiration and envy from practitioners of other disciplines. If one identifies the methods of the physical sciences as the key to their success, the temptation to import those methods into one’s own less spectacularly successful discipline becomes almost irresistible. So, for example, in the

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mid-twentieth century, efforts were made to develop a so-called ‘Covering-Law Theory’ of history that would put history on a quasi-scientific footing (see Evans 1997). Somewhat similar, but in terms of its adoption by the members of the profession much more successful, was the adoption by economists at around the middle of the twentieth century, of the experimental, modelling, hypothetical-deductive method of the natural sciences. Rothbard notes that the technique of this methodology ‘is to look at facts then frame ever more general hypotheses to account for the facts, and then to test these hypotheses by experimentally verifying other deductions made from them’ (Rothbard 1997d, 17). But, he continues, ‘[T]his method is appropriate only in the physical sciences, where we begin by knowing external sense data and then proceed to our task of trying to find . . . the causal laws of behavior of the entities we perceive. We have no way of knowing these laws directly . . .’ (Rothbard 1997d, 17). The ‘positivist model’ of the scientific method is said to have the following steps: z z z z

the scientist observes empirical regularities, or ‘laws’ between variables; hypothetical explanatory generalisations are constructed which serve to explain these regularities; testable deductions must be made from the hypothetical generalisations to ensure they are not ad hoc; following the testing and modification of the initial hypotheses, a wider body of hypotheses is constructed which can be discarded if empirically falsified. (Rothbard 1997f, 29)

In order for this method to work, it must be possible to create experimental situations in which all the variables but one are held constant. However difficult this may be to accomplish in the natural sciences, in the human sciences it is impossible since the matter under investigation, human beings, will not lend themselves to controlled experimentation and since, moreover, the human sciences’ analogue of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

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comes into play in that the predictions that are made affect the outcomes predicted. But while the natural scientist is reasonably sure of his empirical regularities and holds his hypotheses with becoming tentativeness, the economist, as praxeologist, knows his fundamental principle, the action axiom, with certainty and moves outwards from it towards more concrete empirical laws. The Austrian School of economists has refused to concede that the method of the natural sciences is the only appropriate scientific method, arguing, as we have just seen Rothbard do, that the matters under investigation in the natural sciences and the social sciences are so distinct and different that it is a methodological solecism to attempt to apply the methods of the former to the latter. If the methods of the natural sciences are inapplicable to the human sciences, so too the methods of the human sciences are inapplicable to the natural sciences. Most people would have no difficulty assenting to the second part of this proposition but, if they are contemporary economists, they would have great difficulty in assenting to its first part. To attempt to transfer the method proper to the natural sciences to the field of the human sciences is not science but a kind of scientism. Although both kinds of science, natural and human, employ reason ‘it becomes crucially important . . . not to neglect the critical attribute of human action: that, alone in nature, human beings possess a rational consciousness’ (Rothbard 1997d, 3). The fact that human beings are rational conscious beings, and that the objects of study of the natural sciences are not, makes a crucial difference to the appropriate method. ‘To ignore this primordial fact about the nature of man – to ignore his volition, his free will – is to misconstrue the facts of reality and therefore to be profoundly and radically unscientific’ (Rothbard 1997d, 3).7 Rothbard attributes contemporary scientism in part to an overreaction to the excesses of distorted forms of Aristotelianism which had illegitimately attempted to import teleological methods into the physical sciences: ‘When the seventeenth century enthroned quantitative laws and laboratory methods, the partially justified repudiation of

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Aristotle in physics was followed by the unfortunate expulsion of Aristotle and his methodology from the human sciences as well’ (Rothbard 1997d, 18).8 Just as there are diverse physical sciences, so too there are diverse human sciences, each constituted by its own proper object. The study of formal means-ends relationship is praxeology. Economics is a subdivision of praxeology, to date, its only fully elaborated one. Economics deals with ‘the analysis of the action of an isolated individual . . . and . . . the analysis of interpersonal exchange . . . The rest of praxeology is an unexplored area’ (Rothbard 2004, 74).9 Rothbard sums up the relationship between praxeology and other disciplines as follows: psychology is the study of why man chooses various ends; ethics, the study of what ends man should choose; technology is the study of how to use means to arrive at ends; history, the study of what man’s ends are and have been and how man has used means to attain them. All of these disciplines are, in one way or another, concerned with material aspects of human choice. Praxeology, by contrast, studies the formal implications of the fact that men use means to attain various chosen ends and is not, as such, interested in their material aspects. It is, as it were, a kind of grammar of human action. The theoretical aspect of the field of the most developed branch of praxeology, economics, is constituted for Rothbard by one fundamental axiom and a few broadly empirical subsidiary postulates. The fundamental axiom is ‘Man acts’: ‘All human beings act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings’ (Rothbard 2004, 2). Action is purposeful behaviour directed towards the attainment of ends in some future period involving the fulfilment of wants otherwise remaining unsatisfied and involves the expectation of a less imperfectly satisfied state as a result of the action. The objects of human action and the human actions directed towards them are at once manifold and varied and yet ordered or at least capable of being ordered. If the objects of human action are so orderable, so too should the human actions directed towards them. There are many particular goods that can be chosen by us and yet it is important

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to us – that is, it is itself another good – that the selection of particular goods should be such that they do not clash with one another and cancel one another out. The good is sought in every limited and particular good and yet no particularized good can exhaustively express or contain it. There are always more and other goods necessarily excluded by our particular choices. An agent chooses means from his environment to achieve his ends and economises his means by directing them, in ways he deems (accurately or not) to be appropriate, towards his most valued ends. So, from the seemingly obvious and uninteresting axiom that ‘Man acts’, the most surprising consequences follow. According to Rothbard, ‘Some of the immediate logical implications that flow from this premise are: the means-ends relationship, the time-structure of production, time-preference, the law of diminishing marginal utility, the law of optimum returns, etc’ (Rothbard 1997c, 104). Why is the action axiom an axiom? For Rothbard, it is simply inconceivable that human beings should exist but not act. Attempts to deny this axiom are themselves instances of human action and so self-referentially incoherent. ‘[I]f a man cannot affirm a proposition without employing its negation, he is not only caught in an inextricable self-contradiction; he is conceding to the negation the status of an axiom’ (Rothbard 1997d, 6; see Rothbard 2004, 2). Rothbard appears to distance himself from Mises in his characterization of the action axiom. He regards Mises as defining the action axiom in neo-Kantian terms as a law of thought, whereas he himself, as an adherent of the epistemological-realist tradition of Aristotle and St Thomas, regards it as a law of reality. In the end, Rothbard betrays a certain impatience with the question of the appropriate labelling of the action axiom, holding that ‘the all-important fact is that the axiom is self-evidently true, self-evident to a far greater and broader extent than the other postulates. For this Axiom is true for all human beings, everywhere, at any time, and could not even conceivably be violated’ (Rothbard 1997c, 105). However one labels the action, it is ‘a law of reality that is not conceivably falsifiable, and yet is

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empirically meaningful and true’ (Rothbard 1997c, 105). Moreover, ‘it rests on universal inner experience, and not simply on external experience, that is, its evidence is reflective rather than physical . . . [and] . . . it is clearly a priori to complex historical events’ (Rothbard 1997c, 105–6; see also Rothbard 1997f, 32–3).10 The subsidiary postulates that are to be employed in the the oretical structuring of economics are few in number and even though empirical, functionally unfalsifiable. They are (1) the variety of human and natural resources (this gives rise to the division of labour and the market), and (2) leisure as a consumer good. Rothbard believes that only these two postulates are actually needed to complete the essential framework of theoretical economics. From the fundamental axiom and the two subsidiary postulates, economics can deduce the essential elements of Crusoe-economics, barter, and the monetary economy. ‘Once it is demonstrated that human action is a necessary attribute of the existence of human beings, the rest of praxeology (and its subdivision, economic theory) consists of the elaboration of the lo gical implications of the concept of action’ (Rothbard 2004, 72). He adds, a little later, that ‘Praxeology asserts the action axiom as true, and from this together with a few empirical axioms – such as the existence of a variety of resources and individuals) [sic] are deduced, by the rules of logical inference, all the propositions of economics . . .’ (Rothbard 2004, 75). Praxeology is presented by Mises and Rothbard as an axiomatic system with one axiom (the action axiom) providing its foundation and with ordinary verbal logic providing its rules of derivation. But it is difficult to see how anything can be validly deduced by standard logical means from a single axiom that isn’t that axiom stated in another way or simply a more restricted version of that axiom. Rather than think of praxeology as a strict axiomatic system on the model of Euclidean geometry, it might be both more insightful and give fewer hostages to fortune to conceive of it as the systematic conceptual exploration of a web of concepts that mutually imply one another, with the concept of human action ranking first among equals.

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Rothbard on Welfare and Economics For Rothbard, economics as a discipline is value-free. ‘[I]t should be clear that economics by itself cannot establish an ethical position. If an ethical science is possible, it must be built up out of data supplied by truths established by all of the other sciences’ (Rothbard 1997i, 232). In believing this, Rothbard is at one with the majority of economists. That being so, the singular task of welfare economics is to fly under the radar of the value-freedom of economics. ‘When can economics say that “society is better off” as a result of a certain change? Or alternatively, when can we say that “social utility” has been increased or “maximized”?’ (Rothbard 1997i, 233). In Rothbard’s view, ‘Individual valuation is the keystone of economic theory’ (Rothbard 1997i, 211) inasmuch as action results from choice and choice reflects values. Welfare theory bears on the relationship among the values (and choices) of more than one individual and Rothbard believes that he can provide a coherent account of it by using the concept of demonstrated preference. This concept holds that ‘actual choice reveals, or demonstrates, a man’s preferences’ (Rothbard 1997i, 212). Rothbard believes that demonstrated preference, ‘rooted in real choices, forms the keystone of the logical structure of economic analysis, and particularly of utility and welfare analysis’ (Rothbard 1997i, 212). Interpersonal utilities, not being commensurable, cannot be added or subtracted. Given that welfare economics is subject to what Rothbard terms the ‘Pareto Unanimity Rule’ which holds that a change, C, increases social welfare if and only if at least one person is better off and no one is worse off; if even one person is worse off, economics as a value-free discipline can make no supportable claim about overall welfare. ‘Any statement about social utility would, in the absence of unanimity, imply an ethical interpersonal comparison between the gainers and the losers from a change. If X number of individuals gain, and Y number lose, from a change, any weighing to sum up in a “social” conclusion would necessarily imply an ethical judgment on the relative importance of the two groups’ (Rothbard 1997i, 234).

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The Unanimity Rule would seem to spell the end for any viable welfare economics. Not so, according to Rothbard. He believes that ‘welfare economics can be reconstructed with the aid of the concept of demonstrated preference’ (Rothbard 1997i, 240). Uncoerced exchange on the free market shows that both parties to an exchange expect to benefit. The free market is not a substantive entity in its own right but simply a name for the constantly shifting set of individual exchanges. Rothbard concludes from this ‘Since every exchange demonstrates a unanimity of benefit for both parties concerned, we must conclude that the free market benefits all its participants. In other words, welfare economics can make the statement that the free market increases social utility, while still keeping to the framework of the Unanimity Rule’ (Rothbard 1997i, 240). Rothbard is insistent that only demonstrated preference counts when working out what others value; not what they may say they value but what they reveal they actually do value in their choices. He concludes ‘We are led inexorably, then, to the conclusion that the processes of the free market always lead to a gain in social utility. And we can say this with absolute validity as economists, without engaging in ethical judgments’ (Rothbard 1997i, 241). Now, Rothbard turns his attention to the state and its contribution (or otherwise) to welfare. State interference in exchanges (whether to prohibit exchanges that otherwise would be made, or to enforce exchanges that otherwise would not be made) demonstrably increases the social utility of government officials while lowering that of the coerced parties. Rothbard concludes from this ‘no government interference with exchanges can ever increase social utility’ (Rothbard 1997i, 243 italics in original). Putting it all together, we arrive at the following. Without employing any ethical system or principles or values, and using only the Unanimity Rule and the Principle of Demonstrated Preference, we can conclude that (a) the free market always increases social utility, and (b) no act of government can ever increase social utility (Rothbard 1997i, 243). David Prychitko contests Rothbard’s claim that he can show by purely formal economic analysis that no act of the state can

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improve social utility. He writes: ‘because we have no scientific measure whether there will be a net increase or decrease in overall utility, formal economic theory must remain agnostic about the state’s ability to influence social welfare’ and he concludes that ‘Rothbard’s a priorism has not established a valuefree, scientific case for outright rejecting the state’ (Prychitko 1997, 436, 437; see Prychitko 1993). He raises the following objection to the thesis that no government act can ever increase social utility. ‘Suppose . . . state officials enact policies to privatize industry, reduce deficits, and bring about a market economy’ (Prychitko 1997, 439). Given that such policies, though supportive of the free market, are nonetheless enacted by the state, it would seem to follow from Rothbardian principles that society after the policy changes would not in fact be better off. But this objection is relatively easy to meet. Rothbard’s contrast is between the welfare conditions produced by the free market, on the one hand, and the state, on the other, not between one form of the state and another. He is not committed to denying that a state that lessens its interference in the free market thereby increases welfare; the increase in welfare does not come directly from the act of the state but from the underlying market conditions, which are now being allowed to function more freely than before. A man was once asked why he banged his head repeatedly against the wall. He answered, ‘because it feels so good when I stop’. Similarly, a state can increase welfare only in the negative sense of reducing the level of its intervention. Rothbard on Mises Do praxeological considerations actually play a significant role in Rothbard’s libertarianism? It is clear that they play some part (we have seen how Rothbard thinks that welfare economics alone can demonstrate that the state is never a welfare maximizer) but clearly Rothbard needs access to significantly greater resources than this if he is to advance the cause of libertarianism. As did Rothbard, Mises advocated a society and an economy based on the principle of laissez-faire and he too held to a strictly

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value-free theory of economics. Unlike Rothbard, however, Mises firmly rejected the notion of an objective ethics. How was it possible for him to uphold the value-free character of economics, reject government intervention in the economy, advocate the free market and yet reject an objective ethics? According to Rothbard, Mises offered two defences of his position. The first was that even if an economist qua economist cannot say of a proposed government policy that it is good or bad, if it turns out that that policy has consequences that all its supporters agree is bad then the economist is justified in holding it to be a bad policy. Rothbard points out that this defence simply won’t do. People’s value preferences are subjective and are revealed only by their actions. How is Mises to know what the advocates of any particular policy consider desirable, either now or when the consequences of the policy appear? (Rothbard 2002, 207). Suppose that our economist shows that prices controls lead to shortages. Very well. But suppose that those advocating the policy of price control want shortages. They may be socialists who see price controls as a step on the road to collectivism; or nihilists, who desire to see the amount of goods available to the public reduced; or power-seekers who see possibilities for an expansion of their powers in a price-control bureaucracy. ‘In fact, once Mises concedes that even a single advocate of price control or any other interventionist measure may acknowledge the economic consequences and still favor it, for whatever reason, then Mises, as a praxeologist and economist, can no longer call any of these measures “bad” or “good,” or even “appropriate” or “inappropriate,” without inserting into his economic policy pronouncements the very value judgments that Mises himself holds to be inadmissible in a scientist of human action’ (Rothbard 2002, 208). Suppose further that we could show that most people would abhor the ultimate consequences of a given policy; even then, were a significant proportion of people to have a high time preference and were it to be the case that the abhorred consequences took some time to appear in contrast to

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the immediate benefits, Mises is in no position to criticize the policy proposers. ‘There is no way that [Mises] can assert the superiority of the long-run over the short-run without overriding the values of the high time-preference people; and this cannot be cogently done without abandoning his own subjectivist ethics’ (Rothbard 2002, 209).11 Mises’s second defence of his advocacy of laissez-faire and rejection of objectivist ethics is to concede that the economist qua economist cannot advocate laissez-faire but hold that the economist qua citizen can. His ethical commitment, as a utilitarian, is to the familiar utilitarian principle of the maximization of the greatest good of the greatest number. Even leaving to one side the familiar criticisms of utilitarianism (what’s so special about the greatest number? why should each person only count for one? why are the subjective desires of individuals sacrosanct?) Rothbard raises a number of objections to this second defence. Once again, while it may be the case that a praxeological analysis will show that laissez-faire policies will lead to harmony, prosperity and abundance, it could also be the case that many people might have values that rank higher on their subjective preference scale, such as widespread equality of income, or a ‘greener’ world. ‘What can Mises reply to a majority of the public who have indeed considered all the praxeological consequences, and still prefer a modicum – or, for that matter, even a drastic amount – of statism in order to achieve some of their competing goals?’ (Rothbard 2002, 211). Even though, in this second defence, Mises can employ the ethical principle of utilitarianism, it will not suffice to get him what he wants. ‘As a utilitarian, he cannot quarrel with the ethical nature of their chosen goals, for, as a utilitarian, he must confine himself to the one value judgement that he favors’ namely ‘the majority achieving their goals’ (Rothbard 2002, 211).12 In the end, then, Rothbard concludes that valuable as praxeological theory may be in the provision of data relevant to the formation of policies, it does not by itself have sufficient resources to justify the proposal of any particular policy. He writes:

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[W]hile praxeological economic theory is extremely useful for providing data and knowledge for framing economic policy, it cannot be sufficient by itself to enable the economist to make any value pronouncements or to advocate any public policy whatsoever. More specifically, Ludwig von Mises to the contrary notwithstanding, neither praxeological economics nor Mises’s utilitarian liberalism is sufficient to make the case for laissez faire and the free-market economy. To make such a case, one must go beyond economics and utilitarianism to establish an objective ethics which affirms the overriding value of liberty, and morally condemns all forms of statism, from egalitarianism to ‘the murder of redheads’ as well as such goals as the lust for power and the satisfaction of envy. (Rothbard 2002, 214, emphasis added)13

Rothbard – Natural Law Ethicist For a New Liberty was published in 1973, with the appropriate subtitle, ‘The Libertarian Manifesto’ (Rothbard 2006b). It contains not only a 90-page treatment of the principles of libertarianism, but also a 250-page treatment of specific applications of libertarian theory to particular areas such as involuntary servitude, education, welfare, inflation, the public sector, conservation, and war and foreign policy. And if that isn’t enough, Rothbard also provides a ‘how to get there from here’ section at the end of the book, ‘here’ being the status quo, and ‘there’ being the libertarian destination.14 The Ethics of Liberty (Rothbard 2002) was published some nine years later. Although the structure of the second book is very similar to the first, the philosophical treatment of the principles of libertarianism, while shorter, is also deeper. The section containing the application of the theory is at once more philosophically sophisticated and at the same time deals with a different range of problem areas: voluntary exchange, ownership and aggression, property and criminality, land theft, land monopoly, self-defence, punishment, children, bribery, the boycott, contracts, lifeboat situations, and

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animal ‘rights’. As is the case with For a New Liberty, The Ethics of Liberty finishes with a section on libertarian strategy. In the following exposition and critical discussion, I shall move freely between these two books. The applications of theory to practice are exciting, if occasionally controversial, and we shall look at some of them later in this chapter; the strategic sections are also controversial and I shall consider them in more detail in Chapter 4. However, the most important parts of both books are those in which Rothbard lays out the foundational principles upon which his version of libertarianism rests. If these principles are implausible or indefensible then the applications and the strategy become moot. ‘The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else’, aggression being defined as ‘the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else’ (Rothbard 2006b, 27; see Modugno Crocetta 1999, 10–12). It is important to note that this is not a pacifist’s charter. What is ruled out by the nonaggression axiom is the initiation of violence or the threat of violence against another’s person or property; it does not rule out the use of violence in the defence of one’s person or property. One may, of course, decline to defend one’s person or property by force but if so, that is one’s own choice. Although particular individuals have aggressed and still do aggress against other persons and property, Rothbard believes that, throughout history, ‘there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State’ (Rothbard 2006b, 28). What is special and significant about Rothbard’s treatment of the state and its agents is that he insists that the consistent libertarian should hold it accountable to the same moral norms as every other individual: ‘the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society’ (Rothbard 2006b, 28). Once it is conceded that the state and its agents

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must be subject to the same moral law as everyone else, many political problems simply disappear. Murder is murder, whether committed by an individual or by the state through its agents. Theft is theft, whether committed by an individual or by the state through its agents. The transparently obscurantist device of calling these ethical violations by other names succeeds only so long as people are willing to believe that taxation is not really theft and wars of aggression do not really involve murder. It is testimony to the power of long usage and propaganda that so many people do so believe. Taking it as given that the nonaggression axiom is foundational to libertarianism, how, if at all, is it to be grounded? According to Rothbard, it has three possible grounds: emotivist, utilitarian or one based upon a doctrine of natural rights. The emotivist holds the nonaggression axiom on subjective emotional grounds. Rothbard has no time for this position and quickly dismisses it as irrational. The utilitarian justification is, however, much more intellectually robust. The decisive move in any form of utilitarianism is the evaluation of whatever is under review – a proposed ethical decision, a business proposition, or whatever – by what amounts to a cost/benefit analysis. Means are to be adopted in respect of their capacity to bring about a desired and desirable end. The utilitarian libertarian adopts his libertarian perspective because he deems it to be more effective in bringing about his desired goals. But, as Rothbard points out, if ends can be morally evaluated, why not means? Moreover, and more significantly, utilitarianism has no effective or principled defence against the choice of morally dubious means, even aggression, should that be judged to contribute to the achievement of the utilitarian’s overall goals. Rothbard asks us to imagine a society in which redheads are considered to be agents of the Devil. In such a society, if it could be reasonably shown that, on balance, a policy advocating the judicial execution of all the redheads would produce a net gain in psychic satisfactions, what objection could a utilitarian have to its implementation?

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Rothbard now turns to his preferred option for the grounding of the nonaggression axiom, natural rights,15 which are themselves specific applications of the natural law (see Lottieri 2009). The heart of the natural law position is the claim that everything that exists, exists only insofar as it has a specific nature; everything is what it is and not something else. Among existent entities, some, such as living beings, are dynamic rather than static, and their nature consists of a set of basic capacities that must be exercised and realized if they are to flourish. Of all the things that exist in our world, man is the one whose nature is characterized specifically by his choice of goals and by his selection of appropriate means towards their realization. Although some among the higher animals exhibit anticipations of freedom, in this world of ours, only man is truly free. [T]he nature of man is such that each individual person must, in order to act, choose his own ends and employ his own means to attain them. Possessing no automatic instincts, each man must learn about himself and the world, use his mind to select values, learn about cause and effect, and act purposively to maintain himself and advance his life. Since men can think, feel, evaluate, and act only as individuals, it becomes vitally necessary for each man’s survival and prosperity that he be free to learn, choose, develop his faculties, and act upon his knowledge and values. This is the necessary path of human nature; to interfere with and cripple this process by using violence goes profoundly against what is necessary by man’s nature for his life and prosperity. Violent interference with a man’s learning and choices is therefore profoundly ‘antihuman’; it violates the natural law of man’s needs. (Rothbard 2006b, 33) In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard provides a fuller account of the concept of natural law than he presents in For a New Liberty. In contradistinction to his mentor Mises, Rothbard held that not only means but also ends were amenable to rational evaluation. ‘In natural-law philosophy, then, reason is not bound . . . to be a

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mere slave to the passions, confined to cranking out the discovery of the means to arbitrarily chosen ends. For the ends themselves are selected by the use of reason . . .’ (Rothbard 2002, 7; see also, 206–14). Natural law allows Rothbard to go beyond the boundaries of praxeology: ‘natural law provides man with a “science of happiness,” with the paths which will lead to his real happiness’ (Rothbard 2002, 12). Once again, Rothbard highlights the limitations of the praxeological approach. ‘[P]raxeology or economics, as well as the utilitarian philosophy with which this science has been closely allied, treat “happiness” in the purely formal sense as the fulfilment of those ends which people happen . . . to place high on their scales of value’ (Rothbard 2002, 12). The sceptic might raise the question about why any particular ends, such as life or the quality of life, has to be the object of human choice. Rothbard addresses this objection in The Ethics of Liberty using an argument that is not unlike that which would be later used by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his argumentation ethics: [A] proposition rises to the status of an axiom when he who denies it may be shown to be using it in the very course of the supposed refutation. Now, any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is, by virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life. For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion, indeed he would have no business continuing to be alive. Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion, and hence the preservation and furtherance of one’s life takes on the stature of an incontestable axiom. (Rothbard 2002, 32–3) Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in presenting his own defence of a private property ethics that agrees in its conclusions with Rothbard’s, nonetheless criticizes Rothbard’s natural law approach for employing a ‘concept of human nature’ that is ‘far too diffuse to allow the derivation of a determinate set of rules of conduct’ (Hoppe 2006, 345; see Hoppe 1990, 250). It is arguable,

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however, that the concept of human nature employed in Rothbard’s ethics is sufficiently robust to allow him to support his specific claims, including those regarding self-ownership and the ownership of external goods. There is nothing obviously idiotic in attempting to discern the qualities and properties of a given species that are more or less essential to that species. We could consider some properties to be more essential than others if they are in some way structurally or functionally effective throughout the whole range of an animal’s activities or at least the greater part of them. Prescinding from some special revelation, the only way to grasp the nature of any entity is by observing its characteristic activities and reactivities; unless you are the lucky possessor of a metaphysical microscope, if you want to know what something is you must see what it does. We move, then, in the order of discovery, from an entity’s characteristic activities and reactivities to the range of capacities that it must have if it is to be able to act and react in its characteristic way. Man’s rationality is obviously more essential to him than his being two-footed or featherless (Casey 2003, passim). Despite Hoppe’s express reservations, Rothbard sees no contradiction between his own natural rights position and Hoppe’s ‘genuinely new theory’: ‘As a natural rightser, I don’t see any real contradiction here, or why one cannot hold to both the natural rights and the Hoppean rights ethic at the same time’ (Rothbard 1988, 45; cf. Stolyarov 2007, passim).16 There are two basic positions in the debate over the relationship between conceptions of human nature and theories of ethics and politics. On the one side there are those who view any attempt to ground ethics/politics upon a reasonably ‘thick’ conception of human nature as illegitimate, whatever the actual contours of the theory of human nature may be. Typically, such theorists tend to view human beings as being plastic with a nature (if one can use that word) that is infinitely, or at least largely, revisable. Francis Fukuyama notes, ‘for much of this century, the social sciences have been dominated by the assumption that social norms are socially constructed, and that if one

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wants to explain some particular social fact one must refer . . . to “prior social facts” rather than to biology or genetic inheritance’ (Fukuyama 1999, 154). This assumption does not deny the obvious fact that the human body is a natural entity and not merely a social construct but ‘the so-called standard social science model asserts that biology governs only the body; the mind, which is the source of culture, values, and norms, is a completely different matter’ (Fukuyama 1999, 154). On the other side of the argument are those who accept the necessity of a theory of human nature for an adequate grounding of ethics and politics, though there are deep divisions among them as to what kind of theory best fulfils this grounding role. For some, the rejection of a human nature is simply a specific application of a general rejection of all natures or essences, that is, a rejection of essentialism. But this won’t do. Consider the following argument. The anti-essentialist must either simply assert the anti-essentialist thesis or demonstrate it via argument. The simple assertion of the anti-essentialist thesis carries no weight for what is simply asserted can simply be denied; therefore, the anti-essentialist must demonstrate the antiessentialist thesis via argument. However, if an argument for the anti-essentialist thesis is to be other than incidentally persuasive, it must be valid. But an argument for the anti-essentialist thesis is valid if and only if it exhibits the property of valid implication, that is, if and only if it is a token of the universal type ‘valid implication’. Hence, in order to prove the anti-essentialist thesis the anti-essentialist has to make covert use of essentialism. The antiessentialist is caught in an existential contradiction, a contradiction between the content of what is being asserted by the anti-essentialist in the anti-essentialist thesis and what the antiessentialist is implicitly committed to in making that assertion (see Casey 1992 and Casey 2008a; see Hoppe 2006, Ch. 11 and Appendix, and Hoppe 1989, Ch. 7). One further very important task which natural law allows Rothbard to perform is to distinguish very clearly between that law which is discoverable by the use of reason, on the one hand, and either custom or the arbitrary will of legislators, on the

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other. One might be tempted to think that a natural law approach is necessarily conservative in its orientation but nothing could be further from the truth. Customs, habits, traditions, statutes – all these are brought to the bar of reason to be judged and, if found wanting, to be rejected. ‘[T]he fact that natural-law theorists derive from the very nature of man a fixed structure of law independent of time and place, or of habit or authority or group norms, makes that law a mighty force for radical change’ (Rothbard 2002, 20). Finally, it is important to be clear that it is not Rothbard’s intention in either For a New Liberty or The Ethics of Liberty to provide a complete or comprehensive ethical system. He intends only to set out the essence of a political philosophy of liberty based on a very sharply focussed concept of justice. That a man should be free to perform act X and that no one may justly prevent him by force from so doing does not settle the question of whether, within the scope of a larger and more comprehensive ethics, it is right for him so to do. Followers of classical eudaimonistic ethics who accept the traditional idea that the virtues are co-implicative might worry that Rothbard’s notion of justice, being so sharply separated from the other virtues, cannot be fully rounded. To this, the response must be that while the concept of justice deployed by Rothbard is not fully rounded, it is not intended to be fully rounded, merely basic. However, it is in no way antagonistic to or subversive of a complete ethical system; rather it is fully compatible with any complete ethical system whose principles or applications do not violate the essence of liberty. There are two parts to Rothbard’s defence of the natural rights case for libertarianism. The first is the establishment of the right to self-ownership; the second is the establishment of the right to the ownership of external objects. Rothbard’s whole case depends upon the establishment of these two rights. Let’s take these in turn (see Hoppe 2006, 381–97). The two basic principles at work here – self-ownership and original appropriation – are not novel with Rothbard nor does he claim originality for them. Hoppe remarks ‘Rothbard saw himself in the role

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of a political philosopher as well as an economist essentially as a preserver and defender of old, inherited truths, and his claim to originality, like that of Mises, was one of utmost modesty’ (Rothbard 2002, xvii). Rothbard finds a source for the principles of self-ownership and original appropriation in the writings of the Late Scholastics and the early Moderns.17

Rothbard on Self-ownership Rothbard’s self-ownership argument can be found in For a New Liberty (Rothbard 2006b, 34) and in The Ethics of Liberty (Rothbard 2002, 45–7). Here is part of the relevant passage in its For a New Liberty formulation: The most viable method of elaborating the natural-rights statement of the libertarian position is to divide it into parts, and to begin with the basic axiom of the ‘right to self-ownership.’ The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to ‘own’ his or her own body, that is, to control that body free of coercive interference. Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation. (Rothbard 2006b, 33–4) The claim that if I own anything at all, I own myself is one of those that divides people. To some, it seems more or less selfevident to others, nonsensical. G. A. Cohen18 takes the notion of self-ownership seriously, finding it intuitively plausible. In his influential Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality19 he writes: The thesis of self-ownership has . . . plenty of appeal. . . . Its antecedent (that is, pre-philosophical appeal) rivals that of whatever principles of equality it is thought to contradict. . . . In my experience, leftists who disparage Nozick’s essentially

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unargued affirmation of each person’s rights over himself lose confidence in their unqualified denial of the thesis of selfownership when they are asked to consider who has the right to decide what should happen, for example, to their own eyes. They do not immediately agree that, were eye transplants easy to achieve, it would then be acceptable for the state to conscribe potential eye donors into a lottery whose losers must yield an eye to beneficiaries who would otherwise be not oneeyed but blind. The fact that they do not deserve their good eyes, that they do not need two good eyes more than blind people need one, and so forth – the fact, in a word, that they are merely lucky to have two good eyes – does not convince them that their claim on their own eyes is not stronger than that of some unlucky blind person. But if the standard leftist objections to inequality of resources, private property, and ultimate condition are taken quite literally, then the fact that it is sheer luck that these (relatively) good eyes are mine should deprive me of special privileges in them. (Cohen 1995, 70)20 Edward Feser has argued that Rothbard’s attempt to provide a grounding for the nonaggression axiom is evidence of muddleheaded thinking on his part.21 In particular, he notes, ‘while Rothbard sometimes speaks of self-ownership as axiomatic, he also often speaks instead of the “nonaggression axiom” as what is fundamental to libertarianism . . .’ (Feser 2009). He then goes on to ask ‘But if the nonaggression principle is itself justified only by reference to the self-ownership principle, in what sense is it “axiomatic”?’ (Feser 2009). There are a number of ways to handle Feser’s objection. The first is to note that there is nothing to prevent a principle being axiomatic in one field of inquiry yet non-axiomatic in another. Even if this were so, it would not seem to apply here, for both nonaggression and self-ownership seem to be principles in the same order of inquiry. If one is derived from the other then at most one of them can be axiomatic. If the nonaggression principle is derived from the self ownership axiom, then that would make the nonaggression

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principle a theorem rather than an axiom, and vice versa. I have already expressed the view22 that it might be more helpful to conceive of praxeology as a systematic mode of conceptual explication of a web of co-implicative concepts with the notion of human action as the concept first among equals rather than as a quasi-mathematical axiomatic system. Similarly, I suggest that in the ethical order, it might be more helpful to conceive of the principles of political philosophy as a web of co-implicative concepts with the notion of self-ownership as first among equals. In the end, the mark of axiomaticity (or whatever other term we might care to use) for Rothbard is inconceivability and for him it is inconceivable (which doesn’t mean immediately self-evident or verbally undeniable) that we should not be self-owners and that aggression should not be a fundamental violation of justice. One can take the following positions on self-ownership: one can hold that the concept is intrinsically incoherent; that it is coherent but insignificant; that it is coherent and significant but that its significance is self-limited; or, finally, that it is both coherent and significant, and that it has implications for the ownership of external objects. To that topic we now proceed. Rothbard on Original Appropriation Rothbard believes the articulation and defence of a doctrine concerning the appropriation of external objects to be a much more difficult task than giving a defensible account of selfownership. ‘It is comparatively easy to recognize . . . when someone is aggressing against the property right of another’s person. . . . But with nonhuman objects the problem is more complex’ (Rothbard 2006b, 35). If we witness what looks on the face of it like an act of aggression by Tom against the property of Dick it may just be that; on the other hand, Tom may simply be repossessing himself of what rightfully belongs to him and so, what appears to be an act of aggression is in fact an act of restorative justice. To know just what we are witnessing ‘we need a theory of justice in property, a theory that will tell us whether

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X or Y or indeed someone else is the legitimate owner’ (Rothbard 2006b, 35). The notions of self-ownership and the ownership of external goods appear to be connected (see Bylun).23 The free exercise of self-ownership seems to lead inexorably to an inegalitarian distribution of ownership rights to external goods. If one doesn’t want to end up a libertarian then one must, it seems, either deny that self-ownership does, in fact, lead to libertarianism, or else, despite its antecedent plausibility, reject self-ownership. Cohen chooses the latter route.24 Gordon asks the obvious question. ‘But why then is Cohen so anxious to give up self-ownership, a principle he has acknowledged seems plausible? He has no more to offer than the usual Rawlsian pabulum. It is “unfair” that, owing to genetic “luck” and other circumstances that people do not “deserve,” some are in a position to do vastly better than others’ (Gordon 1998b). Even if the right of every person to self-ownership is granted, it is still the case that the actual exercise of our right to selfownership is contingent upon our having an appropriate relationship with our material environment. We must breathe, eat, drink, and occupy space if we are to continue to exist, still more if we are to flourish: ‘Man . . . must own not only his own person, but also material objects for his control and use. How, then, should the property titles in these objects be allocated?’ (Rothbard 2006b, 37). The account Rothbard gives of this problem is, in the end, basically Lockean. Granted man’s ownership of himself, he owns his labour and whatever in the world has been transformed by the exercise of his labour assuming, for the sake of argument, the material thus transformed did not, before transformation, belong to another. Rothbard sees only three possibilities here: either (i) the labourer has the property right in the transformed material, or (ii) others have a right to that transformed material, or (iii) every person has an equal right to the ownership of the transformed material. Rothbard gives, as an example upon which to test our intuitions, the activities of a sculptor who fashions an object from some raw clay. He believes that ‘. . . there are very few who would

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not concede the monstrous injustice of confiscating the sculptor’s property, either by one or more others, or on behalf of the world as a whole’ (Rothbard 2006b, 38; cf. Rothbard 2002, 48). If this be so, then we can extend our principle of property acquisition to all cases of production that are not qualitatively different from that of the sculptor. So, those who dig the clay from the ground and prepare it for use have also transformed original material by the use of their labour and so they, no less than the sculptor, are the owners of what they have thus transformed. And so with fruit plucked from a tree or with any other appropriation of material, which was not previously owned by another.25 Of the three possibilities given by Rothbard, it seems reasonable in the cases just considered to reject the second and the third, namely, that others besides the transformer have a right to the transformed material. Still, one key problem remains. Even if we grant that the transformer has the right to the material transformed, the fruit plucked from the tree and so on, we may yet wonder who, if anyone, has the right to own the earth itself? Here, Rothbard parts company with the disciples of Henry George and with the majority of Marxists. ‘The Georgists argue that, while every man should own the goods which he produces or creates, since Nature or God created the land itself, no individual has the right to assume ownership of that land’ (Rothbard 2006b, 40). Once again Rothbard applies his analytical trident to this problem. If the land is to be used, it has to be owned, and there are only three possibilities – either (i) the land belongs to its first user, or (ii)it belongs to others apart from or in addition to the first user, or (iii) it belongs to everyone. A key presumption which determines how one approaches the question of land ownership, is whether or not one holds that prior to individual appropriation, the surface of the earth (a) belongs to everybody or, on the contrary, (b) belongs to nobody. If (a), then individual appropriation from the common stock requires the consent of all others to the appropriation; if (b), the consent of others is not required. Leif Wenar correctly points out a significant dynamic difference between the two

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conditions. In the ‘no ownership’ condition, ‘appropriation is unilateral, while in the “common-ownership” state any appropriation of private property requires the consent of all nonappropriators’ (Wenar 1998, 804). Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, libertarianism as such is not necessarily a ‘rightwing’ doctrine, as the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are commonly employed in political discourse. Socially, all forms of libertarianism would be identified with the defence of freedoms characteristically associated with the left. Libertarians across the entire political spectrum tend to agree on the matter of self-ownership but differ in their positions on the ownership of natural resources. Libertarians such as Rothbard believe that external resources belong to those who have appropriated them in a non-aggressive manner; left-wing libertarians believe that such resources belong to everyone. The ‘Mixing of Labour’ (to use the Lockean metaphor) or the notion of transformation, as Rothbard employs it, is reasonably clear in the case of the sculptor and that which he makes – it is not quite so clear in the case of land. Nonetheless, Rothbard believes that ‘the natural rights justification for the ownership of ground land is the same as the justification for the original ownership of all other property’ (Rothbard 2006b, 41). Neither in the case of the clay transformed by the hand of the sculptor nor in the case of land brought into use by the hand of the farmer is the original material created by him. In both cases, we have a transformation of what is originally simply given. ‘The homesteader, too, has transformed the character of the nature-given soil by his labor and his personality. The homesteader is just as legitimately the owner of the property as the sculptor or the manufacturer; he is just as much a “producer” as the others’ (Rothbard 2006b, 41).26 Despite its intuitive appeal, the notion of ‘mixing one’s labour’ is dangerously close to being merely metaphorical. It is difficult to see how it could be taken literally for, as Leif Wenar points out, labour is not a substance but an activity and therefore not something that can actually be mixed with anything else. Nozick

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has a well-known objection to the mixing of labour as a justification for original acquisition, the ‘tomato juice’ objection. Nozick’s basic idea is that if A and B are mixed together, there is nothing intrinsically determinative of whether one should attribute the resultant mixture to A or to B, or to A’s owner’s or B’s owner’s. If I mix what I own with what I don’t own, it seems an open question whether I should then be considered to own the resultant mixture or should be considered to lose what I have added to the mixture to the owner of the other material or be considered to have abandoned it if the other material has no owner. If I mix my tomato juice with the ocean, do I thereby come to own the ocean or do I simply lose my tomato juice? The response from the Rothbardian side would, it seems to me, have to assert the asymmetry of the entities that are, as it were, mixed or transformed. Ownership of one’s self is not contingent; ownership of things other than oneself is contingent. That being so, the mixing of one’s labour with what is naturally given or the transformation of the natural world by one’s actions results in the extension of one’s ownership of one’s self to the resultant mixture or transformed material (see Gordon 1990, 88–90). As with the notion of mixing, there are some difficulties with the notion of homesteading via transformation (that is assuming that the two notions don’t actually coalesce). Rothbard is clear that one cannot simply arrive on a land mass, say a large island, and claim that entire island as one’s own by a simple declaration. ‘Crusoe, landing upon a large island, may grandiosely trumpet to the winds his “ownership” of the entire island. But, in natural fact, he owns only the part that he settles and transforms into use’ (Rothbard 2002, 64). The limiting factor here is transformation. The sculptor transforms the clay, the miner transforms the original condition of the land. It is easy enough to see how this would continue in certain instances. For example, one who fences off an area of land, ploughs it, seeds it, waters it, weeds it, has transformed the original land in a significant way and it thereby belongs to him. So far so good. Suppose,

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on the other hand, that on my tropical island, the land between my house and the sea has never been transformed in any significant way by me, that there has been no mixing of my labour with it. True, I have walked upon this land on my way to take a swim in the sea but that hardly counts as transformation. (If I have fenced it off but not done anything else with it, does that constitute transformation? If so, why could I not then fence off the whole island and claim it as my property?)27 What counts as transformation? Suppose I domesticate some animals, which I then release to graze all over the island. Does the grazing by my animals constitute a transformation of the land in the required sense of the term (cf. Terrell 2000, 12)? Concerning the ‘mixing one’s labour with the land’ claim, the archetypical libertarians Linda and Morris Tannehill ask: Just how much labor is required, and of what sort? If a man digs a large hole in his land and then fills it up again, can he be said to have mixed his labor with the land? Or is it necessary to effect a somewhat permanent change in the land? If so, how permanent? Would planting some tulip bulbs in a clearing do it? Perhaps long-living redwood trees would be more acceptable? Or is it necessary to effect some improvement in the economic value of the land? If so, how much and how soon? . . . mixing one’s labor with the land is too ill-defined a concept and too arbitrary a requirement to serve as a criterion of ownership. (Tannehill and Tannehill 1970, 57–8) Of the three options just listed ((i) land belongs to its first user, or (ii) land belongs to others apart from or in addition to the first user, or (iii) land belongs to everyone) (ii) is really a non-starter. If option (i) is to be rejected, then there is no more reason – probably even less reason – to accept option (ii). Option (iii), however, has a certain initial plausibility. Here we have, on the one hand, the whole world, and, on the other hand, the whole human race. Why, it might be wondered, if there is to be

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ownership, should not the whole world be owned by the whole human race? Apart from the severe impracticalities of giving effect to this option (people are born and people die by the thousand every minute, so how would the allotments be made?) to hold it is, in effect, to hold that the earth is owned either by no one or, de facto, by a small group of would-be agents, claiming to represent everybody.‘It is difficult to see why a newborn Pakistani baby should have a moral claim to a quotal share of ownership of a piece of Iowa land that someone has just transformed into a wheatfield – and vice versa of course for an Iowan baby and a Pakistani farm’ (Rothbard 2006b, 42). Once justifiable rights to personal and non-personal property are established, the right to alienate all or part of that property follows without difficulty. To own X is not only to have the right to use it subject to the constraints of the nonaggression axiom, it is also the right to dispose of it to others by gift or sale. No principled problems attach to the alienation of non-personal property; of personal property, labour can certainly be alienated, at least temporarily. Whether or not it can be alienated permanently is a matter of some controversy. An attempt is sometimes made to distinguish effectively between human rights, on the one hand, and property rights, on the other. Human rights so considered would include the right to speak, think and write, the right to engage in noncoerced sexual conduct, and so on. Some liberal thinkers would want to defend such human rights without necessarily being committed to the defence of property rights. Rothbard, however, points out the untenability of the original dichotomy. We do not have two completely separate categories: human rights and property rights. ‘Property rights are human rights, and are essential to the human rights which liberals attempt to maintain’ (Rothbard 2006b, 52). The purported dichotomy is based upon an angelic conception of human nature, a treatment of human beings, which sees them as so many disembodied intelligences.

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The basic flaw in the liberal separation of ‘human rights’ and ‘property rights’ is that people are treated as ethereal abstractions. If a man has the right to self-ownership, to the control of his life, then in the real world he must also have the right to sustain his life by grappling with and transforming resources; he must be able to own the ground and the resources on which he stands and which he must use. In short, to sustain his ‘human right’ – or his property rights in his own person – he must also have the property right in the material world, in the objects which he produces. Property rights are human rights, and are essential to the human rights which liberals attempt to maintain. (Rothbard 2006b, 52) Wenar on Original Appropriation Leif Wenar believes that if libertarians could prove that ‘durable, unqualified private property rights could be created through “original acquisition” of unowned resources in a state of nature’, this proof ‘would cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of the state’ (Wenar 1998, 799). On the other hand, he also believes that none of the usual Locke-libertarian arguments, of which Rothbard’s is an instance, actually succeeds. He provides a useful 5-stage analysis applicable to original appropriation theories. Stage 1 describes what obtains in a pre-appropriation state of nature; stage 2 outlines the incitement to appropriation; stage 3 outlines the conditions of appropriation; stage 4, the method of appropriation; and stage 5, the duration and shape of appropriation. In Stage1, the pre-appropriation state of nature, there are two basic possibilities. Either one holds that in that situation no one owns anything (the no ownership condition) or one holds that everything is held in common (the common-ownership condition). In the no ownership condition the justification to be provided concerns original appropriation; in a common-ownership condition, however, the justification to be provided concerns original privatization, the removal of a section of a commonality from

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common usage. Wenar thinks that neither condition can simply be taken as the correct one – both are in need of justification. It is arguable, however, that the no ownership condition is the more intuitively plausible original state of nature. Imagine the planet with no human inhabitants, a situation that must, it would seem, have obtained. In this scenario, it is clear that no one owns anything since there is no one to own anything. Now imagine the same scene but this time with the addition of 100 human beings. Now who owns what? Is the whole planet now owned in common by the 100 human beings? Suppose they are living in caves on the side of Mount Kilimanjaro. Do they own Oklahoma? This seems radically implausible, so the thought experiment appears to come down on the side of the no ownership condition rather than the common-ownership condition. The position that one is antecedently prepared to defend tends to colour one’s intuitions in this matter. Peter Vallentyne puts the standard left-wing libertarian argument against the appropriation of external resources thus: ‘A main objection to this view is that no human agent created natural resources, and there is no reason that the lucky person who first claims rights over a natural resource should reap all the benefit that the resource provides. Nor is there any reason to think the individuals are permitted to ruin or monopolize natural resources as they please. Some sort of fair share condition restricts use and appropriation’ (Vallentyne 2009). G. A. Cohen has described Nozick’s position that the natural world is originally unowned as blithe’. On the contrary, Eric Mack argues that ‘surely the default position about “raw worldly resources” is that they are unowned. In the absence of credible positive argument for some form of original proprietorship over nature, the assumption that raw worldly resources are originally unowned is not blithe at all’ (Mack 2002b, 240). Wenar argues that the common-ownership condition renders any strong appropriation theory implausible. The argument is difficult to resist. There are two reasons why this is so. The first is the positioning asymmetry among the original inhabitants in

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the state of nature. Some are in one place, some in another; some come upon and appropriate property before others because of an accident of geography; some are possessed of superior powers to others. All these factors make it extremely unlikely that the common consent of all to any appropriation that is in any way durable is likely to be obtained. The second problem has to do with the dynamically shifting population. Children who were not born when any original consent was sought and obtained would not consider themselves bound by such consent. Why should they? Is the original agreement, then, to be constantly renegotiated or is constant redistribution of resources to take place in line with the constantly shifting population? It seems clear, then, that a requirement of common consent is incompatible with any robust system of lasting property rights (see Wenar 1998, 804–5). Eric Mack, too, envisages additional difficulties with how one would ‘answer all the natural questions about how one measures the total quantity of raw resources that are now or will in the future be available’ and all the natural questions ‘about how one determines the total number of present and future individuals among whom these total resources are to be divided’ (Mack 2002b, 241). Wenar envisage a four-stage defence of original appropriation rights: (1) original acquisition creates no new duties incumbent upon others; if (1) cannot be defended, then it is argued that (2) original appropriation creates duties but they are not burdensome on others; if (2) is not conceded, then it is argued that (3) the duties on others are burdensome but the original acquirer deserves what he appropriates; if (3) cannot be maintained, then we fall back on arguing that (4) others can be compensated for the burdens they have to sustain. Of these four defence strategies, the first is implausible. Rights and duties are correlative and it is inconceivable that one should have rights where others have no duties, even if only negative ones. The third and fourth lines of defence come in to play only if the second is unsustainable so if it can be defended, they need not be considered.

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Wenar’s argument that original appropriation creates burdensome duties is not ultimately sustainable. Original appropriation does indeed create duties but these duties are not burdensome for the most part inasmuch as they do not require anyone else to actually do anything but simply to refrain from certain actions. The duties could conceivably be burdensome in certain circumstances (such as routing around another’s property in going from A to B) but such burdens are not any more onerous than in alternative systems and usually, via negotiation and trade, much less. There is a further consideration. In the interests of sheer survival, human beings are obliged to make use of the resources of the world in a way that at some level or other is necessarily exclusive. The water you drink is denied to another. The fruit that I eat cannot be eaten by you. The land that Tom clears for the production of crops cannot simultaneously be used by Jerry for the grazing of cattle. Any productive use of natural resources is, then, necessarily exclusive at some level. The one excluded cannot complain inasmuch as his use of the resources would have been similarly exclusive. If it is argued that those excluded are entitled to some form of compensation, then the considerations already adumbrated relating to the non-limitation in either geographical or temporal terms of those persons entitled to be compensated would mean that any principled compensation principle would have the effect of making the actual employment of resources by anyone practically impossible. The central Rothbardian principles of self-ownership and original appropriation are not entirely unproblematic;28 however, that is a characteristic they share with all other accounts of the self and the just acquisition and use of external resources. Although further work needs to be done on the Rothbardian principles, I believe they are essentially correct and the only ones that preserve and express the core libertarian intuitions on self and world.

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Rothbard – Enemy of the State The tension between Liberty and Power is the dynamic upon which almost all of Rothbard’s work turns. The market, the network of free uncoerced exchanges, is the locus of Liberty; the primary locus of Power is the state. Power and Market,29 which was published in 1970, was originally intended by Rothbard to form part of Man, Economy, and State30 – indeed, Chapter 12 of Man, Economy, and State is a truncated form of Power and Market. The two works are now published together as was originally intended (Rothbard 2004). Here, I want to focus on those parts of Power and Market that could be seen as providing a bridge between the purely economic aspects of Rothbard’s thought and the more specifically political. David Gordon is right to stress that ‘Power and Market does not contain Rothbard’s ethical system; it is a work of praxeology and is thus value free’ (Gordon 2007, 23). Nonetheless, the topics that Rothbard broaches here are germane to the system of political ethics he developed in his later works. In Power and Market, Rothbard applies the results of his economic work primarily though not exclusively to the realm of power, namely the state, examining particularly its modes of intervention in the market. Intervention is the violent intrusion by an agent into free social or market relations. Rothbard provides a typology of intervention which, as far as I can tell, is both original and novel. Intervention can be autistic,31 binary or triangular. In autistic intervention, the intervener, I, either interferes with the person of S, an individual subject, or commands S to perform or to refrain from performing action A, where that action or interference bears on S’s person or property alone. In binary intervention, the intervener, I, forces S to exchange with I, or elicits a ‘gift’ from S. In triangular intervention, the intervener, I, compels or prohibits exchanges between pairs of subjects, S1 and S2 (Rothbard 2004, 1058; see Casey 2009a, 2). All three forms of intervention are

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hegemonic, that is to say, they belong in the arena of command and obedience, in contrast to the voluntary contractual relationships characteristic of the market. Human relations can be (i) one-one, (ii) one-many, (iii) manyone or (iv) many-many. Following the principle of methodological individualism, cases (ii), (iii) and (iv) ultimately reduce to (i). The market, however complex it may be, is analytically reducible to a complex of two-party exchanges. Human relations are either hegemonic (vertical), based upon command and obedience, or free (horizontal) and based upon agreement or contract. Where the relationship is hegemonic, as we have seen, there are only three basic possibilities. Rothbard instances murder and assault as examples of autistic intervention. These would be examples of S’s having to suffer radical interference with his person. Other instances of interference with S’s actions would include forcing him to speak or not to speak, to observe a particular religious practice or to refrain from so doing. Instances of binary intervention are not hard to come by – taxes, conscription, compulsory jury service and, Rothbard adds provocatively, highway robbery. Price controls, minimum wage laws, conservation laws, patents, antitrust laws, licences and tariffs are all examples of triangular intervention. Those on the left side of the political spectrum tend to object to autistic intervention and are libertarian in this area while usually being in favour of triangular intervention. Those on the right side of the political spectrum, in contrast, tend to object to triangular intervention and so are libertarian in this dimension, while being neutral or actively supporting autistic intervention, particularly in regard to the enforcement of public morals. Both sides take binary intervention to be basically unproblematic. The consistent libertarian, however, objects to all three kinds of intervention. The final chapter of Power and Market provides a tabular representation of the implications of holding to either a market principle or to a hegemonic principle in one’s political society,

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which I present here in a slightly adapted form (Rothbard 2004, 1365): Topic

Market Principle

Hegemonic Principle

1. Freedom

Individual Freedom

Coercion

2. Utility

General mutual benefit – maximized social utility

Exploitation – benefit of one group at expense of another

3. Conflict/ Harmony

Mutual Harmony

Caste Conflict

4. Violence

Peace

War

5. Power

Power of man over nature – most efficient satisfaction of consumer wants

Power of man over man – disruption of want-satisfaction

6. Calculation Economic calculation

Calculational chaos

7. Incentives

Destruction of incentives – capital consumption and regression of living standards

Incentives for production and advances in living standards

The State and Society Given one’s ownership of one’s self and one’s ownership of those things that one has properly appropriated, there may well be times when another person will attempt to interfere with one’s use of one’s property. The world is not now, never has been, and never will be, a utopia and there will always be those who prefer to live parasitically and criminally upon the efforts of others. To the extent that such people succeed in their efforts, to that extent is one’s liberty abridged. For really impressive interference with liberty, however, we must go not to your average criminal, but to an institution that takes aggression to a whole new level. ‘[L]ibertarians regard the State as the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public. All States, everywhere. . .’ (Rothbard 2006b, 56).

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Rothbard’s definition of the state is two-fold. The state is that organization that (i) ‘acquires its revenue by physical coercion’ and (ii) ‘achieves a compulsory monopoly of force and of ultimate decision-making power over a given territorial area’ (Rothbard 2002, 172). In both these aspects, the state interferes with the property and liberty of the individual. Through taxation, the state aggresses against the property of the individual, and through the variety of compulsory monopolies it enjoys, the state aggresses against the free exchange of goods and services in the area of which it claims control. If, then, taxation is compulsory, and is therefore indistinguishable from theft, it follows that the State, which subsists on taxation, is a vast criminal organization, far more formidable and successful than any ‘private’ Mafia in history. Furthermore, it should be considered criminal not only according to the theory of crime and property rights as set forth in this book, but even according to the common apprehension of mankind, which always considers theft to be a crime. (Rothbard 2002, 166) When one examines the rhetoric of defenders of the state, one point that comes across with monotonous regularity is the allegedly unique nature of the state which permits it to operate in ways not available to ordinary people. ‘Reasons of State’ is a full and complete justification for actions that we would ordinarily condemn as immoral or criminal or both. ‘For centuries the State has committed mass murder and called it “war”. . . . For centuries the State has enslaved people into its armed battalions and called it “conscription” in the “national service.” For centuries the State has robbed people at bayonet point and called it “taxation”’ (Rothbard 2006b, 56–7). But, as Rothbard points out, ‘The distinctive feature of libertarians is that they coolly and uncompromisingly apply the general moral law to people acting in their roles as members of the State apparatus’ (Rothbard 2006b, 56). And that is precisely the point. Applying our principle of methodological individualism, we can see that there is, in the end, no such thing as a state, if by that we mean an entity

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ontologically distinct from and superior to ordinary people. The state is simply a name for a particular group of people acting at a particular time in particular ways. The moral law applies to all human actors, whether they act as agents or principals, and whether they benefit personally from their depredations or not. Human beings organize themselves in multifarious ways either for their mutual betterment or for the criminal exploitation by one group of another. The state, on one level, is simply another organization. The state differs from all other non-criminal organizations, however, inasmuch as it receives its income by coercion and violence or the threat of coercion or violence (Rothbard 2002, 162). The state employs coercion and violence not only to generate its income, but also takes it upon itself to interfere, often radically, in the lives of what it is pleased to regard, with proprietorial pride, its citizens. The state is also the quintessential monopoly and the services it provides, such as they are, are provided badly and expensively. The monopoly power of the modern state extends widely ‘over police and military services, the provision of law, judicial decision-making, the mint and the power to create money, unused land . . . streets and highways, rivers and coastal waters, and the means of delivering mail’ (Rothbard 2002, 162). Some attempt to justify the state by claiming that the state is us or, somewhat less radically, that the state represents us, and so what may appear to be an interference with liberty is just simply an appearance. Manifestly, the state is not us (the common experience of oppression testifies to this) nor, somewhat less obviously, can it be said to represent us in any significant sense (See Rothbard 2002, 164–6 and Casey 2009a). In order for the state to function, the mass of the people has to believe in its necessity and legitimacy.32 To that end, the state employs a class of professional apologists and controls the means of propaganda, often through dominance of the education system. The function of these professional apologists, latter-day court intellectuals, is to persuade the public that only the state can provide for the common good and the public welfare, and that a whole range of services would not be provided at all if the state were not there to supply them. Rothbard therefore considers that

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‘one of [the libertarian’s] prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the State among its hapless subjects’ (Rothbard 2006b, 29; see Casey 2007, passim). The apologists for the state have to explain that murder is murder except when perpetrated by the state in war; that theft is theft, except when perpetrated by the state via taxation; that kidnapping is kidnapping except when perpetrated by the state in conscription. The purpose is ‘to convince the public that what the State does is not . . . crime on a gigantic scale, but something necessary and vital that must be supported and obeyed’ (Rothbard 2002, 169). In return for their services, the apologists are rewarded with power and status and allowed to share in the booty obtained from the masses. The conflation of state and society is a fruitful source of confusion. Of course human beings are not isolated individuals; of course we live in and can only flourish in society where ‘society’ denotes the sum of the complex, overlapping system of voluntary and status relationships between individuals. But it is a gross mistake to conclude from this that because we need society that therefore we need the state. ‘The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State’ (Rothbard 2002, 187). Not only is the state not equivalent to society, it is not, properly, even part of society, unless we are prepared to recognize criminal gangs as part of society as well. ‘[T]he State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and property of its subjects. Rather than necessary to society, it is a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off the productive activities of its subjects’ (Rothbard 2002, 187). Rothbard on Hayek The Mises–Rothbard tradition is not the only surviving strand of Austrian thought. As it happens, because of the award to him of

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the Nobel Prize for economics, the most widely known Austrian economist is neither Mises nor Rothbard but Friedrich Hayek.33 Hayek devoted the greater part of his later life to social and political analysis. Although Rothbard appreciates Hayek’s definition of freedom in The Constitution of Liberty as ‘the absence of coercion’ he has significant problems with Hayek’s extremely wide definition of coercion which, while it subsumes the central aspect of coercion, namely, the aggressive use of physical violence, also includes what Rothbard regards as peaceful and non-coercive actions as well. Hayek appears to regard all violence as being necessarily aggressive. In failing to distinguish between aggressive and defensive violence, Hayek’s account is defective in yet another respect. ‘Hayek’s justification of the existence of the State, as well as its employment of taxation and other measures of aggressive violence, rests upon his untenable obliteration of the distinction between aggressive and defensive violence, and his lumping of all violent action into the single rubric of varying degrees of “coercion”’ (Rothbard 2002, 226). Given Hayek’s broad definition of ‘coercion’, nagging, apparently, falls under that description but, as Rothbard notes, however unpleasant nagging may be, there is a clear difference in kind between nagging, on the one hand, and the use of physical violence to inhibit or prohibit certain activities (including nagging). However problematic the inclusion of such actions as nagging under the rubric of coercion may be, even more problematic for Rothbard is Hayek’s inclusion, under the heading of coercion, of certain refusals to exchange. The kind of situation Hayek has in mind is one in which, given conditions of widespread unemployment, an employer might use the threat of dismissal to obtain concessions not originally contracted for. But whatever the ultimate moral status of such a threat, Rothbard is clear that dismissal, which is simply a ‘refusal by the capital-owning employer to make any further exchanges with one or more people’, is, as such, an exercise of freedom. Another example of coercion given by Hayek that Rothbard finds unacceptable is

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that of the monopolist who refuses to sell a vital commodity to others in extremis except on terms that they find harsh and unwelcome. Once again, Rothbard says that assuming there is no antecedent wrongdoing by the monopolist, whatever the moral implications of his action, it cannot be considered coercion. Rothbard concludes, ‘[Hayek’s] middle-of-the-road failure to confine coercion strictly to violence pervasively flaws his entire system of political philosophy’ (Rothbard 2002, 225). If earlier Hayek had widened the notion of coercion to include non-aggressive actions, in other respects, he narrows the notion of coercion to exclude clearly aggressive actions. ‘In order to “limit” State coercion . . . Hayek asserts that coercion is either minimized or even does not exist if the violence-supported edicts are not personal and arbitrary, but are in the form of general universal rules, knowable to all in advance . . .’ (Rothbard 2002, 226). But such an account is scarcely plausible, given that it is easy to conjure up examples of patently unjustifiable actions and policies that could nonetheless be generally and known in advance, say, for example, a policy of culling 30 per cent of female infants under the age of two every four years. In a ‘Memorandum to the Volker Fund’ (Rothbard 1958b) which he wrote in 1958, Rothbard anticipates some of the points he makes in The Ethics of Liberty but he is much more forthright and scathing here than he is in the relevant section in The Ethics of Liberty.34 Expressing surprise and distress, he describes Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty as being ‘an extremely bad, and I would even say evil, book’ (see Gordon 2007, 68). Rothbard notes that while Hayek begins well by defining freedom as the absence of interpersonal coercion, when he comes to define coercion ‘the descent into the abyss begins. For instead of defining coercion as physical violence or the threat thereof . . . he defines it to mean: specific acts of one person with the intent of harming another.’ If you were to open a grocery shop next to Monopoly, Inc., the only grocery shop in the local village, it is very likely that this would have a damaging economic effect on Monopoly’s revenues but it would not thereby be a coercive act.

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On the other hand, suppose you bore a grudge against Monopoly Inc. for the high prices they had charged you for comics when you were a boy and that you had opened your shop with the specific intention of causing harm to Monopoly, then it appears that the act would be coercive. Rothbard is rightfully puzzled at this strange outcome of Hayek’s inflated conception of coercion. He claims further that Hayek endorses the principle that if government policy is laid down as a general rule in advance, then its effect is not coercive. Hayek’s specific application of this principle is to the military draft so that by my knowing in advance that I am to be drafted, my being drafted by the government is not an act of coercion. Of course, Rothbard has no difficulty exposing the absurdity of such a principle, pointing out ‘if everyone knew in advance that he would be tortured and enslaved one year out of every three, neither would this be coercion’. Rothbard regards what he terms Hayek’s ‘inordinate passion for the Rule of Law, and equality under the law’ as resulting from Hayek’s ‘brusque and cavalier dismissal of the whole theory of natural law . . . as “intellectually unsatisfying”’. Running together with this dismissive attitude to natural law (and natural rights) is ‘Hayek’s continuous, and all-pervasive, attack on reason’. Dismissing natural law/natural rights as a basis for a political ethics, Hayek is left with only two options: either a ‘blind adherence to custom and the traditions of the “social organism”, or the coercive force of government edict’. The latter coercive option is identified with rationalism and so the attack on coercion becomes an attack on reason. [F]or Hayek, reason, rationalism, is synonymous with government coercion, and coercion can only be attacked by also attacking reason, and saying, over and over again, that we must do despite that we know not what or why we are doing. Not realizing that reason is in fact the very opposite of coercion, that force and persuasion are antitheses, and that this was so considered by the rationalist libertarians, Hayek constantly confuses traditions and concepts. Also he doesn’t seem to

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fully realize the paradox of using reason, as he tries to do, to attack reason. (Rothbard 1958b) Hayek, then, for Rothbard, must be taken to be, in effect, a ‘New Conservative’ inasmuch as ‘he believes that we must blindly follow traditions even if we can’t defend them’ (Rothbard 1958b). Rothbard sums up Hayek’s overall position in the following way: traditional social institutions are to be accepted on blind faith and without adequate reason; reason cannot discover moral principles or justice; the argument for freedom rests on ignorance; and freedom means equality under the law, whatever the content of legal rules.

Rothbard – Defender of Liberty The theoretical grounding of libertarianism is very important and it must be theoretically defensible if libertarianism is to have a future. Most people, however, are also interested in seeing how the theory works out in practice and here Rothbard does not disappoint. He provides an analysis of a whole range of topics, many of them controversial even within libertarian circles. Among the topics Rothbard treats are involuntary servitude, personal liberty, education, welfare and the welfare state, inflation and the business cycle, the public sector: government in business, conservation, war and foreign policy, land theft and monopoly, self-defence, punishment, children, blackmail, bribery, contracts, lifeboat situations and animal rights. What follows is a brief sample account of some of these topics.

Involuntary Servitude If there is one thing that should be foundationally incompatible with liberty, it is involuntary servitude. Well, one might think, slavery is long gone, so what’s the problem? Conscription, for one thing, is a problem. Until very recently, many states have

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asserted the right to force a section of their population into the armed forces and have acted on that right. Although conscription is not at present widely employed in the West, so far as I know, no state has relinquished its right to conscript. We react with horror to stories from history of press gangs roaming towns and cities and dragging men off forcibly to serve in the Navy yet what is the principled difference between impressment and conscription except that one is more obviously brutal and the other somewhat less so. What of voluntary enlistment in the armed forces? Is that problematic? Not as such. What happens, however, if before his term of enlistment is up, a man decides to leave? Has not the enlisted man engaged to serve for a fixed term? What then could possibly be problematic about not allowing him to derogate from this freely arrived at agreement? ‘Can he,’ Rothbard asks, ‘or should he be forced by the monopoly of weaponry of government to keep working for the remainder of his term?’ (Rothbard 2006b, 100). Rothbard clearly thinks the answer to this question is no. ‘[T]hat would be forced labor and enslavement. For while it is true that he made a promise of future work, his body continues, in a free society, to be owned by himself alone’ (Rothbard 2006b, 100). Not every libertarian agrees with Rothbard on this point. Chief among those who disagree with Rothbard is Walter Block. The question is, is it morally possible for a person voluntarily to sell himself into slavery? Rothbard – and here he is joined in substance by Randy Barnett, David Gordon, Stephan Kinsella and others – is of the view that this is not possible. ‘The concept of “voluntary slavery” is indeed a contradictory one, for so long as a laborer remains totally subservient to his master’s will voluntarily, he is not yet a slave since his submission is voluntary; whereas, if he later changed his mind and the master enforced his slavery by violence, the slavery would not then be voluntary’ (Rothbard 2002, 41). Walter Block, however, argues on the contrary that ‘If I own something, I can sell it. . . . If I can’t sell it, then, and to that extent, I really don’t own it. . . . if I really own

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my liberty, then I should be free to dispose of it as I please, even if, by so doing, I end up no longer owning it’ (Block 2003, 44). In the context of considering objections to the doctrine of selfownership, Peter Vallentyne raises the issue of voluntary slavery (Vallentyne 2009). Noting Rothbard’s objection to this doctrine, Vallentyne believes Rothbard to be mistaken. Rothbard’s fundamental objection to the doctrine appears to be that another cannot control one’s will, but Vallentyne believes that what is at stake is not the psychological capacity to control another but rather the right to use another permissibly. Block, it would seem, would agree: ‘What, precisely, did the slave owner in Alabama in 1835 get from his slave? Moral agency? Will? Heartfelt and cheerful obedience? None of the above. The master only received the privilege that when and if he used violence against the slave, he would not be penalized by law for assault, battery and kidnapping, as he would have been had he carried out these acts against a free person. That is all that voluntary slavery would give the owner; not moral agency or will or anything else discussed by the critics of voluntary slavery’ (Block 2003, 81). Rothbard objects to anti-strike laws on similar grounds. Though no lover of Trades Unions or of the coercive tactics frequently employed by them, Rothbard nonetheless believes that at least that element of the strike which is constituted by the withdrawal of labour should not be prohibited by law. Here, as in the enlistment case, the argument could be made (and presumably would be made by Block) that the strikers engaged to serve for a fixed period and so their labour for that period, having been alienated by them, should be subject to legal enforcement. Taxation, although essentially theft, may also be viewed as a form of involuntary servitude. If, let us say, your tax amounts to 25 per cent of your total income, then you are, in effect, being forced to work one quarter of your time for the state. And if this weren’t bad enough, in many countries, people are legally required to complete and return a tax form, which again is a form of involuntary labour and one for which they receive no

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compensation – who would complete such a form unless obliged to do so by the threat of legal penalties? Rothbard has much to say on the matter of the provision of legal services and we’ll come to that in due course. Suffice it to point out, in the context of involuntary servitude, that the compellability of testimony in law cases is a kind of forced labour. Rothbard argues, ‘the entire power to subpoena should be abolished, because the subpoena power compels attendance at a trial. Even the accused criminal or tortfeasor should not be forced to attend his own trial, since he has not yet been convicted’ (Rothbard 2006b, 107). Other aspects of legal practice that attract Rothbard’s criticism are pre-trial imprisonment (except where the alleged criminal has been caught in the act and so there is a reasonable presumption of guilt), contempt of court and compulsory jury service. Compulsory commitment of individuals to psychiatric institutions is clearly a form of involuntary incarceration and servitude. Thomas Szasz, the libertarian psychiatrist, has made it his life’s work to fight against this and other socio-medically approved restrictions of liberty (Rothbard 2006b, 111–13, 399; see Szasz 1970; 1974; 1978; 1987; 1996). Personal Liberty A number of important issues fall under this head. Let’s begin with free speech. Are we or should we be free to say whatever we like about whomever or whatever we like? The libertarian answer, in brief, is yes. This has a number of controversial implications. In most jurisdictions, one finds on the statute books, crimes of incitement, conspiracy and attempt. Whatever about the alleged inchoate crime of attempt, the alleged crimes of incitement and conspiracy are problematic from a libertarian perspective. If I advise, counsel or exhort someone to commit a crime, as things stand, I render myself open to criminal prosecution. The morality of such advice, counsel or exhortation is not in question – some may think it good, others bad – what is to be considered is

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whether such acts should be illegal. In general, the law requires there to be a causal link between allegedly criminal acts and consequences. But, as Rothbard points out, unless man’s freedom of the will has been abrogated, I cannot, simply by means of my advice, counsel or exhortation, compel someone to commit a criminal act. Having heard what I have to say, the decision to act or not to act remains the prerogative of the agent. Similar considerations apply to the putative crimes of conspiracy. Needless to say, if the advisor or the conspirator ceases merely to talk and begins to act physically in a criminal manner, then matters are entirely different but until he does so he has not, in Rothbard’s opinion, committed any act for which he should be criminally liable. The laws on libel and slander vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but, wherever they are to be found, they constitute a serious infringement on a man’s freedom to speak and write. Once again, we must distinguish between what is morally opprobrious and what should be legally considered to be so. Traditional moral theology identifies the sins of detraction and calumny – the former being the unwarranted revelations of true facts about X that have the result of damaging X’s reputation; the latter being the spreading of untruths about X that have the result of damaging X’s reputation. Many people would agree on the general moral reprehensibility of such conduct. However matters may lie morally, should such conduct be legally prohibited? If so, on what basis? The legal basis of the laws on libel and slander appear to rest on an assumption that a man has a property right in his reputation but, as Rothbard notes, ‘someone’s “reputation” is not and cannot be “owned” by him, since it is purely a function of the subjective feelings and attitudes held by other people’ (Rothbard 2006b, 117). Once the conceptual connection between liberty and property is established, many apparently intractable problems can be resolved with relative ease. To put the matter somewhat crudely, we might express the liberty-property principle as ‘my house, my rules’. On my property, no one has the right to speak, organize a meeting, demonstrate or picket unless I grant him permission

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so to do. Indeed, no one has a right to even be on my property without my permission and I have the right to remove or arrange the removal of such a person subject only to the condition that in so doing I am not myself guilty of acts of aggression. The reason I am not permitted to shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded cinema is not because there is some metaphysical zone beyond which my otherwise limitless freedom of speech fails to extend, it is simply a matter of determining what the appropriate property rights of any given situation are. When you purchase a ticket for a film, what you are granted is a licence peacefully to enter the cinema and to remain there for the duration of the performance. Your licence doesn’t permit you to set up a hamburger stand there or to begin to play table tennis with some other licensees. Similarly, it doesn’t permit you to disrupt the performance by loud conversations with your neighbours or to interrupt the performance by shouting out any words. To stand up in the middle of the cinematic performance and shout out ‘Basingstoke’ is every bit a violation of the conditions of your licence as it is to shout out ‘Fire!’, albeit somewhat less spectacular in its results (see Rothbard 2006b, 53). Boycotting is another activity that is dubiously illegal. Insofar as it does not involve associated incidental acts of criminality, the boycott itself is a matter of organizing the withdrawal of business from a particular enterprise through advocacy. If force or coercion is used, then of course we have something entirely different. What of picketing and demonstrations? Assuming the picketers and demonstrators have a right to occupy the place on which the picketing or demonstrating is taking place (and that’s a big assumption) then, unless the picketing or demonstration necessarily involves some other illegal act, it is legitimate. Pornography is a particularly troubling issue for libertarians with conservative leanings. Once again, we must invoke the distinction between the immoral and the illegal. Rothbard distinguishes emphatically between ‘a man’s right and the morality or immorality of his exercise of that right’ (Rothbard 2002, 24). The possession of a right is one thing; its exercise is quite

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another. ‘But what may be the moral or immoral ways of exercising that right is a question of personal ethics rather than of political philosophy – which is concerned solely with matter of right, and of the proper or improper exercise of physical violence in human relations’ (Rothbard 2002, 24). The issue, then, is not whether pornography is immoral or degrading or whether it is a liberal expression of spontaneous sexuality. Such matters are relevant in determining the morality of pornography; none of them is relevant to the question of whether or not pornography should be legally prohibited. The only question here, for the libertarian, is whether the law should be used to enforce a particular morality where the issue in question does not pertain to the matter of defending people against aggression directed at their persons or property, and the libertarian answer is clear – the law has no business enforcing purely moral considerations. By now, it should be apparent how a libertarian, on Rothbard’s view, should analyse and respond to a whole range of practical matters. When it comes to considering whether to recognize actions or behaviours as criminal, one must ask if they involve aggression against the person or properties of others. If not, whatever view one may entertain of their morality or desirability, they should not be the subject of legal prohibition. Using this criterion, we would see the repeal of laws on prostitution, gambling, the sale and use of narcotics, and laws prohibiting the purchase and possession of guns. The Public Sector The experience of many libertarians has been that the objection most often raised against a completely free-market approach to provision of all goods and services is that there are simply some goods and services that do not lend themselves to such an approach. We are told that only a state can provide a road system, a rail system; only a state can organize the airwaves so that chaos is prevented; only a state can arrange for the safe and reliable

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delivery of water and the removal and disposal of waste; only a state can provide policing and the administration of justice. The short answer to these objections is simply to point out that, as a matter of historical fact, all these goods and services were provided by non-state individuals and agencies in the past; that while a state can of course provide all these goods and services, as a monopoly provider its provision of them will invariably be inept and expensive. The short answer, however, rarely satisfies the objector and so Rothbard provides an extensive and detailed discussion of these matters. Although there are difficulties associated with the freemarket provision and operation of roads, utilities (water, waste, electricity, etc.) and so on, in the end, such difficulties are not insuperable. The real sticking point when it comes to a fullblooded acceptance of the Rothbardian proposal is the alleged inability of the free market to supply policing, legal and judicial services. Rothbard recognizes this as the most difficult task of the anarcho-capitalist libertarian. ‘How could private enterprise and the free market possibly provide such service? How could police, legal systems, judicial services, law enforcement, prisons – how could these be provided in a free market?’ (Rothbard 2006b, 267). Take policing first. One must recognize immediately that police protection is not a single, indivisible service provided uniformly over a given area. How many policemen there shall be, what equipment they shall have, where they shall be located, what crimes shall attract their attention and be prioritized – all these are decisions that must be made by whoever is responsible for the provision of this service. As with any other service – food supply, road pricing – the monopolistic state has no rational way of making decisions on these matters. ‘The government only knows that it has a limited budget. Its allocations of funds are then subject to the full play of politics, boondoggling, and bureaucratic inefficiency . . .’ (Rothbard 2006b, 268). On the free markets, customers would get as much protection as they were willing to pay for.

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Which laws should our police forces enforce? Again, in staterun police forces, these matters are determined by political considerations that may, but very often do not, respond to the actual needs of individuals. Given the staggering profusion of laws, a policy of zero tolerance is simply not possible, even assuming it were otherwise desirable. Many laws currently on the statute book are of benefit to nobody but the state that makes them. Customers in the real world, on the other hand, would be willing to pay only for the enforcement of those laws that actually protect their lives and property and would be reluctant to pay for the enforcement of laws the purpose of which is to interfere in matters of which our legislators disapprove. ‘[T]here is no reason to assume a priori, as many people do, that there is something divinely ordained about having only one police agency in a given geographical area’ (Rothbard 2006b, 271). If there were more than one such agency, isn’t there a possibility that there might be clashes between the rival police forces? Yes – anything is possible; but given the high transaction costs of conflict and given that the costs would have to be borne by the agencies themselves and not the unfortunate taxpayer, such conflicts are unlikely to arise. It is in the interests of such agencies to make sure that conflicts and possible conflicts are amicably, speedily and efficiently resolved. To do that, there has to be a viable dispute resolution mechanism, and that brings us to a consideration of the systems of courts. State courts are notoriously backlogged, slow, costly and unpredictable. The standard advice given by responsible lawyers to their clients is to stay out of the courts. But surely, it will be objected, whatever about private police agencies, there cannot be private courts. If such were the case, wouldn’t we get the anarchy, the rampant chaos, beloved of political theorists? The first point to make here is that much of the difficulty in accepting as viable the libertarian proposals in this area arise from a simple failure of historical imagination. Because things are the way they are, we tend to presume that this is how they always have been and always must be. So, because we have a

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state-supported monopolistic court system, we tend to assume that this is how things have always been and how they have to be. But a glance at our history will dispel the notion that things have always been this way. Europe had multiple and overlapping legal jurisdictions for most of its history (see Berman 1983) and it is really only since the emergence of the modern state in the seventeenth century that we have had the development, under state control, of the monopolistic state-run judicial systems with which we are acquainted. Most people believe that the state is necessary for the creation and development of law. The most common method of lawmaking in operation today is the enactment of statutes by legislative bodies such as the UK Parliament or the US Houses of Congress. Such is the force of what exists that many people find it difficult to conceive and to believe that such a state of affairs is historically contingent. For most law, but especially the most libertarian parts of the law, emerged not from the State, but out of non-State institutions: tribal custom, common-law judges and courts, the law merchant in mercantile courts, or admiralty law in tribunals set up by shippers themselves. In the case of competing common-law judges as well as elders of tribes, the judges were not engaged in making law but in finding the law in existing and generally accepted principles, and then applying that law to specific cases or to new technological or institutional conditions. The same was true in private Roman law. Moreover, in ancient Ireland, a society existing for a thousand years until the conquest by Cromwell, ‘there was no trace of State-administered justice’; competing schools of professional jurists interpreted and applied the common body of customary law . . . (Rothbard 2002, 178; see Berman 1983, and Casey 2010b) In a libertarian legal code, custom and traditional practice could not be the ultimate criteria of what the law would be. Any such law code would have to be based on the principle of

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nonaggression, with elaborated principles of property rights and rules of evidence. Some may doubt that any stable and consistent law code could be constructed on libertarian principles. Rothbard disagrees. Not only are [libertarian law codes] possible, but over the years the best and most successful parts of our legal system were developed precisely in this manner. Legislatures, as well as kings, have been capricious, invasive, and inconsistent. They have only introduced anomalies and despotism into the legal system. In fact, the government is no more qualified to develop and apply law than it is to provide any other service; and just as religion has been separated from the State and the economy can be separated from the State, so can every other State function, including police, courts, and the law itself! (Rothbard 2006b, 282–3) The important rhetorical point of the historical examples of functioning anarchic societies and the contemporary evidence of functionally anarchic elements in statist societies (e.g. private arbitration companies) is, among other things, to emphasize the sheer contingency of what seems like a necessity – to show that it wasn’t always like this, that it isn’t like this everywhere or in every respect even now, and that it doesn’t have to be like this. Bruce Benson, in The Enterprise of Law (Benson 1990) shows clearly that the system of criminal law which we now possess – state legislatures,35 public prosecution, prisons, juries, crimes against the state, public police forces – all of which seem as if they sprang, like Venus, fully armed from the head of Jove, are merely historically contingent developments. Moreover, the pressure for these developments came not from any perceived increase in efficiency but from motives that were far less noble. And Harold Berman demonstrated in his remarkable book Law and Revolution (Berman 1983) that legal polycentrism was the norm in medieval Europe for many hundreds of years.

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Conclusion There may be those who think that Wendy McElroy overstated her case in claiming that Rothbard created the modern libertarian movement. Looking at the evidence objectively, however, one has to admit that even though many of the ingredients of contemporary libertarianism were originated and developed by his predecessors – the anarchism of Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, the economics of Ludwig von Mises and other Austrians, the anti-war sentiments of the Old Right – Rothbard brought all these elements together in a new and potent theoretical and practical synthesis which, powered by his rhetorical and dialectical skills, created a new platform on which subsequent defenders of liberty could stand.

Notes 1

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‘Economics and the a priori’ (26–32 above), and ‘Rothbard on Welfare and Economics’ (33–35 above). See Gordon (2007, 14–41) for a concise and accurate guide to Rothbard’s economic achievements. Readers are referred to Man, Economy and State (Rothbard 2004) and, for a convenient source for largely, though not exclusively, economics articles, to The Logic of Action One and The Logic of Action Two (Rothbard 1997a and 1997b). According to Rothbard, the roots of Austrianism go much further back (Rothbard 1997f, 41ff). For a more extended account of the early Austrian School, see Mises (1984). Together with William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras, Menger originated the theory of subjective value based on diminishing marginal utility. (The English economist Alfred Marshall credits the English term to Wieser’s notion of Grenznutzen) (see Mises 1996, 119–27; Rothbard 2004, 21–33). Human action manifests itself in choice and choice is not of a good just as such, whether water or wheat or butter, but of a definite quantity or amount of a good – a litre of water or a bushel of wheat or a quarter pound of butter. The smallest amount of a good that may be the object of choice may be called a unit. The marginal utility of a good (or service) is the utility of the specific use to which an actor would apply an increase in the supply of units of that good (or service) or of the specific use that

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would be given up in response to a given decrease in the supply of units of that good (or service). ‘Valuation is always directed toward a definite quantity of a particular good or service. Choices and decisions are not concerned with the whole supply of a certain good or service. . . . Each additional unit of a particular good is devoted to a use that is less important and urgent than the use to which the preceding unit was applied’ (Taylor 1980, 41). The principle of diminishing marginal utility is now a commonplace of almost all forms of economics and so does not serve as a uniquely distinguishing character of Austrianism. Much more characteristic of the uniqueness of Austrian economics are its rejection of the explanatory power of aggregates (methodological individualism) and its emphasis on an a priori approach to the fundamental theoretical structure of economics. For a detailed and critical discussion of the Austrian conception of methodological individualism, see Nozick (1977, 353–61). See, in response, Block (1980, 398–408). For a detailed and critical examination of the Austrian conception of the a priori, see Nozick (1977 361–9). See, in response, Block (1980 409–22). In his general discussion on the philosophy of science, the philosopher Daniel Hausman notes that although ‘Modern physics has refuted Kant’s view that the axioms of Euclidean geometry are a priori truths . . . Kant’s general position still has supporters. Modern “Austrian” economists, especially Ludwig von Mises and his followers, believe that the fundamental postulates of economics are synthetic a priori truths’ (Hausman 1992, 303). Unfortunately, having tantalizingly said this much, Hausman declines to consider these views directly, but instead focuses on what he terms the ‘generally empiricist views of theory assessment’ (Hausman 1992, 303). According to Hausman, Mill’s view of economics as an inexact science and its method as deductive or a priori was adopted by his followers and by early neoclassical methodologist. Hausman thinks that this is still the view to which most economists in fact subscribe, whatever they may say (Hausman 1992, 124). Hausman claims that there is a disconnection between methodological practice and methodological precept. The practice still adheres to the a priori method; the precept is typically positivistic or Popperian (Hausman 1992, 151). It is hard to disagree with Hausman in this regard. To take an example, I doubt very much if any economist seriously considers the non-zero sumness of uncoerced exchange to be an empirical matter. Would any economist consider it worthwhile to send a research team to examine the practices of some recently discovered Amazonian tribe to see if their practices disconfirmed our principles? I think not.

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For a sophisticated and challenging discussion of the relations between science, consciousness and reality, see Bohm (1980) and Barfield (1988). ‘Out of the political economy of the classical school emerges the general theory of human action, praxeology. The economic or catallactic problems are embedded in a more general science, and can no longer be severed from this connection. No treatment of economic problems proper can avoid starting from acts of choice; economics becomes as part, although the hitherto best elaborated part, of a more universal science, praxeology’ (Mises 1996, 3). According to Gennady Stolyarov, it is widely believed that Rothbard and another major Austrian thinker Hans-Hermann Hoppe differ on their approach to the action axiom. This belief hinges upon a distinction between something’s being a law of reality and its being a law of the mind. In Stolyarov’s view, this is an ‘unfortunate dichotomy that presumes that “laws of thought” are outside reality itself and hence do not really exist’ (Stolyarov 2007, 46). According to Stolyarov, Hoppe and Mises use the term ‘empirical’ narrowly and deny that it plays any role in the action axiom; Rothbard, on the other hand, use the term ‘empirical’ broadly and allows it a role in the action axiom. There is no real clash here, according to Stolyarov (Stolyarov 2007, 47). ‘[W]hile Hoppe’s views of economics’ status are true and consistent with his (and the empiricists’) definition of the term “empirical,” such a definition is not the only one used for that term. There are other far broader definitions of the “empirical” which . . . are consistent with Hoppe’s views of the status of economics. One such definition – among the broadest – is held by Rothbard’ (Stolyarov 2007, 50). It would be a mistake to take Hoppe to subscribe to a ‘law of the mind’ approach to the action axiom, as opposed to a ‘law of reality’ (Stolyarov 2007, 50–5). ‘The way Hoppe resolves the problem of idealism in orthodox Kantian epistemology is by recognizing that “our mind is one of acting persons. Our mental categories have to be understood as ultimate grounded in categories of action. As soon as this is recognized, all idealistic suggestions immediately disappear’ (Stolyarov 2007, 54). Stolyarov gives a very useful 6-point summary of Hoppe on the action axiom (Stolyarov 2007, 55): 1 2

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The action axiom is not dependent on historically contingent facts. The action axiom is not experimentally testable, verifiable or falsifiable. The action axiom cannot be arrived at through logic alone (we grasp it by reflection on ‘inner’ experience).

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The action axiom is irrefutably true (trying to deny it simply affirms it). The action axiom is a bridge between mind and reality (the mind is part of reality). The action axiom is an irrevocable law of mind and reality.

Rothbard’s defence of objective ethics is one area in which he diverges from his mentor Mises. ‘Mises contended that ethical judgments were subjective: ultimate ends are not subject to rational assessment. Rothbard dissented, maintaining that an objective ethics could be founded on the requirements of human nature’ (Gordon 2007, 87). Peter Boettke believes that ‘Mises’ thought is much more subtle than is typical of Rothbard’ (Boettke 1988, 30). In his opinion, they differ substantially in their understanding of praxeology. For Mises, ‘praxeology is a discipline, not a method. Rothbard totally obscures this point throughout his methodological writings’ (Boettke 1988, 30). In economic matters, Rothbard advanced Austrian theory beyond the position taken by Mises in at least two respects: first, in demonstrating the fictional nature of monopoly prices, and second, by showing up the concealed ethical judgements embedded in standard analyses of welfare economics. In other respects, however, Boettke believes that Rothbard’s thought is a regression from genuine Austrian insights, notably, in his account of inflation as any increase in the supply of money as against what Boettke regards as the Misesian view of inflation as the excess supply of money over demand. Even more significantly, Boettke believes that Rothbard downgrades the role of subjectivism. ‘To Mises, subjectivism is fundamental – to Rothbard, it is necessary to explain interest. . . . The market, to Mises . . . was the result of human interaction, but not of human design. . . . Rothbard, on the other hand, views the market much more as the product of pure reason. He, in fact, denies spontaneous order and views the market and social cooperation, in general, as the result of human intentionality’ (Boettke 1988, 32). According to Jean-Guy Prévost, ‘Rothbard . . . exhibits more the character of an 18th century Encyclopaedist than a contemporary scholar.’ He writes: ‘because of his tireless activity as propagandist of libertarian thought and for the influence he has exerted on many young scholars, Rothbard may properly be considered the high priest of anarcho-capitalism’ (Prévost 1992, 738–9). Surprisingly, Prévost argues that the theses put forward by Rothbard regarding the nature, origin and legitimacy of the state do not in fact square with the methodological prescriptions and the fundamental axioms

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that he himself upholds. Human action as teleological, methodological individualism, the concept of demonstrated preference – none of these, in Prévost’s opinion, can be reconciled with Rothbard’s theses on the nature, origin and legitimacy of the state. Morris Kominsky is complimentary of those parts of For a New Liberty in which Rothbard criticizes American foreign policy (‘[O]ne must credit him with possession of considerable intellectual courage and political sagacity, as shown in the criticism he has levelled against United States foreign policy in Indochina and other areas, as well as his critique of the military-industrial complex’ (Kominsky 1974, 166), but is vehemently opposed to Rothbard’s free-market an archism. Here Rothbard indulges in what Kominsky considers the fallacy of ‘consistently advocating freedom in the abstract’ and, even more appalling it seems, ‘advocating absolute freedom!’ (Kominsky 1974, 166). The reviewer concludes, ‘One would have to write another book to analyze the fallacious reasoning Dr. Rothbard has used in writing his Rx [prescription] for the cure of our social ills. At a time when the crying need of humanity in general, and our country in particular, is for clarity and rational analysis, this reviewer feels that Professor Rothbard has done a disservice in publishing a book that can only obscure and obfuscate’ (Kominsky 1974, 166). Eric Mack gives For a New Liberty a mixed review. The review provides a reasonably extensive yet succinct account of the book’s theses and arguments. Mack believes, however, that it has theoretical shortcomings, specifically the ‘unfounded assumption . . . that Lockean state-of-nature theory can provide, and needs to provide, a complete specification of the moral permissibility of any particular action’ (Mack 1977, 333). Despite this, he believes the book is not without its strengths, chief of which is its ‘powerful unification of Lockean, anarchist, laissez-faire, and anti-Statist theories and in its employment of this unified view’ (Mack 1977, 333). For a comprehensive historical account of the origin and development of natural rights theories, see Tuck (1979). Hoppe is not as sanguine about the compatibility of his approach and the natural rights approach. ‘Nor do I claim that it is impossible to interpret my approach as falling in a “rightly conceived” natural rights tradition after all. What I claim, though, is that the [argumentation ethics] approach is clearly out of line with what the natural rights approach has actually come to be, and that it owes nothing to this tradition as it stands’ (Hoppe 1989, chapter 7, n. 7). Rothbard, in the first volume of his economic history, says ‘The initial right of each person is to ownership over his own self, in Aquinas’s view in a “proprietary right over himself”’ (Rothbard 1995a, 56–7).

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On the other hand, John Finnis, in his Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory, says that ‘Aquinas does not think that one owns or has any other property in or over oneself’ (Finnis 1998, 189) which appears to contradict directly what Rothbard claims. Rothbard says, ‘Aquinas, anticipating the famous theory of John Locke, grounded the right of original acquisition of property on two basic factors: labour and occupation’ (Rothbard 1995a, 56). Once again, Finnis appears to contradict this claim: ‘arguments for founding property rights on alleged “metaphysical” relationships between persons and the things with which they have “mixed their labour”, or to which craftsmen have “extended their personality”, are foreign to Aquinas’ (Finnis 1998, 189). Hoppe believes that Rothbard may have overestimated just how much his system was in agreement with classical natural rights theory ‘and not sufficiently emphasized his own distinct contribution of importing and applying the Misesian method of praxeology to ethics . . .’ (Rothbard 2002, xxxi; but see Chua Soo 2002). According to Hoppe, for Rothbard, ethics (by which Hoppe means the validity of the principles of self-ownership and original appropriation) are not contingent upon agreement or contract; on the contrary, these principles are logical-praxeological presuppositions that make agreement and contract possible (Rothbard 2002, xxxiv) Hoppe sees this as being Rothbard’s distinct contribution to the natural-rights tradition. He also interprets some of Rothbard’s remarks in ways that make them come very close to Hoppe’s own argumentative ethics. According to Hoppe, Rothbard recognized that ‘whatever must be presupposed as valid in order to make argumentation possible in the first place cannot in turn be argumentatively disputed without thereby falling into a practical self-contradiction’ (Rothbard 2002, xxxiv). ‘[M]y favorite Marxist’ – David Gordon (Gordon 1998b). Cohen’s book generated a significant amount of a scholarly discussion; see, in particular, Gordon (1990). Some articles that are broadly anti-Cohen from a libertarian perspective are Jedenheim-Edling (2005) and Narveson (1998). An article that is anti-Cohen from a Marxist perspective is Warren (1997). For some mixed responses, see Vallentyne (1998), Otsuka (1998), Brenkert (1998), Weinberg (1997) and Weinberg (1998). It is unfortunate that Cohen did not directly address Rothbard’s libertarianism but confined his attention more or less exclusively to Nozick’s account. ‘By confining his argument to Nozick, Cohen makes his case easier for himself than it should be’ (Gordon 1990, 79). Central to Nozick’s account is his own version of the infamous Lockean ‘proviso’ which is that in the acquisition of external

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property, ‘enough and as good’ be left for others. However, as Gordon notes, ‘Many libertarian theories omit this proviso entirely’ (Gordon 1990, 86). For an extended discussion of Rothbard on self-ownership, see Feser (2006), Casey (2009b) and Feser (2009). Above page 32. David Gordon remarks that ‘Nozick’s theory lacks this stress on selfownership – a term, in fact, that he does not use. . . . Other libertarians do derive the rights to acquire property from self-ownership. This derivation forms the basis of . . . Murray Rothbard’s discussion in Ethics of Liberty’ (Gordon 1990, 85). For an exhaustive refutation of Cohen, see Gordon (1990, 77–117) and Mack (2002a and 2002b). Marcus Verhaegh, in ‘Rothbard as a Political Philosopher’, says, ‘[T]he Rothbardian account of property acquisition should receive further attention as an area in Rothbard’s thinking in need of clarification and buttressing’ (Verhaegh 2006, 15). Verhaegh points out that Kant appears to directly contradict Rothbard’s Neo-Lockean homesteading principles in asserting ‘The first working, enclosing, or, in general, transforming of a piece of land can furnish no title of acquisition to it.’ The reference to the Kantian text is unclear, and the sense of this citation appears to be in some tension with other expressions of Kant’s thought on these matters. For example, in The Metaphysical Elements of Justice (Part I of the The Metaphysics of Morals), Kant writes: ‘A thing is externally mine if it is something outside me which is such that any interference with my using it as I please would constitute an injury to me . . .’ (Kant 1965, 55). And ‘the possessor originally acquires a piece of land through first possession and withstands by right . . . anyone else who might interfere with his private use of it. In a state of nature, however, he cannot do this through legal proceedings . . . for there is no public law in that state’ (Kant 1965, 57–8). Kant allows that the things of this world must be used in order for man to survive and flourish, and that it would be absurd to await universal consent before granting anyone a right to so use the things of this world. Unilateral appropriation is, therefore, legitimate but, and this is important, it is only provisionally legitimate. A principle of universalizability comes into play such that all provisional arrangements would have to be accepted or adjusted so that the interests of all are taken into account. It is true, of course, that the Lockean story on original appropriation is not the only one that can be told. David Hume presents a different narrative. He assumes that people have been squabbling over scarce resources since the beginning of time. Who owns what at any time is

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an arbitrary matter, determined not by considerations of justice but by force or luck. In the end, the high transaction costs of continued violence bring about a kind of jaded equilibrium in which the de facto possession is ratified. As with Locke, the state enters the picture only when the initial property dispositions have already been made and its job is to reinforce the emergent conventions. The advantages of the Humean account are obvious – we actually don’t know who did what to whom in history and our historical knowledge begins with property already allocated to particular holders. The problem with the Humean account is that it is resolutely factual, and takes little or no account of moral considerations. Suppose that our equilibrium state give rise to the convention of slavery (as indeed, at a particular time, it did). Would we then be compelled to simply recognize this status quo? Concerning this point, the Tannehills remark: ‘It is difficult to understand, however, what would be so objectionable about this situation. If the first comers were ambitious, quick and intelligent enough to acquire the property before anyone else, why should they be prevented from reaping the rewards of these virtues in order to hold the land open for someone else? And if a large chunk of land is acquired by a man who is too stupid or lazy to make a productive use of it, other men, operating within the framework of the free market, will eventually be able to bid it away from him and put it to work producing wealth’ (Tannehill & Tannehill 1970, 58). See van Dun (2009a) for an argument that libertarianism as ‘propertarianism’ runs the risk of substituting property for freedom as the supreme libertarian value and that, therefore, a libertarian conception of property and its rights must be subordinate to a libertarian conception of freedom and not the other way around. He presents a problem of encirclement as a challenge for a ‘liberty as property’ proponent. I suggest, however, that this challenge can be met in something like the following way without violating the Rothbardian conception of property. Ownership by A of X consists in A’s having a bundle of rights over X; such rights or their exercise cannot include a right to seriously infringe A’s neighbour B’s ownership of Y (think of air pollution, or excessive noise). But access to one’s property and to other properties where one is welcome is itself a property right. Land encirclement of B’s property amounts to (or can amount to) de facto imprisonment of B and therefore could be conceived of as a radical infringement of B’s ownership of Y. That being so, to respect the rights of property, in the absence of a road system, contiguous landowners would be

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obliged to grant reasonable easements of access reciprocally to one another and to their licensees. In reviewing the second edition of Power and Market, John Kwokax concludes that Rothbard’s “extreme ideological view and quick dismissal of limitations of the market make literal interpretation of parts of this volume difficult.” (Kwokax 1978, 650). Despite this, ‘many specific government activities are treated in an illuminating manner, their purposes held up to close scrutiny and their effects challenged as non- or counterproductive’ (Kwokax 1978, 650). Howard D. Marshall writes: ‘For those economists who like their economies pure and untainted by any form of government intervention, either in the micro- or macro-field, Rothbard’s new look [sic] will prove highly satisfying. For the rest of us, who have doubts about whether monopoly is solely the result of government interference, or whether taxation can properly be likened to brigandry, the contents will prove somewhat indigestible’ (Marshall 1971, 196). All that being said, Marshall is generally complimentary about the book. ‘At points, Rothbard marshals his points nicely and, even though unconvinced, the reader is forced to admire the nature of his argument’ (Marshall 1971, 197). While Lewis E. Hill thinks that Man, Economy, and State is refreshing in its boldness and ‘probably the most accurate and detailed praxeological analysis of the economy which has yet been written’ (Hill 1963, 253) he also thinks it susceptible to the following criticisms: 1. the axioms from which Rothbard deduces his system are, at best, relative truths that need to be heavily qualified; 2. Rothbard errs in focusing exclusively on government interference as the cause of friction in the economy; 3. Rothbard’s account of monopoly exhibits a double standard in being critical of government monopoly while being accepting of corporate monopoly. Victor Heck, in the American Economic Review, criticizes Rothbard for not telling the reader that the system presented in Man, Economy, and State is ‘only one system of economic principles and particularly that it is a system that has been found to be deficient’ (Heck 1963, 460) although he does not condescend to say how and by whom this finding has been done. Heck doesn’t appreciate what he sees as Rothbard’s ‘petulant tone’ and regards the whole enterprise as expressing the ‘viewpoint of a militant conservative concerning the contributions of any economist since the last quarter of the 19th century who has dared to disagree with the Austrian viewpoint’ (Heck 1963, 460–1). For Rothbard, this is a purely technical use of the term which is not to be confused with its use in medicine and psychiatry.

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There is an amusing irony in the failure of those who vehemently deny the possibility of anarchic individual relationships to recognize that we currently have an anarchic system fully operational in the sphere of international relations. ‘In the existing world, each land area is ruled over by a State organization, with a number of States scattered over the earth, each with a monopoly of violence over its own territory. No super-State exists with a monopoly of violence over the entire world; and so a state of “anarchy” exists between the several States’ (Rothbard 2002, 191–2). Hayek is the subject of a volume in this series. In the paragraphs that immediately follow, citations from Rothbard are from this communication, unless otherwise specified. Parliament was originally not a law-making body but a tax-granting body deciding on the tax demands of the king. After the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1689, as Parliament became increasingly subservient to an executive appointed from its own ranks, tax-levying became a function of the ministers of the Crown, in effect, a committee of Parliament, and the possibility of institutional resistance to tax demands effectively disappeared.

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Chapter 3

Influence and Reception

I can easily say that Murray’s influence on my career has been so significant that I simply do not know where I would be today or what I would be doing had it not been for his guidance. I knew Murray for the last 22 years of his life. I look back now and realize that he was not as old when I first dined with him and Joey as I am now. In stature, though, he seemed to me then like the Old Master – having more to show for his early years than most of us will have in the longest lifetime. Since then, of course, his influence, both personal and through his writing, has grown enormously. (Roger W. Garrison, in Rockwell 1995, 17–18)

With the exception of Ayn Rand, no individual has affected the modern libertarian movement to the extent of Murray N. Rothbard. (Peter J. Boettke 1988, 29)

Introduction Rothbard’s influence within Austrian and libertarian circles has been and continues to be hugely significant. While not everyone agrees with everything he wrote on every topic, there can be very few among Austrian thinkers and libertarians of any stripe who can afford to ignore or disregard his work. In many areas – economic, political or polemical – his work provides a, if not the, point of departure. David Gordon lists Llewellyn Rockwell, Joseph Salerno, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Peter Klein, Walter

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Block, Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Jeffrey Herbener as just some of those who have been directly inspired by Rothbard’s work (Gordon 2007a, 122ff). Since its inception, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, by its educational programmes, by its conferences and publications, but perhaps most especially by its online presence, has been a major source for the promulgation and widespread distribution of Rothbard’s ideas.

Rothbard and Nozick Despite Rothbard’s direct and immediate personal influence on many central figures in contemporary libertarianism, and his direct if mediated influence on very many others by means of his scholarly and popular publications, Rothbard’s most significant influence on contemporary academic discussions of political thought has been uncharacteristically indirect. Ask the average philosopher for an example of a libertarian thinker and, if he knows any, the chances are that it will be Robert Nozick.1 The publication of Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia in 1974 created something of a sensation in the normally sedate world of academic philosophy. Here we had a Harvard philosopher defending a form of libertarianism when libertarianism of any kind is a position which your average liberal academic reflexively considers unspeakable. To the bulk of the academic community, Nozick’s book must have seemed an egregious case of ‘defending the undefendable’.2 Nozick credits his interest in libertarianism to a long conversation he had with Rothbard sometime in the late 1960s (Nozick 1974, xv). Despite this explicit acknowledgement, Rothbard’s writing on libertarianism isn’t directly discussed in the actual text of Anarchy, State and Utopia, his intellectual presence being confined to just a few minor footnotes. If Nozick was reticent about explicitly discussing Rothbard, Rothbard did not return the compliment. One of the most scintillating sections of The Ethics of Liberty is a chapter entitled ‘Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State’.

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Building on the work of Roy Childs and Randy Barnett (Childs 1977; Barnett 1977) Rothbard subjects the central thesis of Anarchy, State and Utopia to a withering criticism. His summary of its central thesis is succinct. It is, he says, ‘an “invisible hand” variant of a Lockean contractarian attempt to justify the State, or at least a minimal State confined to the function of protection’ (Rothbard 2002, 231). He outlines the steps in Nozick’s thesis as follows: ‘Beginning with a free-market anarchist state of nature, Nozick portrays the State as emerging, by an invisible hand process that violates no one’s rights, first as a dominant protective agency, then to an “ultraminimal state,” and then finally to a minimal state’ (Rothbard 2002, 231). If Nozick’s account of the necessary and inevitable emergence of the state from a condition of anarchy by means of libertarian principles is defensible, Rothbard’s anti-state anarchic position is seriously undermined.3 While it might seem to be a mere matter of historical detail, Rothbard believes it to be theoretically important to ask whether any state has actually come into being by means of the Nozickean process. With all the available evidence apparently pointing in the other direction, Rothbard judges that the answer to this question has to be in the negative: ‘[E]very State where the facts are available originated by a process of violence, conquest, and exploitation . . .’ (Rothbard 2002, 231). One may wonder whether Rothbard’s opinion in this matter is, in fact, historically accurate. One thinks, for example, of Switzerland and Vatican City. However, despite these possible exceptions – and one would have to admit that Switzerland and Vatican City are not your standard state – the history of the majority of states, if not of all states, supports Rothbard’s opinion. The practical effect of this for Nozick’s position, according to Rothbard, is that no actual state is in fact justified and he believes that Nozick, to be consistent, should join with him in calling for the abolition of all existing states; only then could we see whether or not a minimal state would inevitably come into being without violating anyone’s rights.

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The Protective Agency Before presenting Rothbard’s substantive criticism of Nozick, I need to introduce the idea of the protective agency. In a state of libertarian nature, everyone has the right to resist and punish aggression. Of course, not everyone is in a position physically so to do nor, even if such were physically possible, would it necessarily fit with the principle of comparative advantage and the division of labour for each man to be his own defender and avenger. So, just as with many services that we require, it is more than likely that some people will offer their services to others in the matter of protection and vindication and thus protective agencies will emerge, much as in the last several hundred years, the desire to protect oneself against the costs of catastrophic disasters has led to a system of pooling of risks that has resulted in the emergence of insurance agencies. Any individual may choose to exercise the right to defend and vindicate himself if he so chooses but, practically speaking, it makes economic sense for the non-specialist to pay others to provide such services for him. In the normal course of events, then, a plurality of protective agencies will arise, each offering a range of services at a range of prices and which protective agency (if any) one selects to protect one will depend upon normal commercial and personal considerations. Now Nozick’s story, in brief, is that first we would have a plurality of protective agencies. From this plurality, one protective agency would achieve dominance. This dominant protective agency would then transmute itself into an ultraminimal state from which, in turn, a minimal state would emerge. All this would occur without any violation of libertarian principles. The Emergence of the Dominant Protective Agency Where an aggressor and the one aggressed against both belong or subscribe to the same protective agency, then any dispute is resolvable internally. What happens if the aggressor and the one aggressed against belong or subscribe to different agencies? It is possible that the matter might be resolved by violence but, given

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the high transaction costs of violence, both to the agencies involved and eventually to their clients, it is highly unlikely that agencies would voluntarily choose to take this path. It is much more likely that an inter-agency dispute will be referred to a third party for resolution. Nozick contends that such appeals to a third party will lead inevitably to the emergence of a unified federal judicial system of which all the protective agencies are mere components. Rothbard takes issue with Nozick on this very point. ‘The fact that every protective agency will have agreements with every other to submit disputes to particular appeals courts or arbitrators does not imply “one unified federal judicial system”’ (Rothbard 2002, 234). Nozick’s argument commits a basic logical fallacy. Just as from every husband’s having a wife it doesn’t follow that there is some one particular woman who is wife to every man; so too, if every inter-agency dispute is referred to a third part arbitrator, it doesn’t follow that there has to be some one specific third party arbitrator to which every dispute is referred. Even in our present non-libertarian society, there are thousands of non-state arbitrators making a living by resolving disputes. Indeed, so clogged is the state courts’ system that many corporations include a private arbitration clause in their contracts in an effort to avoid inevitable delays. Nozick believes that there is something special about the provision of protection services that militates against the emergence and continuing existence of different agencies: ‘[U]nlike other goods that are comparatively evaluated, maximal competing protective services cannot coexist; the nature of the service brings different agencies not only into competition for customer’s patronage, but also into violent conflict with each other’ (Nozick 1974, 17). However, the evidence of history and contemporary experience shows Nozick’s thesis of the inevitability of the emergence of a dominant protective agency to be indefensible. In Europe for many hundreds of years, multiple overlapping and competing legal jurisdictions competed and cooperated, most having no connection with the state’s coercive

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apparatus (see Berman 1983) and even today, the existence of thousands of arbitrators, lawyers, private protection agencies and insurance companies testifies to the viability of having multiple agents and agencies competing to provide insurance, arbitration and protection services. If a natural monopoly were to emerge anywhere, it should surely emerge in the area of insurance but in fact there is a significant amount of competition between rival insurance companies and no indication that a super-insurance agency either has or must inevitably emerge. From Dominant Protective Agency to Ultraminimal State Nozick’s argument then falls at the first hurdle. While it is always possible that a dominant protective agency could in fact emerge, there is no inevitability about such an event’s occurring and, as we have seen, given normal competitive pressure, every likelihood that it will not in fact occur. For the sake of argument, let’s grant Nozick his first step and move on to a consideration of the second. How does one get from a dominant protective agency to an ultraminimal state? The story here is that the dominant protective agency, observing the remaining small-time operators engage in risky procedures against its clients, would have the right to prohibit such procedures and, in so doing, it would take on the mantle of a state, albeit an ultraminimal state whose remit extended solely to security issues. While it is easy to see why an agency might have at least an interest and possibly some rights in respect of the activities of other agencies that bear upon its clients, we might well wonder why the dominant protective agency should have any particular rights where the alleged risky behaviour of the small-time operators does not involve its clients. Still more to the point, we might ask why, in cases of interagency conflict, the dominant agency should have the right (as distinct from the power) to prohibit the risky procedures of the small-timers and not vice versa?4 The suggestion that those agencies whose activities are prohibited should be satisfied to be compensated by the dominant

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protective agency is untenable. What form will the compensation take? What amount of compensation will be offered? Who will be the judge of its adequacy? What if no amount of compensation is acceptable? Why should the ultraminimal state not simply do whatever it likes, to whomever it likes, in whatever way it likes, paying whatever kind and amount of compensation it likes? The only defensible answer to this question has to rest on the assertion of the basic libertarian principle of non-aggression. ‘No one has the right to coerce anyone not himself directly engaged in an overt act of aggression against rights’ (Rothbard 2002, 239). Once it is conceded that an agency has the right to use violence to prohibit risky behaviour by other agencies, there is no principled stopping place that can resist the extension of this concession and the ultraminimal state rather quickly becomes the minimal state. Nozick’s’ second step, from the dominant protective to the ultraminimal state is unjustified. However, for the sake of argument, let us leave our objections to one side and consider Nozick’s third step: from the ultraminimal state to the minimal state. From Ultraminimal State to Minimal State Nozick’s argument here is that the ultraminimal state is obliged to compensate the potential customers of the small-time agencies whose risky activities it has had to restrict, by providing them with protective services and, in so doing, de facto, the minimal state emerges. Once again, the principled point concerning the insufficiency of compensation as a legitimation of criminal action is irrefutable. A willingness to make compensation is not, and never can be, a justification of criminal action; it can be, at best, an attempt to restore the situation that existed before the crime was committed. My burglary of your house cannot be justified by my subsequent willingness to compensate you for your loss, particularly if I am to be the one who determines the method and quantity of compensation. ‘[C]ompensation, in the theory of

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punishment, is simply a method of trying to recompense the victim of crime; it must in no sense be considered a moral sanction for the crime itself’ (Rothbard 2002, 241). There is the further point that all this talk of compensation rests on the illegitimate assumption of commensurable utility scales but if Austrian economics has shown anything to be beyond question, it is the ultimately subjective nature of people’s value scales. ‘[T]he existence of only one fervent anarchist who could not be compensated for the psychic trauma inflicted on him by the emergence of the State is enough by itself to scuttle Nozick’s allegedly non-invasive model for the original of the minimal state. For that absolutist anarchist, no amount of compensation would suffice to assuage his grief’ (Rothbard 2002, 242–3). From Minimal State to Anarchy Rothbard adopts Roy Childs’ brilliant ‘Nozick-in-reverse argument’ in which Childs demonstrates that if we were to start with the minimal state the invisible hand would lead us inexorably to the ultraminimal state; the same process would take us from the ultraminimal state to the dominant protective agency and thence to a plurality of agencies, no one of which is necessarily dominant (Rothbard 2002, 250–1; see Childs 1977, 32–3). Let’s start with the assumption that we have a minimal state. Now let another agency which mirrors the procedures of the minimal state come into being. By hypothesis, the activities of this new agency cannot be any riskier than those of the minimal state. The new agency can charge less for its services since the minimal state, as distinct from the ultra minimal state, has to pay compensation to those who would have used agencies with risky procedures. Since these compensation payments are not legally mandatory, the minimal state, now under pressure from its competitor, is more likely than not to cease making them. In doing so, it ceases to be a minimal state and becomes an ultraminimal state. Those who were in receipt of compensation can now choose to patronize the new agency. If the price differential

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disappears, as is likely to happen if the formerly minimal state ceases having to provide the payment of compensation, the new agency will have to differentiate itself from the (now) ultraminimal state by other means, such as the provision of better or different services. But there is nothing magical about the number two. If there can be two such agencies, there can be a third; and if a third, then a fourth. The ultraminimal state is now simply the dominant agency among a plurality of agencies. Since, however, there is no economic imperative unsupported by coercion that guarantees any business its dominant position, there is every likelihood that the owners and operators of the once minimal state, then ultraminimal state, and now (for the moment) dominant agency will be unable to maintain its market dominance vis-à-vis the new, aggressive agencies and instead of being first among equals will simply become one among equals.5 ‘The sinister minimal state is reduced, by a series of morally permissible steps which violate the rights of no one, to merely one agency among many. In short, the invisible hand strikes back’ (Childs 1977, 32–3). Rothbard then summarizes his argument against Nozick’s argument: (1) no existing State has been immaculately conceived, and therefore Nozick, on his own grounds, should advocate anarchism and then wait for his State to develop; (2) even if any State had been so conceived, individual rights are inalienable and therefore no existing State could be justified; (3) every step of Nozick’s invisible hand process is invalid: the process is all too conscious and visible, and the risk and compensation principles are both fallacious and passports to unlimited despotism; (4) there is no warrant, even on Nozick’s own grounds, for the dominant protective agency to outlaw procedures by independents that do not injure its own clients, and therefore it cannot arrive at an ultra-minimal state; (5) Nozick’s theory of ‘non-productive’ exchanges is invalid, so that the prohibition of risky activities and hence the

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ultra-minimal state falls on that account alone; (6) contrary to Nozick, there are no ‘procedural rights,’ and therefore no way to get from his theory of risk and non-productive exchange to the compulsory monopoly of the ultra-minimal state; (7) there is no warrant, even on Nozick’s own grounds, for the minimal state to impose taxation; (8) there is no way, in Nozick’s theory, to justify the voting or democratic procedures of any State; (9) Nozick’s minimal state would, on his own grounds, justify a maximal State as well; and (10) the only ‘invisible hand’ process, on Nozick’s own terms, would move society from his minimal State back to anarchism. (Rothbard 2002, 252–3)

Rothbard – Historian of Economic Crises Rothbard was not only an economist and political philosopher; he was also an outstanding, if controversial, historian. His histories are a pleasure to read for he writes with a clarity, vigour and narrative power that is absent more often than not from your average historical text. His earliest substantial work, a version of his doctoral thesis, was a volume of economic history, entitled The Panic of 1819 (Rothbard 2007a). The financial crisis of 1819 was America’s first great largely indigenous economic crisis. The usual litany of bad things characterized that panic: foreclosures, drops in agricultural production and in manufacturing and, of course, the inevitable bank failures. To those who lived through it, there was no obvious event or series of events to which the panic could be attributed. A lot of discussion took place about the possible causes and, of course, about possible remedies. For a work by a relatively unknown author, The Panic of 1819 received a significant number of reviews, some laudatory, others not. James Primm believes that the book is ‘neither sound in interpretation nor reliable in detail . . . ’ (Primm 1962, 516). He accuses Rothbard of excessive reliance on secondary material, general scholarly sloppiness and some factual errors.

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In a mixed review, Hugh Aitken considered The Panic of 1819 to be ‘tidy and well-organized . . . thorough and comprehensive’ even if ‘uncommonly dull reading’ (Aitken 1963, 100). On the negative side, he claims that the book lacks the ‘suggestive insights and hypotheses that distinguish real scholarship from mere competence’ (Aitken 1963, 100). More positively, he commends several dimensions of Rothbard’s book, in particular, his ‘systematic analysis of attitudes and policies in the states. Too often, in standard histories of banking and of economic thought, the country is implicitly regarded as a unity or as being divided into one or two broad regions and attention is focused upon policies at the national level. Rothbard’s demonstration of the heterogeneity of sentiment and policy at the state level is a valuable corrective’ (Aitken 1963, 100). Donald Kemmerer provides a generally positive review of The Panic of 1819, remarking that ‘Dr. Rothbard has written a wellorganized, well-document study. His analysis is thorough, thoughtful, and always fair’ (Kemmerer 1963, 161) while Eugene Lerner judges that it is ‘a first-rate chronicle of economic events during one of the colourful periods of our past’ (Lerner 1963, 604). Harris Proschansky finds the book to be ‘instructive, and lucid’ (Proschansky 1963, 259). In particular, he finds stimulating Rothbard’s challenging of the conventional view ‘that depicted the debtors’ relief and paper-money conflicts as being fought on geographical, occupational, or income-class lines. Rothbard contends that the controversy cut sharply across these lines, and in support of this position, points to the wealthy and respectable men who were the leaders on both sides’ (Proschansky 1963, 259). In Nathan Miller’s view, The Panic of 1819 might be regarded as being good in so far as it goes but as not going far enough. ‘Rothbard’s decision to study the reactions to the panic, and the public policies that resulted was an excellent one and he has performed a useful service in uncovering a relatively unexplored area of economic thought and action’ (Miller 1963, 291). However, ‘his own efforts are not quite as deep or as searching as they might have been. . . . He might well have reinforced his use of

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secondary sources, articles, and monographs with more of the same, together with more generous use of primary source material and far more critical use of newspapers’ (Miller 1963, 291). Harry Shaffer, in his review in the American Economic Review, believes the work to be primarily descriptive rather than analytical. That said, he commends the book’s thoroughness and the author’s ‘extensive research’ (Shaffer 1963, 215). He sees the book as having two central theses: 1. ‘that many of the ideas, proposed remedies, and instituted polices were precursors of similar ideas, remedies and policies of later eras . . .’; and 2. ‘apart from the tariff question, the controversy cut across regional, geographic, class, and income boundaries’ (Shaffer 1963, 214). Shaffer believes that Rothbard was not as successful in demonstrating the second thesis as he was in demonstrating the first, saying that in support of this thesis he offers ‘substantial but not conclusive evidence’ (Shaffer 1963, 215). Overall, Shaffer concludes that as ‘Rothbard’s work represents the only published, book-length, academic treatise on the remedies that were proposed, debated, and enacted in attempts to cope with the crisis of 1819’ it should ‘certainly find a place on the shelf of the student of U.S. business cycles and of the economic historian who is interested in the early economic development of the United States’ (Shaffer 1963, 215). Another somewhat mixed review of The Panic of 1819 was given by George Taylor who wrote that Rothbard makes ‘a definite but limited contribution to our understanding of this short period’ (Taylor 1963, 572). While allowing that the book is ‘surely the most exhaustive study yet made of the economic thought of the crisis period’ and while it ‘adds much detail to a picture the outlines of which were already fairly familiar’ Taylor argues that the book lacks analytical incision. ‘For the most part the author summarizes and paraphrases the chief arguments, with rather less attempt at interpretation and generalization that might have been expected’ (Taylor 1963, 572). Positively, there are some interesting conclusions: Rothbard’s discovery of a high degree of economic sophistication in the discussions at

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the time and, interestingly, Rothbard’s claim that positions on the various measures and reactions were not determined by sectional or economic class interest. In the light of these reviews, which are fairly representative, I think it reasonable to suggest that the convergence of critical opinion, while recognizing the many merits of The Panic of 1819, in particular, its extensive and exhaustive scholarship, claims to detect a certain lack of analytical incisiveness in the interpretations that Rothbard offers of the phenomenon under investigation. To whatever extent such criticism is justified, and it is arguable that it is not, it is clear that The Panic of 1819, even if imperfect, attains a critical standard and attracted critical attention in a way that few published PhD theses generally do. The Panic of 1819 was quickly followed by another historical work on economics, America’s Great Depression. Once again, the reviews were mixed. Some were more or less wholly negative. Eugen Smolensky, for example, considered that America’s Great Depression ‘must be judged a failure’ (Smolensky 1964, 283). He is critical of what he takes to be Rothbard’s terminological revisionism (for example, Rothbard’s use of the term ‘inflation’ and his definition of money) and he accuses Rothbard of misusing his statistics even when he manages to get the numbers right. Smolensky concludes that ‘We are sorely in need of a scholarly study of the 1920’s. . . . But there are no new numbers or concepts in this book, and its appearance neither decreases nor increases the need for further research’ (Smolensky 1964, 284). Clarence Barber reviews the book in a way that is critical without being hostile. He takes issue with some of the economic ideas in Rothbard’s book, in particular, what he describes as the ‘obscure’ Austrian notion of the lengthening of the structures of production. He is appreciative of those parts of the book in which Rothbard describes Hoover’s efforts to deal with the depression although he believes ‘the description tends to be journalistic rather than scholarly and is interlarded with a commentary reflecting the author’s viewpoint’ (Barber 1978, 638). Overall, however, he concludes that ‘Readers of this book will

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learn very little about what caused the Great Depression and why it became so severe’ (Barber 1978, 638). In contrast with the previous two reviews of America’s Great Depression, George Green provides one that is broadly favourable. He believes that ‘This consistently provocative book will remain the most consistently laissez-faire interpretation of the boom and depression of 1920–1933’ and says that ‘Rothbard’s greatest contribution to historical knowledge lies in his careful analysis of the factors behind the growth of the money supply during the boom under Federal Reserve supervision’ (Green 1965, 416). In the end, however, he finds the work historically defective: ‘Novel in argument, vigorous in the use of theory, Rothbard’s work is frequently disappointing in the quality of its historical scholarship. His selection of published sources omits recent historical scholarship and has a consistently conservative bias. Polemical language is unrestrained. . . . The central focus upon the analysis of depression is often lost in peevish attacks on fractional-reserve banking, unions, unemployment compensation, child labor laws, tariffs, price stabilization, inheritance taxes, and virtually all forms of government spending’ (Green 1965, 417). The tenor of the reviews of The Panic of 1819 and America’s Great Depression is indicative of a general failure to appreciate Rothbard’s novel approach, both in his revisionary historiography and in his using the data of economic history as a palimpsest upon which to write with the pen of Austrian theory. Professional historians and orthodox economists tend not to appreciate Rothbard’s approach because it sits uneasily with their preconceived ideas of what history and economics should be. Those who are more ideologically attuned to Rothbard’s economic and political positions not surprisingly tend to take a different view of the matter. For example, Roger Garrison finds America’s Great Depression to be absolutely compelling (Rockwell 1995, 14) and Richard Vedder agrees with him, speaking of it as a ‘landmark not only of historical analysis but also a profoundly important reinforcement of Misesian concepts of the role that labor markets play in relieving human misery, and that governmental market interference plays in creating it’ (Rockwell 1995, 8–9).

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Rothbard – Historian of Liberty Starting out on what was originally intended to be a limited project, Rothbard eventually produced a comprehensive and exhaustive history of the Colonial period in American history. The four volumes of Conceived in Liberty, published between 1975 and 1979, stretch to almost 1,700 pages in total (Rothbard 1975a, 1975b, 1976 and 1979). A fifth volume was completed by Rothbard but has not yet been published.6 One of the distinctive features of this multi-volume work is that it not only deals with the usual political and social factors contributing to the American experience but, as one might expect from an economist, it pays particular attention to the economic and financial factors that are either treated sketchily or completely ignored in most histories of the period. The purpose of this work, however, is not just to add another narrative to the large number of already extant histories of the period but to show clearly that pursuit of liberty was central to the American revolutionary project from its very beginnings and not something that sprang into existence, suddenly and inexplicably, in 1776, and that the conflict between Liberty and Power was the ideological analogue of the physical conflict on the battlefield. Rothbard explains his motive and his method thus: My own basic perspective on the history of man, and a fortiori on the history of the United States, is to place central importance on the great conflict which is eternally waged between Liberty and Power, a conflict, by the way, which was seen with crystal clarity by the American revolutionaries of the eighteenth century. I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life. But liberty has always been threatened by the encroachments of power, power which seeks to suppress,

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control, cripple, tax, and exploit the fruits of liberty and production. Power, then, the enemy of liberty is consequently the enemy of all the other goods and fruits of civilization that mankind holds dear. And power is almost always centered in and focused on that central repository of power and violence: the state. (Rothbard 1975a, 9–10) The America of the early eighteenth century comprised a set of colonies very different from one another in religion, culture and political allegiance. How was it possible that such a disparate collection of elements could be unified in any coherent way? Rothbard sees the unifying threads as being at once the development of a common set of political institutions linked to a common relationship to England but, even more importantly, the awakening of a common libertarian ideology. ‘Another vital unifying factor was the spread of a conscious libertarian ideology throughout the colonies during this period, influenced directly by English libertarians who engaged not only in trenchant theoretical arguments but also in a caustic and powerful critique of the political institutions within Britain itself’ (Rothbard 1975b, 14). To say this is not to deny that America had its own home-grown libertarian ‘green shoots’ – ‘[P]arts of America itself had experienced entirely libertarian institutions in the seventeenth century: for example, Rhode Island, North Carolina and Pennsylvania’ (Rothbard 1975b, 186). However, such proto-libertarianism was to a large extent theoretically unarticulated. Rothbard identifies three sources that helped Americans to a conscious theoretical appropriation of their libertarian practices; these were the writings of Algernon Sidney, especially his Discourses Concerning Government, John Locke’s Essay Concerning Civil Government, and John Trenchard’s and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters. Sidney exercised a direct influence on the Congregational ministers Andrew Eliot and Jonathan Mayhew, the latter of whom regarded Sidney as a martyr to civil liberty. The influence of Locke’s Essay is too well-known7 to require

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comment save to say, as Rothbard does, that of the two strains in his work – one being the individualist libertarian strain and the other being the conservative majoritarian strain – ‘. . . the individualist view is the core of the philosophic argument, while the majoritarian and statist strain appears more in the later, applied portions of the theory’ (Rothbard 1975a, 190). Of Trenchard and Gordon, Rothbard writes: ‘The third great influence on America, and perhaps the most widely cited source in the colonies, was the works of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, especially their Cato’s Letters’ (Rothbard 1975a, 192). Rothbard credits this work with the radicalization of Locke’s nuanced libertarianism. ‘From the position that the people have the right to revolt against a government destructive of liberty, “Cato” proceed to argue with great force that government is always and everywhere the potential or actual aggressor against the rights and liberties of the people’ (Rothbard 1975a, 192). There are those who think that while, of course, all revolutions are revolutionary, the American Revolution wasn’t really revolutionary, certainly not radical. Rothbard will have none of this. For him, the American Revolution was ‘the first successful war of national liberation against western imperialism’ (Rothbard 1979, 443). It was above all else a people’s war, a ‘revolutionary war led by “fanatics” and zealots’ and ‘victorious to the extent that guerrilla strategy and tactics were employed against the far more heavily armed and better trained British army’ (Rothbard 1979, 443). Moreover, the revolution was not a matter of some kind of genteel consensus manifesting itself in a mild disapproval of Britain and all things British. It was ‘a civil war, resulting in the permanent expulsion of 100,000 Tories from the United States. Tories were hunted, persecuted, their property confiscated, and themselves sometimes killed; what could be more radical than that?’ (Rothbard 1979, 443). In his account of the way in which the revolutionaries dealt with those who had remained loyal to Britain Rothbard gives examples of the way in which libertarian principles can be violated in

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practice. He remarks that the revolutionaries went at the Tories ‘with a zeal that went beyond the bounds of libertarian principle’ (Rothbard 1979, 65). After boycotts and ostracism came fines, imprisonment, confiscation and banishment. He draws the moral: ‘Thus, a Revolution and revolutionaries dedicated to the cause of liberty move to suppress crucial liberties of their opposition – an ironic but not surprising illustration of the inherent contradiction between Liberty and Power, a conflict that can all too readily come into play even when Power is employed on behalf of Liberty’ (Rothbard 1979, 67).8

Rothbard – Historian of Economics As Rothbard began, so he finished. Towards the end of his life, he was working on a general history of economic thought, a work left unfinished at this death. Whereas his early work in The Panic of 1819 and America’s Great Depression concentrated on quite specific historical events, his later work in the history of economics attempted to cover the entire history of the discipline in an encyclopaedic manner. Two substantial volumes (over 1,000 pages) of this were published in 1995 – Economic Thought before Adam Smith (Rothbard 1995a) and Classical Economics (Rothbard 1995b). These volumes contain material that is as least as controversial as much of his earlier historical work and, in the case of his treatment of Adam Smith, hugely controversial. Thomas DiLorenzo believes Rothbard’s contributions to economic history to be ‘his stellar contribution to scholarship’ (Rockwell 1995, 73) and Jeffrey Herbener agrees: ‘[H]istory will judge his multi-volume work on the history of economic thought his greatest contribution’ (Rockwell 1995, 86). As we shall see, not everyone will necessarily agree with these judgements. The reader who has read this far will not be surprised to learn that the two volumes of economic history make no attempt to provide an aseptically neutral treatment of their subject. They

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are written to illustrate the non-viability of the Whig theory of history by demonstrating the discovery, loss and recovery of economic insights throughout history, and to re-evaluate the standard accounts that have been given of the contributions of the economic ‘Greats’. David Gordon remarks that, despite Rothbard’s avowed anti-Whig stand, ‘Rothbard’s own method is in another way Whiggish itself. He has his own firmly held positions on correct economic theory, based on his adherence to the tenets of the Austrian School. He accordingly is anxious to see how various figures anticipate key Austrian views or, on the contrary, pursue blind alleys’ (Gordon 2007a, 115). Rothbard was inspired in his approach to economic history by Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970). According to Rothbard, ‘Kuhn demolished what I like to call the “Whig theory of the history of science”’ (Rothbard 1995a, ix). To simplify somewhat, I think it is largely true to say that before Kuhn published his groundbreaking work, the standard view of scientific progress was that one scientific theory succeeded another simply by virtue of being demonstrably more rationally adequate than its predecessors. Applying the standard ‘scientific method’ (hypothesis formation, testing and rejection of inadequate theories), scientists simply proceeded to ever more adequate theories, rejecting those that failed to meet the strict methodological tests. ‘Kuhn, however, shocked the philosophic world by demonstrating that this is simply not the way that science has developed. Once a central paradigm is selected, there is no testing or sifting, and tests of basic assumptions only take place after a series of failures and anomalies in the ruling paradigm has plunged the science into a “crisis situation”’ (Rothbard 1995a, ix). If this is the case in the so-called hard sciences, how much more so is it in the human or social sciences? ‘There can therefore be no presumption whatever in economics that later thought is better than earlier, or even that all well-known economists have contributed their sturdy mite to the developing discipline’ (Rothbard 1995a, x). This Kuhnian anti-Whiggery, then, is Rothbard’s

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reason for the study of economic history in the round. The task of the history of economics is not merely to record the mistakes and inadequacies of the past as a background showing forth the glories of the present state of enlightenment; instead, it is to open doors to the possibility of recovering and reinstating insights that may have been lost, discarded or simply disregarded. It would be pointless, even if possible, to provide an adequate précis of this work. There is no substitute for the exhilaration of reading it for oneself. Instead of attempting the impossible, I shall provide a brief overview of the range of thinkers and topics covered by this work before going on to consider in some detail Rothbard’s controversial account of Adam Smith and the critical reaction to that account. The very title of the first volume, Economic Thought before Adam Smith, is itself a challenge to academic orthodoxy. Many historians of economics, especially if they are Anglophone, locate the beginnings of economics with Adam Smith’s classic The Wealth of Nations, together with the works of David Ricardo and the Mills, James and John Stuart. Others, more historically ecumenical and less Britannically insular, might look upon the Mercantilists of an earlier age as proto-economists; still others might include the Franco-Hibernian Richard Cantillon and the Physiocrats among the originators of economics. While the names of the founders of and significant contributors to economics may differ from one historian’s list to another, the suggestion that there is anything of value to economic theory to be found in the speculations of ancient or medieval thinkers is likely to invite a sceptical reaction (see Casey 2006). Rothbard’s first volume deals not only with the writers of the seventeenth century but covers in some detail the contributions to economic though of the Greeks, the Christian Middle Ages and, especially, the late Spanish scholastics: Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Martin de Azpilcueta Navarrus, Juan de Medina, Diego de Covarrubias y Leiva, Tomás de Mercado, and many others. This is followed by an extensive account of the emergence of Mercantilism (five chapters) which is, in turn, followed by a survey of the contributions of Richard Cantillon.

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Before moving on to consider the contributions of the Scottish Enlightenment and the ‘celebrated Adam Smith’, Rothbard gives us an overview of the views of the Physiocrats, pausing to present an account of the economic contributions of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, whose ‘career in economics was brief but brilliant and in every way remarkable’ (Rothbard 1995a, 385). The second volume, Classical Economics, continues where the first leaves off. In the opening chapter on Jean-Baptiste Say, Rothbard remarks, ‘One of the great puzzles of economic thought, as we have indicated . . . is why Adam Smith was able to sweep the field and enjoy the reputation of “founder of economic science” when Cantillon and Turgot had been far superior, both as technical economic analysts and as champions of laissez-faire’ (Rothbard 1995b, 3). Rothbard then proceeds to consider the contributions of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and David Ricardo. After an extensive discussion of the economics of money and banking, he discusses in some detail over five chapters the nature, history and demise of the Marxian system. Any chapter, indeed any page, in this exhaustive work could provide material for extended reflection. However, given the general canonical acceptance of Adam Smith as the father of economics, at least in the Anglophone world, I am going to focus on Rothbard’s controversial treatment of Smith as generally illustrative of his method and his revisionary approach. Rothbard contra Smith For Rothbard, the stellar reputation of Adam Smith9 is a ‘mystery in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma’ (Rothbard 1995a, 435). To put the matter bluntly, in Rothbard’s judgement, Smith’s contributions to economics that were new weren’t true and those that were true weren’t new. Worse still, in Rothbard’s view, Smith was guilty of intellectual theft: ‘Adam Smith was a shameless plagiarist, acknowledging little or nothing and stealing large chunks, for example, from Cantillon’ (Rothbard 1995a, 435). Worse still, he was an ineffectual plagiarist: ‘[H]e plagiarized badly. . . . his economics was a grave deterioration from his predecessors . . .

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[and even] . . . from his own previous works . . .’ (Rothbard 1995a, 436). Rothbard’s fundamental objection to Smith would appear to be that his ill-deserved reputation has had the effect of obscuring the fact that other and better economists had preceded him, a fact that is all the more baffling to Rothbard inasmuch as The Wealth of Nations is, in his opinion, ‘a huge, sprawling, inchoate, confused tome, rife with vagueness, ambiguity and deep inner contradictions’ (Rothbard 1995a, 436). Rothbard’s Specific Charges Why did such a ‘deeply flawed’ tome achieve such fame and influence?10 (Rothbard 1995a, 436). Rothbard’s somewhat cynical answer to this question is to suggest that such intellectual defects are precisely its scholarly merits in that they provide a ‘happy hunting ground for intellectuals, students and followers’ and ensure endless work for those who would tell us what Smith really meant (Rothbard 1995a, 436). Rothbard is not the first person to suspect that lack of clarity and confusion are grist to the scholar’s mill. Whether or not such a view is generally justified, Rothbard’s specific charges against Smith include the following (see Rothbard 1995a, 442ff): z

z

Smith is famous for his account of the economic significance of the division of labour. Rothbard charges that his account shifts the focus from the subjectively non-zero sum benefits of exchange to ‘an allegedly irrational and innate “propensity to truck, barter and exchange”, as if human beings were lemmings determined by forces external to their own chosen purposes’ (Rothbard 1995a, 442). Furthermore, he believes that Smith failed to carry his analysis of the benefits of the divisions of labour beyond the confines of particular industries and into an inter-industry and international context. Rothbard alleges that Smith contradicted himself in The Wealth of Nations in that, in Book I, the division of labour is equated with civilization itself and presented as the sole

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factor accounting for the wealth of civilized society while in Book V the division of labour is credited with bringing about the intellectual and moral degeneration of the population. ‘There is no way’, Rothbard says, ‘that this contradiction can be plausibly reconciled’ (Rothbard 1995a, 442). Smith, quick to accuse others of plagiarism, was in fact himself a plagiarist. Adam Ferguson was accused of stealing Smith’s pin-factory example of increased productivity brought about by the division of labour. ‘When Smith upbraided Ferguson for not acknowledging Smith’s precedence in the pin-factory example, Ferguson replied that he had borrowed nothing from Smith, but indeed that both had taken the example from a French source . . .’ (Rothbard 1995a, 443). According to Rothbard, Smith claimed to have invented the concept of laissez-faire but such a claim ignored what he had acquired from his own teachers, not to mention sundry French thinkers of the late seventeenth century. Rothbard claims that Smith’s advocacy of laissez-faire is inconsistent. Whereas Smith had supported a full-blooded natural law position of the emergence of order by means of the free interaction of individuals in his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in The Wealth of Nations, ‘laissez-faire becomes only a qualified presumption rather than a hard-and-fast rule, and the natural order becomes imperfect and to be followed only “in most cases”’ (Rothbard 1995a, 465). Additionally, Smith supported a raft of measures and policies at variance with a genuine laissez-faire approach to economics. It is Rothbard’s opinion that Smith apparently knew very little of the effects of the Industrial Revolution and what little he knew was defective. ‘Adam Smith was oblivious to the important economic events around him. Much of his analysis was wrong, and many of the facts he did include in The Wealth of Nations were obsolete and gathered from books 30 years old’ (Rothbard 1995a, 444). Smith, influenced by the Physiocrats, retained the un fortunate distinction between productive and unproductive

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labour (Rothbard 1995a, 444ff; see Raimondo 2000, 342f). Rothbard attributes this in part to Smith’s Presbyterian conscience which ‘led him to value the expenditure of labor per se, for its own sake, and led him to balk at free market timepreferences between consumption and saving’ (Rothbard 1995a, 444–5). That aspect of Smith’s thought about which Rothbard is most scathing is his theory of value. ‘Adam Smith’s doctrine of value was an unmitigated disaster. . . . not only was [it] a degeneration from his teacher Hutcheson . . . but it was also a similar degeneration from Smith’s own previous unpublished lectures’ (Rothbard 1995a, 448). Rothbard has the support of Paul Douglas and Emil Kauder in his negative evaluation of Smith’s theory of value, with Douglas arguing that Smith diverted the English Classical theorists ‘into a culde-sac from which they did not emerge . . . for nearly a century’ and Kauder noting that ‘With these few words [on utility] Adam Smith had made waste and rubbish out of the thinking of 2,000 years’ (cited in Rothbard 1995a, 450). Rothbard holds that Smith’s theory of distribution was ‘fully as disastrous as his theory of value’ (Rothbard 1995a, 458) and his theory of money and international monetary relations was ‘hopelessly inadequate’ (Rothbard 1995a, 461).

The Critical Response to Rothbard’s Charges It hardly needs to be said that Rothbard’s severely negative evaluation of Smith has not gone uncontested. The most scathing indictment of Rothbard’s Smithian criticism has come from fellow libertarian David Friedman. In connection with Rothbard’s claim that Smith desires to see the government instil a martial spirit via government control of education, Friedman remarks that this claim ‘is consistent with either of two explanations – that he [Rothbard] was deliberately dishonest or that he had never really read the book he was criticizing, merely skimmed it for quotes suited to his purposes’ (Friedman 1998). Commenting

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on Rothbard’s account of Smith’s theory of value, Friedman writes: ‘This is a complicated subject. Rothbard misrepresents, probably through lack of understanding, Smith’s position . . .’. And regarding Rothbard’s account of Smith’s support for export taxes on wool, Friedman writes: ‘Rothbard does not mention that at the time Smith was writing the export of wool was a criminal offense, which the government tried to prevent by extensive regulations over the wool trade. What Smith is actually advocating is thus a sharp reduction in government interference with trade, although not a total elimination of it. Rothbard has to have known that, and I do not see any way of interpreting his failure to mention it as due to anything but deliberate dishonesty – the attempt to mislead his reader by omission’ (Friedman 1998).11 If we leave to one side the heated dialectical milieu of the internet and focus our attention on pieces published in standard journals, we find that even there, Rothbard’s account of Smith has given rise to considerable comment. Paul Trescott evaluates Rothbard on Smith in a way that is partly positive and partly negative. Trescott believes that despite the severity of his criticisms of Smith, Rothbard overlooked some relevant criticisms to which Smith’s work could be subject; in addition, he failed to remark upon some positive aspects of Smith’s work (Trescott 1998, 61). Trescott denies that Smith failed to apply his analysis of the effects of the division of labour to international trade: ‘international exchange is present in Smith’s very first sentence, where he notes that economic well-being arises from “the immediate produce of labor . . . or . . . what is purchased with that produce from other nations”’ (Trescott 1998, 62). He also denies that Smith neglected intra-industry division of labour: ‘numerous industries and occupations are cited in introducing the topic’ (Trescott 1998, 64). While he believes that Rothbard is more persuasive in his claim that Smith was imbued with a Calvinistic scorn of consumption, ‘this can be tempered by passages in The Wealth of Nations’ (Trescott 1998, 63), and although he holds that Rothbard exaggerates the extent to

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which Smith regarded labour as a determinant of value, he concedes that ‘it is still broadly true that Smith set the stage for Ricardo and Marx by passages which presuppose that labour is the source of all value, and that property incomes are somehow a diversion which may be morally and functionally dubious’ (Trescott 1998, 63–4). Trescott endorses Rothbard’s claim that Smith’s theory of money was defective, and he finds Rothbard’s criticism of Smith on distribution to be well grounded. ‘Smith indeed had no adequate theory of the rate of return on capital. . . . His analysis of rent is muddled’ (Trescott 1998, 65). On the other hand, he believes that Rothbard ‘misrepresents both the content and merit of Smith’s wage theory’ (Trescott 1998, 65). He agrees with Rothbard that ‘Smith provided much ammunition for Marx and other socialists’ and promoted ‘the labor theory of value, even if on balance he did not believe in it’ (Trescott 1998, 69). He finds that Smith’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour ‘paved the way for the Marxian neglect of services’ (Trescott 1998, 70). However, Trescott takes exception to the charge of that Smith plagiarized Cantillon’s theory of wages, a charge which he describes as ‘an especially outrageous assertion’ (Trescott 1998, 66, n. 14). He also believes that Rothbard has overstated his case for Smith’s support for government intervention in commerce and education. ‘Taken in its entirety, The Wealth of Nations enumerates a vast array of government measures that Smith disliked. . . . On numerous occasions, the reader is reminded of the limitations and incapacities of government. Rothbard’s commentaries do not communicate this quality to the reader’ (Trescott 1998, 69). In the end, Trescott concludes that ‘Rothbard’s treatment of Smith’s work is unfair and inaccurate’ (Trescott 1998, 71). James C. W. Ahiakpor is another reviewer who is severely critical of Rothbard’s treatment of Smith. ‘[T]here is little evidence in Rothbard’s book to justify the serious charges he levels against Smith. Rather, most of the claims are misrepresentations of

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Smith’s arguments. . . . others derive from errors in Rothbard’s own analysis’ (Ahiakpor 1999, 356). Ahiakpor is unwilling even to make the partial concessions to Rothbard that Truscott made on Smith’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour, his theory of value, and the role of landlord and capitalist (see Ahiakpor 1999, 356–7). In Ahiakpor’s opinion, the work of Douglas (1928) and Kauder (1953) on which Rothbard rests much of his case against Smith has been refuted by the work of Samuel Hollander (Hollander 1973, 133–6 and Hollander 1987, 60–72), and while Ahiakpor concedes that ‘If one applied the standard of modern libertarianism . . . Adam Smith would not qualify as an advocate of laissez-faire’ (Ahiakpor 1999, 374) he nonetheless concludes that most of Rothbard’s criticisms ‘appear to stem from his incomplete reading of The Wealth of Nations or from his peculiar interpretations of texts’ (Ahiakpor 1999, 380; cf. Matthews and Ortman 2002, and Kennedy 2006a; 2006b; 2000c; 2000d; 2000e; 2000f). In contrast to Trescott and Ahiakpor, Spencer Pack provides a somewhat more sympathetic reading of Rothbard on Smith. He accepts that ‘At first reading, Rothbard’s criticisms of Smith seem unduly severe’ but he argues that when taken in the context of Rothbard’s polemical style and his methodological strategy, the criticisms are largely justified and that, in the end, ‘Smith was no libertarian’ (Pack 1998, 74, 78). Broader Assessments Mark Thornton provides a very positive review of Rothbard’s two volumes. He believes that this is the ‘first comprehensive treatment of classical and preclassical economics from an Austrian perspective since Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis’ (Thornton 1996, 283). His summary of the main points of the books notes the convergence of Rothbard and Schumpeter in their negative assessment of Adam Smith. His review, however, also notes some problems with the books’ scholarly apparatus. ‘The referencing system is inadequate. . . . the comprehensive

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list of references and the indexing seems inadequate for such a work. . . . There are too many typos . . .’ (Thornton 1996, 284) He concludes by noting that ‘. . . these books will be controversial and should be considered dangerous to professional cohesion’ (Thornton 1996, 284). Mark Perlman is one of the few reviewers who takes Rothbard’s point that this is an anti-Whig treatment of economic history and believes that Rothbard is right in thinking that it is just not the case that in economics each day in every way, things get better and better. He concedes that ‘The narrative is somewhat disorganised, full of engaging historical asides (perhaps better put in footnotes)’ but that it is ‘always aimed at the point that improvements in “science” (more conventionally called “knowledge”) are not sequential – quite the contrary, in the case of economics the discipline retrograded from greater understanding (the Scholastics) to a caricature of itself, the SmithRicardian utilitarianism’ (Perlman 1996, 1415). Perlman concludes his review of the first volume by saying that it ‘might well be read by anyone wanting to get an interpretation of Continental and English economics before Adam Smith . . .’ (Perlman 1996, 1416). The tone of the second volume is, in Perlman’s opinion, very different from that of the first, presenting a ‘generally harsh and negative view’, one that ‘Most current American and British historians of economic though will find . . . distasteful and wrong-headedly doctrinaire’. In the end, he concludes that Rothbard’s interpretations, while captivating, are ‘hardly persuasive’ (Perlman 1996, 1417). S. Todd Lowry provides a very extensive, scholarly and considered review. He holds that the first volume of the set is well-written but he has reservations about the quality of the writing in the second volume. He notes that Rothbard rejects a Whig reading of economics but remarks, ironically, as we also saw David Gordon remark, that Rothbard provides an alternative Whig version of Austrian history and prehistory (Gordon 2007a, 115). Lowry, who has published in the area of classical Greek economic ideas, is critical of Rothbard’s treatment of

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Protagoras, Plato and Aristotle. He believes that Rothbard’s claim that paper money was invented in the West in Quebec in 1661 is a piece of folklore that ‘could have been avoided if the author had noted Plato’s endorsement in Laws (742a-b) of a domestic fiat money system’ (Lowry 1996, 1337). In the context of Rothbard’s discussion of the medievals, Lowry criticizes him for not drawing on the work of Langholm (Langholm 1979; see also Langholm 2006). On the other hand, Rothbard is praised for putting forward a convincing argument that ‘by relying on the Roman Law doctrine of voluntarism and consensual contract, [the medievals] neutralised the burden of the usury prohibition on commerce. The doctrine of lucrum cessans is credited with introducing the concepts of time and liquidity preference (v. 1, p. 125) (see Casey 2006). This gateway to modern Austrian thought puts in question the Weberian emphasis on the Protestant ethic as a necessary factor in the development of capitalism’ (Lowry 1996, 1338). However, Rothbard is once again criticized for not making appropriate use of the best and most recent scholarship on this period, notably that of Fernand Braudel (Braudel 1973) on European capitalism between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, and David McNally’s Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (McNally 1988). The writing in the second volume is criticized for being uneven, ‘with most chapters showing clear signs that the author was following one or two secondary sources rather closely. While a few chapters have fairly extensive citations, there is no attempt at providing a comprehensive bibliography’ (Lowry 1996, 1339). Overall, Lowry concludes that ‘the book cannot be considered as a primary reader for a course in the history of economic thought either at the graduate or undergraduate level. The volume on the classical economists is idiosyncratic and unsystematic. The pseudo-erudition of the first volume can be very misleading because it is not theoretically and historically sound or thorough and its treatment of the current literature is casual at best’ (Lowry 1996, 1339).

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Conclusion Rothbard’s influence on and continuing contribution to the debates on economics, politics, history and liberty, both direct and indirect, is widespread and increasing. One particular (and peculiar) way in which Rothbard has affected academic discussions of political philosophy has been by his stimulating Nozick to write Anarchy, State and Utopia. The critical reaction to Rothbard’s economics, or at least those parts of it that bear on liberty, was indicated in the body and the notes to the previous chapter; his polemical work will be considered in the next chapter. In this chapter, apart from sketching his relationship to Nozick’s thought, I have focussed primarily on Rothbard’s historical work on colonial America and on economics. As has been indicated, the critical reaction to this dimension of Rothbard’s work has been somewhat mixed. While some aspects of the various criticisms, such as those bearing on the inadequacies of the scholarly apparatus appear, at least to some extent, to be justified, the bulk of the criticism leaves Rothbard’s withers unwrung. In particular, his interpretation of the American Revolution as being genuinely revolutionary and the outcome of the crystallization of widespread libertarian sentiments, and his overall claim for the reinvestigation and reinstatement of those proto-economists who are routinely marginalized and his corresponding attack on the Smith myth stand as a challenge to conventional political and economic historiography

Notes 1 2 3

Nozick is the subject of a volume in this series. The phrase comes from the title of Walter Block’s book. The Rothbard–Nozick tension is merely one aspect of a larger dispute with the camp of libertarians. While all parties to the dispute are keen to defend the claim that the free market is either the proper or the best way to provide for the range of services that human beings

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need, they differ on the critical question of the provision of those services that are often held to be the core services of government – the creation and maintenance of order, the preservation of the peace via a resolution of disputes, etc. The term ‘minarchism’ was coined by Samuel Konkin in 1971 to apply to those libertarians who believe that compulsory government in some form is necessary. Minarchists believe that the free market can provide all the services human beings require except the core functions of government; anarchists believe that all services, including the allegedly core functions of government, are sustainable without the use of a coercive agency exercising a monopoly of legitimate force over a specified geographical area (see Long and Machan, 2008). If there are risks involved in having multiple agencies (and there would appear to be such risks), what of the risks involved in having a single agency with no competitors? A process very like this took place in Ireland a few years ago when private companies were allowed to compete with local councils for the provision of refuse collection and disposal services. First one, then another private company entered the market. The local council had to lower its prices to stay in competition. No longer the monopolist provider of such services, it is now simply one among others. ‘Volume five, on the Constitution, was written in longhand and no one can read my handwriting’ (Rothbard 1990). Rothbard notes that ‘By the 1760s and early 1770s . . . the libraries of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale contained the numerous works of Locke’ (Rothbard 1976, 335). In contrast to the volumes of economic history, which received a significant amount of attention in the scholarly journals, the volumes of Conceived in Liberty, perhaps because of their staggered release over a 4-year period, were not the subject of as much critical attention. As might be expected in the cribbed, cabined and confined world of historical scholarship, not everyone is enamoured of Rothbard’s project. Carl Ubbelodhe, for one, is highly critical of what he perceives as a lack of narrative power in Conceived in Liberty. The provision of historical narrative is, avowedly, Rothbard’s stated purpose but Ubbelodhe finds that a book attempting to cover so many different and distinct topics means that this purpose cannot be achieved. When narrative does eventually make its appearance, ‘so do passions unmarred by references to sources or scholars. This book, in short, is without value for either scholars or libraries. More literate, better synthesized accounts of the decades are available in standard textbooks. Spend your book dollars elsewhere’ (Ubbelohde 1976, 417).

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Adam Smith is the subject of a volume in this series which should be consulted for a more extensive account of his thought than can be furnished here. Not every historian of economics is carried away on a tide of admiration for Smith, and Rothbard is able to cite Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis as a work that casts a ‘cold and realistic eye’ on Smith’s magnum opus. David Gordon takes issue with these charges of inadequate scholarship and downright dishonesty in 2006 (Gordon 2006; see an extensive blog at Various 2006).

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Chapter 4

Contemporary Relevance

The ideas that Rothbard represents, that is, a combination of individualist anarchism, revisionist history, and Austrian economics, warrant serious attention from scholars and activists alike. It is in this set of ideas, and not his political activities or personality cult, that the real relevance of Rothbard lies. . . . Rothbard is one of those bold social thinkers who do not shy away from radical policy positions. His relevance, like that of Marx, lies at exactly this level. He is a steadfast opponent of political oppression, and he presents a system of thought that challenges both conservative and liberal conceptions of the good society. For those who are concerned with not just philosophizing about the world, but changing it, Rothbard provides a vision of a systematic science of liberty. (Peter J. Boettke 1988, 29, 30)

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007 The global financial crisis that began in 2007 has been widely seen as evidence of the failure of what the popular press and electronic media like to call ‘unrestrained’ capitalism. Writing in Barron’s in March 2009, Randall W. Forsyth noted wryly ‘“Will Capitalism Survive?” was the question before the lunch table Wednesday. “It hasn’t been tried,” I replied, “at least not since the McKinley administration and certainly not since 1914,” when the Federal Reserve started operations in earnest’ (Forsyth 2009). The populist image portrayed in the news media is one

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of greedy financiers and speculators playing irresponsibly with other people’s money with no regard for the consequences of their actions on the so-called real economy. The response of many governments to the crisis has been to adopt a neoKeynesian interventionist approach, including such strategies as ‘quantitative easing’1 (the injection of massive amounts of new money into the economy), the partial or complete nationalization of banks or the setting up of quasi-government agencies2 to siphon off and manage the banks’ bad debts.3 What the crisis is evidence for, however, is not the failure of capitalism as such (about which one might say, as Gandhi is alleged to have said about Western Civilization, that it would be a good idea) but the peculiar nature of modern banking, in particular, the incestuous relationship between the commercial and investment banks, the central banks (such as the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank) and governments, a topic on which Rothbard and other Austrian thinkers have written extensively. This morally and economically dubious relationship is at the root of the current crisis.4 Rothbard had always been interested in the phenomenon of market panic or collapse and, as we have seen, in his earliest work he applied the insights of Austrian economics to the Panic of 1819 and the Great Depression of 1929. He also wrote extensively on banking, publishing The Mystery of Banking (Rothbard 1983a) and, in 2002, a collection of his papers was published under the title A History of Money and Banking in the United States (Rothbard 2005). The key to the Austrians’ explanation of the phenomenon of market panics and crashes lies in their understanding of the nature of money, banking and government. In brief, Austrians believe that the market, if not interfered with, is essentially selfcorrecting. Governments and their allies in the central banks, however, constantly interfere in the market by inflating the money supply and manipulating interest rates in such a way that economic projects are undertaken which have an insufficient grounding in economic reality. This generates the boom part of the boom/bust cycle. The root causes of our present problems are the

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Harry Potteresque activities of our government-sponsored central banks (by whatever name known) in conjuring money from nowhere, allied to the heroic efforts of our commercial and investment banks to multiply the magic money and supply it to eager borrowers who, misled by false economic signals, in particular by interest rates not grounded in market realities, malinvested significantly. Eventually, malinvestments are seen for what they really are and the consequence is a rapid retraction of financial support for marginal projects, resulting in crashes and depressions. Attempting to get us out of our current problems by means of stimulus packages is much the same as attempting to help an alcoholic by encouraging him to have another drink. Any attempt to delay the depression process, for example, by means of that forlorn hope ‘quantitative easing’, will simply result in the postponement of recovery. Governments must avoid the temptation to intervene: they must not attempt to prop up unsound businesses; they must not bail out or lend money to businesses in trouble; they must not support wages or prices; they must do nothing to encourage consumption; they must not increase their own expenditure; the only thing they can do positively is to lower their own budgets. The immediate solution to the problem is masterly inactivity. Unfortunately, governments are not in the business of doing nothing and so, either failing to recognize (or denying) that it was their policy interventions and their state-supported central banks that produced the boom/bust cycle in the first place, they feel compelled to intervene again to rescue society from what they fondly imagine to be the excesses of unrestrained capitalism. Typically, their solution to the problem is to do exactly what was done before, hence the aforementioned ‘quantitative easing’, the pressure to lower interest rates, more and tighter regulation of the financial markets, caps on executive pay, and so on. ‘The Austrian prescription, of course, was rejected first by the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and now by massive response by both the purportedly conservative Bush administration and now the Obama administration. First came the $700 billion TARP last year to stabilize the financial system, followed by the

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$787 billion fiscal stimulus . . .’ (Forsyth 2009). Nothing has essentially changed since 1819 and 1929 and having learnt nothing from history, we appear to be doomed to relive it.

Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste Leaving to one side the economic inappropriateness of the responses to the financial crisis, what we also witness is the use of the crisis for the legitimation of an ever-increasing range of interventions in the market economy and ever-more irksome restrictions of our personal liberties. The motto might well be ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’. As in the case of military and political crises5 which, although invariably generated by government action, are to be cured by yet more government action, so too with economic crises. For the critics of capitalism, the problem is market freedom; the solution is tighter regulation and control of the market. In reality, of course, the problem is the unholy trinity of government, banks and all forms of welfare. The solution is to allow markets to operate with real freedom, not the phantom simulacrum of freedom that they currently enjoy, to require banks to operate in non-bankrupt mode and interest rates to be determined by the demand for and supply of money, and to insist upon the immediate cessation of confiscatory state policies that are used to fund clientelistic welfare, whether social, global or corporate. The Austrian approach to economics, of which Rothbard was a leading exponent, has never been more needed nor has it ever been more relevant. Unfortunately, it has never been more likely to be ignored or even to be attacked as part of the problem rather than accepted as the heart of the solution.

Rothbard – Polemicist In addition to his abilities as an economist, political theorist and historian, Rothbard also had a pronounced talent for

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occasional popular literature. All throughout his career, in addition to his scholarly work, he produced a seemingly unending stream of opinion pieces on any topic that happened to take his fancy, and these were many and varied. In these occasional pieces, he demonstrated the relevance of libertarianism to a whole range of topics and problems and, although some aspects of these pieces are of necessity dated, the central principled points embodied in them are still relevant to many issues of current concern.6 Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature In 1974, Roy Childs edited a collection of some of Rothbard’s best occasional pieces in a volume entitled, after its lead essay, Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature (Rothbard 2000b). In this essay, Rothbard takes aim against one of the greatest shibboleths of the age – equality: ‘[T]he goal of equality has for too long been treated uncritically and axiomatically as the ethical ideal’ (Rothbard 2000b, 5). After a pithy analysis of the concept, Rothbard notes that a strictly egalitarian society can only be realized by totalitarian and coercive means. At the heart of the egalitarian hope is a deep-rooted belief in the radical plasticity of man, what Rothbard describes as ‘the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will . . .’ (Rothbard 2000b, 17). But the vessel of egalitarianism, fuelled by a hatred of genuine diversity, is shipwrecked upon the rock of biology. Human nature is not infinitely malleable nor can all the differences that make a difference simply be ironed out by raw desire (see Casey 2003). Rothbard’s pithy observations on the shibboleth of equality are, if anything, even more relevant today than they were when first produced. The goal of social and economic equality – ill defined and indefensible – is the central article of faith of the socio-political creed of the left-liberal establishment.7

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The Free Market Between 1982 and 1995, The Free Market provided a monthly opportunity for Rothbard to air his views on current economic topics and in 1995, a collection of the best of The Free Market articles was published as Making Economic Sense (Rothbard 2006a). In this accessible volume we find Rothbard discussing, among other things, ‘Ten Great Economic Myths’, renewing his attack on Keynesianism in ‘Keynesian Myths’ and ‘Keynesianism Redux’, attacking the socialism of welfare, whether Social Security or government medical insurance, developing the theme of politics as a form of economic violence, revealing some persistent fiscal mysteries surrounding taxation and budgets, and displaying in graphic detail the plague of fiat money. As might be expected, some of this material is dated and no longer topical and therefore primarily (I don’t say ‘merely’) of historical interest; most of it, however, transcends the limits of its original place and time and is as applicable and pointed now as ever it was. The Welfare Racket Every reader will have his own favourites from among these short, punchy pieces. Mine include those collected in the section entitled ‘The Socialism of Welfare’. Here, Rothbard demonstrates the enormous economic disincentives and distortions of the labour market that welfare systems invariably produce. He makes what one would think is a fairly obvious point but one that is not, it seems, obvious to our would-be leaders, that ‘the more any product, service, or condition is subsidized, the more of it we are going to get’ (Rothbard 2006a, 55). Subsidize unemployment and what do you get? More unemployment. As economists are fond of pointing out, people respond to incentives. Social welfare incentivises unemployment. Why then are we surprised when we discover a positive correlation between social welfare and unemployment?

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Turning his attention to Social Security, Rothbard states, baldly, that ‘the Social Security System is the biggest single racket in the entire panoply of welfare-state measures that have been fastened upon us by the New Deal and its successors’ (Rothbard 2006a, 68) – as indeed it is, and as are the corresponding forms of Social Insurance in other countries. The man in the street has a naïve belief that the money which is forcibly extracted from him in the form of Social Insurance (or whatever else it may be called) is stored up for him in a special fund, to be paid back to him in his old age. Of course, nothing could be further from truth. There is no fund. ‘The federal government taxes the youth and adult working population . . . and spends it on . . . boondoggles. . . . then, when the long-taxed person gets to be 65, the government taxes someone else . . . to pay the so-called benefits’ (Rothbard 2006a, 69). As Rothbard notes, if any private individual were to operate in this way, he would find himself bankrupt, sued, in jail, or all three. ‘The whole system is a vast Ponzi scheme, with the difference that Ponzi’s notorious swindle rested solely on his ability to con his victims, whereas the government swindlers, of course, rely also on a vast apparatus of taxcoercion’ (Rothbard 2006a, 69).

The Rothbard–Rockwell Report In 1990, Rothbard and Lew Rockwell founded what came to be known as The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, a newsletter ‘of trenchant opinions on politics and politicians, on economics and history, on foreign policy and government, and on religion and culture’ (JoAnn Rothbard, in Rockwell 2000, xi). A collection of the best of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report was published as The Irrepressible Rothbard (Rockwell 2000) and this accessible collection should be read, if only for its sheer entertainment value. One of the things his opponents found most difficult to forgive Rothbard for was his uncommon common touch and his mastery of rhetoric (in the non-pejorative sense of that term) which permitted

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him to speak and write directly and persuasively to an audience that extended well beyond the narrow bounds of academia. Rothbard’s wife, JoAnn Rothbard, remarked ‘Writing for the Triple R was an important and pleasurable part of Murray’s life for the last four years. Although he also enjoyed the scholarly work that he did, writing for the Triple R was the most fun he could think of’ (Rockwell 2000, xi). The New Old Right Writing in 1992, Rothbard exclaimed, ‘The Old Right is suddenly back!’ (Rockwell 2000, 3). After a review of the emergence of the original Old Right and its career, and having provided some personal reminiscences, Rothbard turns to the question of the appropriate strategy that the ‘New’ Old Right should adopt. He identifies three possible models: Educationism, Fabianism and Populism. Educationism, which Rothbard associates particularly with Hayek, is the strategy of getting the right ideas into the heads of the right people at the top of the social and political hierarchies and having them trickle down through society until, eventually, they arrive at the doorsteps of the masses. The problem with this strategy is not only the inordinate amount of time it would take; it also presupposes a lust for the truth among intellectuals, academics and media operators that Rothbard is not convinced we can find: ‘I hate to break this to you, intellectuals, academics and the media are not all motivated by truth alone’ (Rockwell 2000, 10). The Fabian strategy, a strategy adopted by many right-wing think tanks, is that of promoting a little change here, a little change there and hoping for the best in the long run. However, as Rothbard points out, the original Socialist Fabians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were pushing if not quite on an open door, at least on a door that was substantially ajar, whereas our erstwhile right-wing Fabians are pushing the door of the state in a direction in which it decidedly does not want to

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go and the result is much more likely to be the cooption of the right-wing Fabians by the state than of the state by the Fabians. And that leaves only the Populist strategy, which Rothbard describes as ‘exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing, and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well’ (Rockwell 2000, 11). The problem with conservatism is that everything depends upon what it is that one is going to conserve. If what is to be conserved is independently judged to be good, then conservation is in order. However, if the status quo is independently judged not to be good then change, not conservation, is what is required. The typical Paso Doble of twentieth-century politics has been steady change by the left-liberals when in power followed, bizarrely, by the preservation of those changes by the conservatives when they come to power. God forbid that the conservatives when in power should actually undo anything. But the ‘New’ Old Right, which Rothbard would prefer to call the ‘Radical Right’ or the ‘Hard Right’, intends to repeal pretty much the whole of the twentieth century. Rothbard asks, sardonically, ‘Who would want to repeal the twentieth century, the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repeal that!’ (Rockwell 2000, 19–20). Anti-interventionism Again Ever since the days of his association with the Old Right, Rothbard has been resolutely anti-interventionist. The first US-Bush Gulf War, and the US interventions in Bosnia, Serbia and Somalia provided an occasion for the display of Rothbard’s anti-interventionist credentials. He relentlessly exposes the lies, half-truths, irrelevancies and naked self-interest of the pro-war supporters. With a heavy helping of irony, he tells us that the lessons we should draw from the Gulf War are these – war is good – it makes domestic problems go away (at least for a time); in time

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of war (or even in time of peace) it allows the state to censor, curb and confine the media. It’s important to do this because, after all, the media ‘lost us the Korean and Vietnam Wars. . . . the media injure American morale. The media prattle about “gathering the news,” and “giving us the truth.” What they don’t understand is that only the president deserves the truth’ (Rockwell 2000, 182). And let’s get rid of the members of Congress since they only obstruct and delay the President who ‘embodies in his person the entire national and public interest’ (Rockwell 2000, 182).

Sellout and Retreat It is not always easy to combat the social and political evils of the world. There is a permanent temptation for libertarians to give up the fight, to surrender. Rothbard identifies two major forms of surrender in the conservative and libertarian movements: the sellout and the retreat. His characterization of the sellout is masterly: The young libertarian or conservative arrives in Washington, at some think-tank or in Congress or as an administrative aide, ready and eager to do battle, to roll back the State in service to his cherished radical cause. And then something happens: sometimes gradually, sometimes with startling suddenness. You go to some cocktail parties, you find that the Enemy seems very pleasant, you start getting enmeshed in Beltway marginalia, and pretty soon you are placing the highest importance on some trivial committee vote, or on some piddling little tax cut or amendment, and eventually you are willing to abandon the battle altogether for a cushy contract, or a plush government job. And as this sellout process continues, you find that your major source of irritation is not the statist enemy, but the troublemakers out in the field who are always yapping about principle and even attacking you for selling out the cause. And pretty soon you and The Enemy have an indistinguishable face. (Rockwell 2000, 256)

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This form of betrayal is common enough and fairly obvious; what is neither so common nor so obvious is the other form of surrender, which Rothbard calls ‘retreatism’. Tired of struggle, worn-out by the seemingly unending necessity to combat the social and political evils of the mundane world, our would-be conservative or libertarian says ‘Goodbye, cruel world’ and heads for the hills, remote islands or the primeval forest. The trouble with this mode of surrender is that it rejects not only evil but good as well. ‘For years, I have been replying to these sets of retreatists that the real world, after all, is good; that we libertarians may be anti-State, but that we are emphatically not antisociety or opposed to the real world, however contaminated it might be’ (Rockwell 2000, 257). This mode of surrender has been common enough through the ages, and we can see it in an early form of Taoism, in various medieval purist sects, and in almost all forms of Puritanism, including Puritanism’s latest incarnation in the Green Movement which is not, as many people seem to think, a faintly ridiculous fad but rather a serious menace.8 Rothbard notes that while the ‘sellout is morally evil’ and ‘the retreatist . . . terribly misguided’, in both cases, ‘the cause, the fight against evil in the real world, is abandoned’ (Rockwell 2000, 258). Global Welfare In a short essay on the Rwandan massacres (‘Hutus vs. Tutsis’), Rothbard lays bare some of the major fallacies underlying the international approach to Africa. The root cause of the problem is the lumping together of rival ethnic groups by the colonial powers into one small area, small, that is, by African standards. ‘European imperialism . . . [created] . . . various phony “countries,” with total disregard for the integrity of the various tribes, most of whom . . . have little or nothing in common and hate each other’s guts’ (Rockwell 2000, 251). This geopolitical division of Africa was carried out by Colonial Office officials who thought that what they had to do to sort out African affairs was

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simply to sharpen up their pencils, get out the map of the Dark Continent, draw aesthetically pleasing straight lines on it and then retire for drinks to the Senior Conservative Club with the satisfying feeling that their duty had been done. The proponents of the New World Order have a touching belief in the manifest virtues of democracy, multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity and are genuinely puzzled when others fail to share these beliefs. In other of his writings, Rothbard attacks the special international trade deals, such as NAFTA, pointing out that such arrangements are merely refined ways of setting up barriers to trade. He could have made similar points in his analysis of the African problem. One of the principal sources of continuing African poverty is the existence of barriers to trade erected and maintained by African nations among themselves. Since 1949, the US, Europe and various international organizations, including the IMF and the World Bank, have attempted to solve the problems of the Third World (especially Africa) by means of programmes of global welfare that consist largely in the international redistribution of money via politically funded foreign aid. The results to date have not been inspiring. Some $2.3 trillion (in today’s dollars) in foreign aid has been given to Africa in the last 40 years. Why hasn’t it worked? The answer is multifarious – politics of a worse than usual variety, ethnic and regional conflicts exacerbated by colonial geopolitical ineptitude, official and unofficial corruption, dysfunctional public services and insecure or nonexistent property rights. Peter Bauer’s somewhat cynical aphorism that foreign aid consists of the poor in rich countries giving to the rich in poor countries contains more than a grain of truth. The root problem with the international approach, however, is not just the massive redistribution of funds premised on some ill-conceived notion of collective guilt, but the assumption that central planning can do the trick. Surely if our experience in the twentieth century has taught us one thing it is that central planning doesn’t, and cannot, work. It doesn’t and cannot work in our own regional and local economies; why then should we think it will work globally?

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Like second marriages, the seemingly ineradicable belief in the virtues of central planning represents the triumph of hope over experience. The Cult of the Victim Much of Rothbard’s most devastatingly pungent analysis is reserved for the latter-day cult of the victim. His question for the radical feminist – victim extraordinaire – is quite direct: are men and women essentially the same (with the implications such a thesis has for their treatment by the law) or are they essentially different? Or do the feminists, as Rothbard suspects, cleave now to one thesis, now to the other, as it becomes strategically convenient. How, he asks, ‘can they say both at the same time, or have it both ways?’ (Rockwell 2000, 349). The key to the doublethink is to realize that for the radical feminist ‘men are the evil, victimizer sex; women are the good, victimized sex. The two genders are ineluctable enemies. Therefore, all tactics and strategies are permissible and valuable if they result in the victory of women over the Male Enemy’ (Rockwell 2000, 349–50) and that includes the consistent employment of the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ doublethink form of inconsistency. Rothbard’s reflections on the sexual harassment controversy surrounding the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court allow him to vent his spleen on the farcical yet wholly dangerous implications of such political correctness. Although he could not be counted among Thomas’s warmest admirers, Rothbard was taken aback by the attack launched upon him by the ‘army of organized Left Feminism, including their wimpo Male Auxiliaries’ (Rockwell 2000, 353). The press and media generally abandoned any attempt to be neutral and objective in their reporting and investigating; the claim by Anita Hill of sexual harassment was not to be questioned. ‘The basic premise of the Regiment…is that whenever any woman whatsoever makes a charge of “sexual harassment” (or date rape, or rape, or whatever), that the charge must be

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taken by everyone as per se true. Any doubt expressed, let alone any challenge to try to impeach the witness, is considered per se evil, an attempt to blame or once again “harass” the “victim”’ (Rockwell 2000, 354). In the end, in a battle of the ‘isms’, political correctness fought with political correctness; ‘racism’ contended with ‘feminism’ and ‘racism’ won. The deadly serious point of Rothbard’s critique is not to show that Thomas was or wasn’t guilty of sexual harassment – it is to call the very notion of sexual harassment as a crime into question. The radical feminist wants a criminal chain to extend from rape all the way down to some trivial incident of bad taste. The continuum is meant to raise the trivial to the level of the serious; in fact, however, the danger is that the truly criminal and serious risks being trivialized. A crucial distinction exists between ‘harmless verbal flirting, verbal threats of job loss in demanding sexual favors, and physical assault. We don’t “get” the continuum thesis because that thesis is evil and wrong . . . ’ (Rockwell 2000, 360). In a delicious irony, Clarence Thomas as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was the very person who urged the Reagan administration to broaden the definition of sexual harassment to cover just the kind of verbal ‘harassment’ of which he would himself be accused: ‘Clarence Thomas himself forged the weapon that almost destroyed him, and in that sense he almost got his just deserts’ (Rockwell 2000, 361). Pulling his analytical camera back on the issue to gain a wider perspective, Rothbard sees a kind of Neo-Puritanism standing behind much of Victimology, whose influence is at once absurd and destructive: ‘[O]ne of the grave problems with American public life is that every public personality is expected to be a saint, so that any revelations of sin or of less than saintly behavior discredit the person’s public performance’ (Rockwell 2000, 365). In the end, Rothbard finds himself echoing G. K. Chesterton’s aphorism that when people stop believing in God, they start believing in anything. Society must, of necessity, have some overarching set of constitutive beliefs – if it is not one set, it will be another. The power of potential civic religions such as Feminism or Left

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Puritanism (nowadays, the dominant civic religion is the notso-Jolly Green Giant) is that they claim to be tolerant while being every bit as totalitarian and oppressive as any of the more traditional religions has ever been. ‘[S]ome religion is going to be dominant in every society. . . . if Christianity, for example, is scorned and tossed out, some horrendous form of religion is going to take its place: whether it be Communism, New Age occultism, feminism, or Left Puritanism’ (Rockwell 2000, 365).

A World Full of Hate? In an interview, published in 2002, Noam Chomsky said, ‘The American version of “libertarianism” is an aberration, though – nobody really takes it seriously’ (Mitchell and Schoeffel 2003, 200). It is difficult to know how Chomsky would substantiate this claim and I suspect, perhaps cynically, that by ‘nobody’ he means nobody he knows on the north bank of the Charles River between MIT and Harvard. He continues: ‘I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. . . . it couldn’t function for a second – and if it could, all you’d want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something’ (Mitchell and Schoeffel 2003, 200). Once again, it is difficult to know what the evidence for such an extraordinary claim is. As a matter of fact, we don’t all know about the necessarily ephemeral life cycle of a libertarian society; on the contrary, such societies could and did function not just for three seconds but for millennia. While archaic societies do not match the libertarian paradigm in all respects, they are significantly closer to that paradigm than any modern democratic liberal state. Such archaic societies were the norm in Western Europe until the eleventh century9 and can still be found operating in remote parts of the world. Chomsky does concede that ‘. . . there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard’ but he characterizes Rothbard’s world as ‘a world so full of hate that no human being

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would want to live in it. This is a world where you don’t have roads because you don’t see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you’re not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don’t like the pollution from somebody’s automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It’s a world built on hatred’ (Mitchell and Schoeffel 2003, 200). A world built on hatred? Such a bizarre opinion can only be the result of prejudice. But then, who needs to read and understand what a man actually said and thought when one already knows a priori that he must be wrong. How could anyone who had seriously studied Rothbard’s writings come to such a conclusion? In fact, the world that, according to Chomsky, is built on hatred is the world that built the first passable civil roads, the first canals and the first railroads, a world that is largely responsible not for hatred and division but for the real increase in per capita wealth10 that the West and its imitators have witnessed over the last three centuries. Chomsky’s opinion ignores the whole positive-sum nature of exchange, the increase in wealth and productivity that accrues to all from the division of labour – in short, it ignores the laws of economics. The most charitable interpretation that can be placed upon Chomsky’s remarks is that he has failed to realize that the core of libertarian theory focuses upon justice and is neither coextensive with nor makes any claim to be coextensive with the whole of morality.11

Libertarianism and Conservatism – Again Libertarianism differentiates itself from both liberalism (in its contemporary incarnation) and from conservatism in rejecting the use of force in all cases except those of resisting or punishing aggression. The liberal is content to use the power of the

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state to enforce his economic views on all to produce what he considers to be the correct distribution of goods and services12 while claiming as large a space as possible for personal, especially sexual, morality. The conservative, on the other hand, generally wishes to leave as much space as possible for economic activities while recruiting the state to enforce his moral views on others. Unlike the libertarian for whom liberty operates as a principle across the whole range of human endeavour, both the liberal and the conservative are selective in those spheres in which they will allow liberty to operate. Of the two camps, Rothbard is much more sympathetic to those in the conservative camp than to those in the liberal camp. As was mentioned in the first chapter, Rothbard was by and large a cultural conservative who adopted a welcoming attitude to custom, habit and tradition and, in particular, to religion. Where he differed from the conservative in the matter of custom was not in his appreciation of its social value but in refusing to allow its maintenance by means of force or coercion. That granted, Rothbard was only too willing to entertain a presumption in its favour. Rothbard recognized that many libertarians make the mistake of asserting a form of individualism that, implicitly more often than explicitly, posits a dubious anthropology that, in effect, has the individual existing fully formed, naked and alone, unconnected to any other person, place or thing. He accepted the conservative commonplace that every person is a member of a family, grows up to speak a particular language, and assimilates and learns to think in and through a particular set of cultural practices and traditions. It can hardly be said too often or too bluntly that libertarianism is not libertinism. Libertarianism will not admit the physical restraint or physical punishment of acts that do not aggress against others but it nowhere implies moral approval of such acts or rules out their restraint by other methods such as exhortation, boycotting or loudly expressed disapproval. Libertarianism disconnected from the customs and traditions dear to conservatism risks being mistaken for a skeleton; conservatism without

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the principled core of libertarianism risks being unable to differentiate between that which is genuinely fulfilling and perfective of human nature and the merely customary, transient and contingent.

Strategy Even for those people who, unlike Chomsky, are attracted by the libertarian vision of society, doubts may arise as to practical possibility of realizing such a society. A common charge made against the goals of libertarianism is that they are utopian. The strategic question of the viability and realizability of the libertarian vision was addressed on several occasions by Rothbard (Rothbard 2006b and 2002). The first requisite is education, by which term Rothbard means the persuasion of more and more people of the merits of the libertarian cause and the necessity for its advancement. The message to be heard must be broadcast and so publication in every possible form – books, articles, conferences, seminars, internet – is necessary. In turn, however, unless people hear and accept the message, all such publication activity is ultimately futile. Rothbard is adamant that both the elaboration of libertarian theory and the creation of a movement in which this theory is embedded are necessary if a libertarian society is to be achieved. ‘[T]he theory will die on the vine without a self-conscious movement which dedicates itself to advancing the theory and the goal. The movement will become mere pointless motion if it loses sight of the ideology and the goal in view’ (Rothbard 2006b 374). Libertarians need not only to educate others; they must also educate themselves, not just to expand their range of knowledge but to develop a kind of fortitude in the face of adversity. ‘The contemporary movement is now old enough to have had a host of defectors; analysis of these defections shows that, in almost every case, the libertarian has been isolated, cut off from fellowship and interaction with his colleagues’ (Rothbard 2006b, 375).

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As we have seen, Rothbard identifies ‘opportunism’ as a particularly attractive temptation for the erstwhile libertarian. Confronted with the seemingly impossible task of immediately realizing the libertarian vision, some libertarians confine their attention and activities to practical reforms that may be more immediately adoptable. The danger in this tactic is that the attainment of the ultimate goal is first postponed and eventually abandoned. The goals of gradualism, while realizable, are scarcely the kind of things to stir the spirit. ‘Who’, asks Rothbard ironically, ‘will go to the barricades for a two percent tax reduction?’ (Rothbard 2006b, 378). In short, then, the committed libertarian must try to achieve the ultimate goal as rapidly as possible. ‘The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push the button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty. Of course, he knows, too, that such a magic button does not exist, but his fundamental preference colors and shapes his entire strategic perspective’ (Rothbard 2006b, 379; cf. Rothbard 2002, 259). Given then that a consistent libertarian should be willing to ‘push the button’, must he, as it were, sit around with his finger poised over it, waiting for the critical moment? No. If opportunism is a strategic error, so too is the purist (or as Rothbard terms it, the ‘sectarian’) rejection of measures that lessen or reduce the impediments to freedom. ‘The tragedy is that these sectarians, in condemning all advances that fall short of the goal, serve to render vain and futile the cherished goal itself. For much as all of us would be overjoyed to arrive at total liberty at a single bound, the realistic prospects for such a mighty leap are limited’ (Rothbard 2006b, 382–3; cf. Rothbard 2002, 261). The libertarian, then, is obliged to keep a balance between opportunism and sectarianism. To this end, there are two criteria that may be employed. First, one must never lose sight of the ultimate end of liberty. Second, no position or policy can be adopted that contradicts libertarianism’s ultimate goals. So, for example, given that we have in place a system of taxation, our ultimate goal is its complete abolition. However, if that is not

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immediately realizable, then any measure that results in the lessening of the tax burden may be supported. ‘The reduction or, better, the abolition of a tax is always a noncontradictory reduction of State power and a significant step toward liberty; but its replacement by a new or increased tax elsewhere does just the opposite . . .’ (Rothbard 2006b, 384). Rothbard denies utterly that libertarian doctrine is utopian. If a doctrine, such as communism, is radically antithetical to the nature of man and reality, then it can be said to be utopian. Its inability to work is not a mere technical matter requiring some minor adjustments but a reflection of the fact that, in the end, what is inconsistent with reality will inevitably fail. On Rothbard’s view, libertarianism is not only not inconsistent with the nature of man and reality but is the political doctrine which is in fact most consistent. ‘In the deepest sense, then, the libertarian doctrine is not utopian but eminently realistic, because it is the only theory that is really consistent with the nature of man and the world. The libertarian does not deny the variety and diversity of man, he glories in it and seeks to give that diversity full expression in a world of complete freedom’ (Rothbard 2006b, 381). Apart from fledgling libertarians, at whom should the educational efforts of libertarians be targeted? Well, despite Hayek’s fond hopes, the ruling group in society and its allies and supporters are unlikely to be persuaded of the merits of a doctrine that removes at a stroke their pay and emoluments. The owners or directors of big business operations might seem to be likely candidates for conversion but, in reality, many if not most big businesses are feeding at the trough of the state by means of contracts, legal privileges and various forms of cartelization. ‘Big business support for the Corporate Welfare-Warfare State is so blatant and so far-ranging, on all levels from the local to the federal, that even many conservatives have had to acknowledge it . . .’ (Rothbard 2006b, 388). If government officials, their supporters, their business allies and other fellow travellers are not amenable to the libertarian message, who is? The answer

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is – pretty much anyone who is not a member of the ruling elite or linked to it in some essential way. In sum, then, for Rothbard, the achievement of total liberty is the highest political end and it is based upon ‘a moral passion for justice’ (Rothbard 2002, 264). That end must be ‘pursued by the speediest and most efficacious possible means . . . the end must always be kept in sight . . . and the means taken must never contradict the goal – whether by advocating gradualism, by employing or advocating any aggression against liberty, by advocating planned programs, or by failing to seize any opportunity to reduce State power or by ever increasing it in any area’ (Rothbard 2002, 264). ‘[T]he government has run out of money; increasing taxes will cripple industry and incentives beyond repair, while increased creation of new money will lead to a disastrous runaway inflation’ (Rothbard 2006b, 397). In these words, written almost 40 years ago, Rothbard could be describing the worldwide financial crisis post-2007. As we watch what is happening, we see that governments are indeed running out of money, that taxes are crippling industry and incentives and that the situation is only tolerable because of ‘quantitative easing’, that is, by virtue of the creation of money ex nihilo for which piece of black magic, a price will have to be paid in inflation in future years. It has been said that every crisis in an opportunity in disguise. If that is so, then the present crisis is an opportunity either for a relapse into state control, central planning and the restriction of personal and economic liberty or for a lessening of state control, a reduction or abolition of central planning, and an increase in liberty. Which of these will our current crisis give birth to? Only time will tell.

Conclusion Rothbard was a firm believer in the power of reason. He believed that, through his intellect, man can come to know the natural

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world and the human world. Because the human world, the world of economics, or politics, of action is largely his own creation, man can come to know this world with an intimacy and a certainty that is denied to his knowledge of nature. In his devotion to reason, Rothbard follows in the footsteps of his master, Mises. It used to be a standing joke that the old Soviet Union attempted to take credit for every useful invention and scientific discovery. While it would be equally absurd to claim Rothbard’s paternity for all things libertarian, I believe that Wendy McElroy is essentially correct in her estimation that the modern libertarian movement redounds largely to Rothbard’s credit. Economist, political philosopher, polemicist – Rothbard excelled in all these fields. His ideas, forcefully expressed, are a continuing challenge to all who would subvert the cause of liberty and a source of inspiration to those who would support it; his life, energetically and authentically lived, is an inspiration to everyone who values intelligence, insight and integrity.

Notes 1

2 3

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‘Quantitative easing’ is a strategy that results from a fundamental inability to distinguish between paper money and real wealth. As such, it is a contemporary instance of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Such as the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) in Ireland. ‘Ignored was the work of John Maynard Keynes, the Times contends, whose ideas have been revived with the massive expansion of government intervention in reaction to the current crisis. Also overlooked was Hyman Minsky, another twentieth-century economist who asserted that financial markets are inherently unstable and, in turn, can destabilize the real economy’ (Forsyth 2009). For an eminently accessible yet precise treatment of these matters, see Woods (2009). The threat of terrorism requires a war on terrorism which in turn requires the severe circumscription of civil liberties. Some view Rothbard’s polemical activities with mixed feelings. While recognizing Rothbard’s role as a champion of liberty, Peter Boettke remarks that while Rothbard’s ‘intuition on social policy runs far beyond his analysis, and he is obviously capable of conducting very

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high level scholarship . . . he has chosen to be a polemicist for future generations of libertarians and turned his back on the academic community of his own time’ (Boettke 1988, 34). The associated central article of faith in politics is the self-evident rightness of democracy (see Casey 2009a). Just as Mr Woodhouse, in Jane Austen’s Emma, is not a comical old man intended by the author to provide some light relief but a positive menace to social life. See Berman (1983) for a detailed discussion on related topics. See also Anderson and Hill (2004) and Casey (2006). Estimated by some economists to amount to an average increase in real wealth of around 1200 per cent. Chomsky is not alone in his myopia; many criticisms of Rothbard from a conservative direction suffer from the same mistake. This is becoming increasingly less and less true as the remaining leftwing parties come to a grudging acceptance of the necessity for markets. Rather than go out of business, what they have done is to shift their attention from a futile attempt to control the economy and directed it towards ever more intrusive neo-Puritanical attempts to control people’s use of resources, principally through the imposition of new taxes for putatively ecological reasons, and through the tax-reinforced encouragement of new, expensive and largely untested technologies.

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Bibliography

The bibliography is divided into two sections: Section A comprises publications by Rothbard; Section B comprises publications related to Rothbard or to his work. Both sections are selective. Where material is available on the Web, the relevant address is supplied. Readers who wish to consult a comprehensive bibliography of Rothbard’s writings are referred to that compiled by David Gordon (Gordon 2007, 125–78), which is also available at http://www.mises.org/rothbard/Bibliography1.PDF. For electronic access to a large collection of online essays by Rothbard, go to LewRockwell.com at http://www.lewrockwell.com/ rothbard/rothbard-lib.html. For access to some sound and vision recordings of Rothbard, go to the Murray N. Rothbard Archive at Mises. org at http://www.mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=32. The Ludwig von Mises Institute home page is to be found at http:// mises.org/. Here are the Web addresses for the following journals in which a significant amount of the articles cited below were published: Journal of Libertarian Studies: http://mises.org/periodical.aspx?Id=3 Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics: http://mises.org/periodical. aspx?Id=4 Review of Austrian Economics: http://www.gmu.edu/rae/ Libertarian Papers: http://www.libertarianpapers.org/ The Independent Review: http://www.independent.org/publications/ tir/promo.asp Economic Affairs: http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0265-0665

A. Works by Rothbard Rothbard, M. N. (1951a) Mises’ “Human Action”: Comment. The American Economic Review. 41 (1). 181–5. Accessed at http://www.jstor. org/stable/1815976 on 8 December 2008.

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Rothbard, M. N. (1975a) Conceived in Liberty—A New Land, A New People: The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers. Rothbard, M. N. (1975b) Conceived in Liberty—Salutary Neglect: The American Colonies in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers. Rothbard, M. N. (1975c) Society without a State. The Libertarian Forum. 7 (1). 3–7. Rothbard, M. N. (1976) Conceived in Liberty—Advance to Revolution: 1760–1784. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers. Rothbard, M. N. (1979) Conceived in Liberty—The Revolutionary War: 1775–1784. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers. Rothbard, M. N. (1981) Frank S. Meyer: Fusionist as Libertarian Manqué. Modern Age. (Fall). 352–63. Rothbard, M. N. (1983a) The Mystery of Banking. New York: Richardson & Snyder. Rothbard, M. N. (1983b) The Gold Standard before the Civil War. Washington, DC [Sound Recording]. Rothbard, M. N. (1988) Beyond Is and Ought. Liberty. 2 (2). 44–5. Rothbard, M. N. (1989) Keynes the Man: Hero or Villain? Cambridge, MA. [Sound Recording]. Rothbard, M. N. (1990) A Conversation with Murray N. Rothbard. Austrian Economics Newsletter. 11 (2). 2–5, 15. Rothbard, M. N. (1994) Nations by Consent: Decomposing the NationState. The Journal of Libertarian Studies. 11 (1). 1–10. Rothbard, M. N. (1995a) Economic Thought before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar Publishing Company. Rothbard, M. N. (1995b) Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar Publishing Company. Rothbard, M. N. (1997a) The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School. Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Rothbard, M. N. (1997b) The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School. Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Rothbard, M. N. (1997c) In Defense of “Extreme Apriorism”, in The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School. Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 100–8. Rothbard, M. N. (1997d) The Mantle of Science, in The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School. Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 3–23.

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Rothbard, M. N. (1997e) What is the Proper Way to Study Man? in The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School. Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 24–7. Rothbard, M. N. (1997f) Praxeology as the Method of the Social Sciences, in The Logic of Action One: Method, Money and the Austrian School. Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 28–57. Rothbard, M. N. (1997g) Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics, in The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School. Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 58–77. Rothbard, M. N. (1997h) Praxeology, Value Judgments, and Public Policy, in The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School. Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 78–99. Rothbard, M. N. (1997i) Towards a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics, in The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School. Glos, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 211–54. Rothbard, M. N. (2000a) America’s Great Depression. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Rothbard, M. N. (2000b) Egalitarianism As a Revolt against Nature and Other Essays. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Rothbard, M. N. (2000c) The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: An Economist’s View, in Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature and Other Essays, M. N. Rothbard (ed.). Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 205–18. Rothbard, M. N. (2002 [1982]) The Ethics of Liberty. New York: New York University Press. Rothbard, M. N. (2004 [1962]) Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (with Power and Market). Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Rothbard, M. N. (2005) A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II. Auburn: AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Rothbard, M. N. (2006a) Making Economic Sense. 2nd ed. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Rothbard, M. N. (2006b (1973)) For a New Liberty, the Libertarian Manifesto. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Rothbard, M. N. (2007a) The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. Rothbard, M. N. (2007b) The Case against the Fed. Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute. Rothbard, M. N. (2008) The Mystery of Banking. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute.

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Index

action axiom 29 see also Mises, Ludwig von; Rothbard, Murray and Stolyarov, Gennady Acton, Lord 103 ad hominem see Rothbard, Murray Ahiakpor, James C. W. 114–15 Aitken, Hugh 99 anarchism, anarchy see DeLeon, David; McElroy, Wendy; Nozick, Robert; Prychitko, D. L.; Reisman, George; Spooner, Lysander; Stromberg, Joseph and Tucker, Benjamin anarcho-capitalism, anarchocapitalist ix, 21, 75 see also Prévost, Jean-Guy anarcho-libertarianism The Ethics of Liberty as treatise on 14 anti-interventionism see Rothbard, Murray Aquinas, St Thomas 1 self-ownership 83–4n.17 Aristotle 30, 117 and realist tradition 31 Augustine, St 1 Barber, Clarence 101–2 Barnett, Randy 69, 91

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Benson, Bruce 78 Bentham, Jeremy 109 Berman, Harold 78 Block, Walter 16–17, 69–70, 118n.2 Blumert, Burton 14 Boettke, Peter 142–3n.6 on Mises and Rothbard 82n.12 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von 10, 20n.7, 24 Braudel, Fernand 117 Buckley, William F., Jr 3–4, 10–11 Burns, Arthur 5 Cantillon, Richard 108, 109, 114 Cato Institute 14 Center for Libertarian Studies 14 Chamberlin, William Henry 9 Childs, Roy 125 and Nozick 91, 96–8 Chodorov, Frank 4, 5–6 Chomsky, Noam 135–6, 138, 143n.11 Cohen, G. A. 84n.18–20 on ownership of natural resources 56 on self-ownership 46–7, 49 Columbia University 5 Communism 2, 4, 10–11, 19, 135 Cornuelle, Herbert 6 Corporate Welfare 7, 140 crisis, financial 98, 121–4, 141, 142

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de Azpilcueta Navarrus, Martin 108 de Covarrubias y Leiva, Diego 108 de Medina Juan 108 de Mercado, Tomás 108 de Soto, Domingo 108 de Vitoria, Francisco 108 DeLeon, David anarchism, anarchy 23 DiLorenzo, Thomas 106 Douglas, Paul 112 economic method 17, 24, 25–30 economics and the a priori 26–32, 80n.7 and the German Historical School 24, 27 history of 101, 102, 106–18 and praxeology 30, 38, 42, 81n.9 and value-freedom 36 and welfare 33–5 Feser, Edward on Rothbard on non-aggression 47 Finnis, John on Aquinas on ownership of property 84n.17 Flynn, John T. 4 Forsyth, Randall W. 121, 123–4 Friedman, David on Rothbard on Smith 112–13 Friedman, Milton 13, 19 Fukuyama, Francis 43–4 Garrett, Garet 4, 6 Garrison, Roger W. 89, 102 George, Henry 6 Georgists 19n.2, 50 German Historical School see economics Glorious Revolution 88n.35

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Gordon, David 49, 59, 69, 82n.11, 84–5n.20, 85n.23, 89–90, 107, 116, 120n.11 Gordon, Thomas 105 Gottfried, Paul 11–12, 18 Greaves, Bettina 10 Greaves, Percy 10 Green, George 102 Hausman, Daniel on the a priori 80n.7 Hayek, Friedrich 19n.4, 140 Rothbard on 64–8 Heck, Victor 87n.30 Herbener, Jeffrey 90, 106 Herbert, Aubrey 7 Hill, Lewis E. 87n.30 Hoppe, Hans-Hermann 13, 14, 22, 89 criticism of Rothbard 42–6, 81n.10, 83n.16, 84 Hülsmann, Jörg Guido 90 human rights and property rights 54–5 Hume, David on original appropriation 85–6n.26 on the state 85–6n.26 individualism, methodological 24–6, 80n.5, 83n.13 intervention, typology of 59–61 Jevons, William Stanley 79n.4 Johnson, Bill 9 Kant, Immanuel and the a priori 80n.7 and idealism 81n.10 on original acquisition 85 Kauder, Emil 112, 115 Kemmerer, Donald 99

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Index Kierkegaard, Søren 1 Kinsella, Stephan 69 Klein, Peter 89 Knies, Karl 24 Kominsky, Morris 83n.14 Kuhn, Thomas 107–8 Kwokax, John 87n.29 labour, mixing of 49–53 Langholm, Odd 117 Lawyer, The 10 Libertarian Party 15, 16, 19 libertarianism 6, 7, 17–19, 21–2, 68–79, 90 Chomsky on 135–6 in colonial America 104–5 and conservatism 13–15, 136–8 natural rights case for 45–55 non-aggression axiom fundamental to 39, 47 not necessarily right wing 51 and praxeology 35 self-ownership and 46–8 Smith not a modern adherent of 115 and strategy 138–41 see also van Dun, Frank Locke, John 55, 84n.20, 85n.26, 104–5, 119n.7 see also labour, mixing of Lowry, S. Todd 116–17 Luhnow, Harold 6 Mack, Eric marginal utility 22, 31, 79n.4 on original proprietorship 56, 57 review of For a New Liberty 83n.14 Marshall, Alfred 79n.4 Marshall, Howard D. 87n.29 McCormick, Robert R. 4

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McElroy, Wendy 17, 79, 142 anarchism, anarchy 21–2 Mencken, H. L. 4, 6 Menger, Carl 20n.7, 24, 79n.4 Meyer, Frank 14 Mill, James 108, 109 Mill, John Stuart 80n.7, 108 Miller, Nathan 99–100 Mises Institute 14, 90 Mises, Ludwig von 13, 22, 23, 41, 46, 64, 65, 79, 82n.12, 142 on the action axiom 31 on methodological individualism 25–6 praxeology 32 Rothbard on 35–8 seminar 6, 9–10 Modugno Crocetta, Roberta 3 Mongolian Idiot, The 10 Nock, Albert Jay 4, 6 non-aggression see Rothbard, Murray North, Gary 7, 10, 18 Nozick, Robert 118, 118n.3 a priori 80n.6 anarchism, anarchy 90–8 Cohen on 46–7, 56, 84n.20 Gordon on 85n.23 objection to ‘mixing of labour’ 52 Rothbard on 90–8 Obama, Barack 123 original appropriation 85n.25 see also Finnis, John; Rothbard, Murray and Wenar, Leif Paterson, Isabel 6 Perlman, Mark 116 Petersen, Bill 10 praxeology adoption of term 24

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praxeology (Cont’d) an axiomatic system 32 as conceptual explication 48 economics a subdivision of 30, 81n.9 Mises on 32 natural law and 42 see also Boettke, Peter and Hoppe, Hans-Hermann on Rothbard Prévost, Jean-Guy 82n.13 Primm, James 98 Proschansky, Harris 99 Prychitko, D. L. 34–5 anarchism, anarchy 21 Raico, Ralph 10, 11 Raimondo, Justin 16, 18 Read, Leonard 6 Reisman, George 10 anarchism, anarchy 19n.4 Ricardo, David 108, 109, 114 Rockwell, Llewellyn 8, 12, 14, 89, 127 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 4, 123 Rothbard, JoAnn 128 Rothbard, Murray N. on action axiom 30–2 ad hominem 2 anti-interventionism 5, 129–30 on boycotting 73 on colonial period in American history 103–6 enemy of the state 59–61 free speech 71–3 involuntary servitude 68–70 on law 76–8 on law enforcement 75 on Mises 35–8 natural law 38–58 natural rights 41, 43, 67, 83n.16

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on non-aggression 9, 95 on original appropriation 45–55 on pornography 73–4 on the public sector 74–8 on Smith 109–18 see also Feser, Edward; Friedman, Milton; Hayek, Friedrich; Nozick, Robert; Prévost, Jean-Guy; Smith, Adam; strategy and welfare economics Salerno, Joseph 10, 16, 18, 19, 89 Say, Jean-Baptiste 109 Schmoller, Gustav 24 Schumpeter, Joseph 115, 120n.10 Shaffer, Harry 100 Sidney, Algernon 104 Skousen, Mark 13 Smith, Adam Rothbard on 109–17 Smolensky, Eugen 101 Sobran, Joseph 15 Spencer, Herbert 6, 23 Spooner, Lysander 8, 22 anarchism, anarchy 23, 79 State 8–9, 22, 23, 26, 39–40 as provider of public goods 74–8 and society 61–4 and taxation 70–1 and welfare 34–5 see also Nozick Robert, anarchism, anarchy and Rothbard Murray, enemy of the Steele, David 11 Stevenson, Adlai 9, 11 Stolyarov, Gennady

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Index action axiom 81n.10 strategy, libertarian 128–9, 138–41 Stromberg, Joseph 22 Szasz, Thomas 71 Tannehill, Linda & Morris 53, 86n.27 Taylor, George 100–1 Thomas, Clarence 133–4 Thornton, Mark 115–16 Trenchard, John 105 Trescott, Paul 113–14 Tucker, Benjamin 22 anarchism, anarchy 23, 79

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Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 109 Vallentyne, Peter 56, 70 van Dun, Frank 86n.28 Vedder, Richard 102 Verhaegh, Marcus 85n.25 Volker Fund 6, 12 Wagner, Adolf 24 Walras, Leon 79n.4 welfare economics 33–5 Wenar, Leif 55–8 Wieser, Friedrich von 24, 79n.4 Wittmer, Felix 10 Woods, Thomas E. 142n.4

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