The following story is part of Walter Block's Autobiography Archive.

In the Spirit of Murray Rothbard: Austrian, Libertarian and Thomist

by Jude Chua Soo Meng

I first read about Murray Rothbard while surfing the Internet. As a natural-law theorist, I was looking for material that had been written on economics, especially in recent times. I typed ‘natural law’ and ‘economics’ in the search field. What appeared was a review of the book The Ethics of Liberty. According to the reviewer, this book was an attempt to build an entire economic theory on the basis of natural law. It was written by Murray Rothbard. I was, of course, quite excited. So I ran a search for Murray Rothbard, and the links led me to the (really impressive!) Mises Institute web site, with all its Real Audio lectures. Here also was advertised the Rothbard Graduate Seminar. One thing led to another, and I applied for and was invited to attend both the Mises University and the Rothbard Seminar, thanks to the generosity of the Mises Institute.

Murray Rothbard writes from the tradition of Austrian Economists. I had already been acquainted with some of the Acton’s President Father Robert Sirico’s writings tracing Austrian economics to the Salamancan Scholastic theologians, as well as some of Acton’s research, so the mention of Austrian economics just lit up my eyes.

Still, when I first read the Ethics of Liberty, I had mixed feelings. The first few chapters were great, I thought. They presented Aristotle and Aquinas as masters, but…in the following chapters this perspective was later abandoned in favor of enlightenment theorists. This left me a little disappointed. Of course, coming from a scholastic background, this could be attributable to my own medieval prejudice. But when it came to crafting a defense of private property based on John Locke and Rothbard’s adamant defense of abortion, it was just too much. And the fact that I was a Dominican tertiary and a Thomist, certainly did not help. My heart sank. A wild goose chase – wrong lead. This book is erroneous, I thought. Had I been an inquisitor, I would have set it afire.

My two weeks at the Mises Institute, however, quite changed all that, but not without help. (No, they did not drug me, but they did feed me well!) There I met Oskari Juurikala, who was a Summer Fellow. Since he was an Aquinas and natural law enthusiast as well, we hit it off pretty well. As I look back I am immensely grateful to him not only for his friendship but even more for explaining to me the other side of Rothbard that had so far escaped me. He showed me some other of Rothbard’s works, especially his History of Economics, and pointed out to me that Rothbard’s interest in John Locke was much in evidence, and that there was a strong connection between Rothbard’s Lockean account of property with that of a fellow Dominican Friar named John of Paris, otherwise known as Jean Quiddort OP.

When I read that book, it struck me that not only was Rothbard the historian whom Robert Sirico had quoted for his sources, tracing Austrian economics to the Spanish Scholastics, but even more, that Rothbard was in fact trying to retrace the Lockean theory of private property to its Thomistic roots – through Jean Quiddort OP to Aquinas. He is none other than the Dominican Friar who had written the very famous Corrections of the Corruptions in reply to William De La Mare OFM’s Corruptions. The latter work was a Franciscan challenge to the Thomistic corpus, in particular St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae.

The dispute was reflective of the antagonism between the two greatest mendicant orders at the time: the Order of Preachers (Dominicans), to which I belong, and the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans). John of Paris OP had gotten into trouble with the Church for his alternative to the theory of transubstantiation – a theory he explicitly declared he would be happy to retract if it could be shown to be incompatible with sound doctrine – although otherwise he was a faithful Thomist, especially in his political views. His celebrated work is On Royal and Papal Power, in which he tried to steer a middle ground between the Papists (who insisted that Secular Powers only derived their power through the Church) and Royalists (who argued that the Church has absolutely no claim over Secular business); it has clear Thomistic antecedents.

In appealing to the natural law, John argued that the right to property was a right of secular powers granted by natural law, and that the only jurisdiction the Church had over property was not direct but rather indirect, insofar as the persons who own the property by natural right were themselves members of the Church, and were thus bound in obedience to it. Precisely in appealing to the natural law and the natural right of secular authorities to acquire property rights prior to the Church’s sanction, this offered a loose form of grounding for private property as something which man may naturally aspire to through labour.

Rothbard unfortunately did not make any citations, but a search points to the distinguished historian of medieval political theory Janet Coleman, and her works confirm, or perhaps were in fact the source of, Rothbard’s claims. From a Thomistic point of view, this project was the conniving of a genius in the (Thomistic) history of economic philosophy.

Despite this I still disagree with Rothbard on some issues. Some of his views are not invincibly defensible. Still, when I heard Guido Hulsmann questioning some of Rothbard’s economics at a Rothbard Conference, I knew at once that the Mises Institute was not a propagandizing association, bent on defending its predecessors come what may, but rather a company of real scholars committed to critically engaging and bringing forward a libertarian and Austrian tradition.

So I know in admitting some of my divergences from Rothbard while espousing his other insights, I will not be excommunicated. But perhaps I should further qualify myself: the Rothbard of the Ethics is someone I find less appealing – I much prefer some of his earlier writings, published in the journals in which he tried to grapple as a self-confessed neo-Thomist with the Kantian epistemological presuppositions in the praxeological tradition he had inherited from Ludwig von Mises. Here too, I should say, we see genius. But it was not a job that was complete; rather, there were still loose ends left for others to tie.

Still, as I was to discover, not only did Rothbard not shrink from admitting this, but was eager to have others develop the theory on his behalf. These points were made to me by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who was drinking when he said them. In vino, veritas. So I find no reason to doubt that testimony. Rothbard, it seemed to me, knew he was simply reworking the ground, and was waiting for future generations to complete whatever he in his own lifetime could not perfect. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, I think, has brought the tradition to greater heights, and though I am still in the midst of working through his writings, from what I have seen, the possibilities are immense. It is for us, I think, to actualize these possibilities. In this regard, recent writings on Aquinas’ natural law theory by Germain Grisez and John Finnis offer great incentives for fulfilling Rothbard’s own hermeneutic, and regrounding the projects he worked at for his entire philosophical and economic career.

Liberty is of course a major theme in the particular brand of Austrian thought the Mises Institute embraces, and this is clear not only from the very title of Rothbard’s work, The Ethics of Liberty, but also in the fact that they publish a journal dedicated to liberal ideals. Liberty can mean several dozens of things, and can be a philosophically challenging concept to cash out with precision. My own sympathies are for Millian Liberalism, though I find his so-called utilitarian justifications rather wanting.

Contrary to some scholars, Mill’s notion of freedom from the tyranny of the masses and from physical coercion in his deservedly famous On Liberty is an item which is not typical of the Victorian age, nor even of the Enlightenment, even less something which his friend and later wife Harriet Taylor impressed upon him for dubious ends; rather it is a value closely allied with human happiness and dignity that Mill, it seems to me, was attentive to.

And it struck him with such affective conviction, that he was bent over in trying to fit it in with his utilitarianism – a utilitarianism for which nothing is absolute, not even freedom. I would have rather said, that Mill, like any other sound-thinking human being, was impressed with the natural law that he is intrinsically worthy as an autonomous agent, and to detract from that is to violate his value. Yet no one, I think, who has been even vaguely acquainted with Catholic (Thomistic) social thought should be too impressed with Mill’s fight for liberty. He might congratulate Mill, and thank him for his critical analysis, but to go beyond that is to ignore that tradition of Thomistic, Spanish scholastic thinkers in the 16^th Century.

They wrote at least 200 years before Mill and defended the rights of all human beings in opposition to violent coercion. These scholastics, most of whom were Dominicans with names like Francisco de Vitoria OP, Domingo de Soto OP, and Bartholome de Las Cases OP, opposed with vehemence the massacring and forced conversions of the Indians by Spanish Conquistadors.

In our own time, with perhaps some delay, the Church with the Vatican II document Dignitatis Humanae has reaffirmed the intrinsic dignity of the free human subject, a dignity or worth that cannot without just cause be compromised. The principle drafter of the document, John Courtney Murray SJ, in fact drew inspiration from John of Paris OP’s moderate theory of church and state, for his conception of the right of religious liberty, whether conceived negatively as freedom from imposed values, or positively as freedom from interference from acting according to one’s religious beliefs.

As a Dominican and a Thomist, I see my own commitment to the defense of liberty simply as an outflow of my thinking, and as a natural law theorist my own effort has been to offer a better grounding for arguments against state coercion. Walter Block, during a breakfast conversation, persistently called me evil when I gave the impression that I would support coercion of morality through the law. This did help to nudge me into action. In this respect, recent writings on Aquinas’ natural law theory or indeed the Central Tradition so-called, offer much insights for how this might be done. Here I am thinking of natural law theorists like Robert P. George and John Finnis.

In committing itself to the defense of human freedom and promoting a philosophically informed economic tradition, the Mises Institute is certainly an inspiring association. I am grateful to have encountered it and only regret that it had not been earlier. I am confident that those who will encounter it in the future will benefit from it as much as I myself have, and those of good will will irresistibly be drawn to join us in continuing the good work that Rothbard and his teacher, Ludwig von Mises, began.

February 8, 2003

Jude Chua Soo Meng [send him mail], opl, MA, FRAI, is currently visiting graduate fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame and president’s graduate fellow at National University of Singapore. He has published in journals like The Modern Schoolman, Journal Of Markets and Morality, Maritain Studies, Periodicum Angelicum (forthcoming), amongst others. He is an elected Junior Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute (UK) and a Lay Dominican.

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