Remembering Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard, the principal founder of post-World War II American libertarianism, died twenty-four years ago. What did he stand for? Lew Rockwell, one of Murray’s closest friends and the founder of the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com, offers the best answer.

Lew says: “If you want to understand Murray Rothbard, you need to keep one principle in mind. If you remember this, you will have the key to grasping his thought. And you should want to understand Murray Rothbard, because he was the greatest American defender of liberty in the twentieth century.

The principle in question is that Murray Rothbard had a consistent vision of the good society that he upheld throughout his long career. He described this vision in a vast number of books and articles, including Man, Economy, and StatePower and MarketThe Ethics of Liberty, and Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature. That vision was always the same. Egalitarianism as a Re... Murray N. Rothbard Best Price: $3.44 Buy New $8.95 (as of 07:55 UTC - Details)

What was this vision? As everybody knows, Murray believed in a complete free market. The State, which Nietzsche called ‘that coldest of all cold monsters’ was the enemy.

In order to maintain a free society, people needed to hold certain values. Murray was a traditionalist who believed in natural law and the family. He deplored assaults on tradition such as the modern feminist movement. In cultural matters, Murray started out on the Right, and he always remained there.”

Readers who want to know what Murray Rothbard stood for have, as Lew suggests, an easy task. They have only to read what he wrote. But there was much more to Murray Rothbard than the libertarian vision and contributions to Austrian economics and American history that made him famous.

One of the greatest joys of my life was listening to Murray Rothbard. A conversation with him might take you anywhere. The last time I spoke to him, about a week before he died, he talked about a problem in Schumpeter’s economic theory, a recent book on Jewish theology, the fallacies in a philosophical defense of backwards causation, the O. J. Simpson case, and Hegel’s relation to the tradition of German mysticism. On every topic, he had illuminating things to say, all delivered in his rapid voice, accompanied by that unmistakable laugh. Murray could grasp the essentials of an argument as fast as anyone I have ever met and at once bring to bear on whatever the point at issue his immense learning. On one occasion I had to give a joint seminar with him at the Ludwig von Mises University summer program. He had just read an article by Milton Friedman, highly critical of Mises, which he viewed with less than complete enthusiasm. He proposed to devote the seminar to an analysis of the article and, with barely a pause for breath, demolished each paragraph of the piece. Another year, he began his seminar with a brilliant hour-long discussion of political power that ranged from Lao-tse through Hobbes and Locke to the public choice school.

His immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect, if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked whether Mises had answered this point. He said, “See his response to Lachmann in Economica, 1943.” I often went to used bookstores with him, in both Palo Alto and Manhattan, and listened to him as he commented on nearly every book on the shelves. When he was a student at Columbia, he admired the philosopher Ernest Nagel, who he said would always encourage students to do new work. Murray was like this himself. He constantly encouraged students to work on Austrian and libertarian topics. Power and Market (LvMI) Rothbard, Murray N. Buy New $2.99 (as of 07:45 UTC - Details)

His immense knowledge extended far beyond academic topics.  He not only followed presidential campaigns, but he had a detailed knowledge of Congressional races as well. He could take any Congressional district in the United States and tell you who was running and what the main issues in the district were.

The Libertarian Party, in which he was an active force for a number of years, attracted many odd characters, and of course Murray had detailed information about nearly all of them. He would often regale his friends with hilarious stories about their adventures. In this he was joined by his wife Joey, who shared his interest in what everybody was doing. During the 1979 LP convention at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, he gave a talk at a local libertarian supper club. Joey said to me about the leader of the club, “Do you know what she paid Murray for the talk? Zip!”

He despised rule by a self-proclaimed elite consisting of “court intellectuals”; to them, he much preferred the common sense of the ordinary American, though he was certainly not a majority-rule democrat.  He defended Joe McCarthy and supported the presidential campaigns of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, though he was by no means an uncritical defender of any of these. It may at first seem odd that an anarcho-capitalist libertarian would support these populists, whose views on economics differed greatly from his own, but in fact it was not.

His fundamental political stance was opposition to a bellicose American foreign policy, and these American nationalists opposed efforts to subordinate America to worldwide ideological crusades. Joe McCarthy argued that the main threat posed by Communism was internal rather than external, and in this Rothbard heartily concurred. He was particularly close to Pat Buchanan, who defended the pre-World War II “isolationists” and opposed the American invasion of Iraq.

For the same reason, William Buckley and his neocon successors bitterly opposed Rothbard. They did their best to purge all supporters of a peaceful foreign policy from the Right. Rothbard, once a valued contributor to National Review, was no longer welcome in its pages, once his foreign policy views became clear.

Rothbard liked the populists for another reason, and here we return to the quotation from Lew Rockwell from which we began. He deplored efforts to overhaul traditional American values in favor of “political correctness”. He admired Paul Gottfried’s comprehensive critique of this project, and he joined with Gottfried and other “paleoconservatives” in 1989 to form the John Randolph Club.

One person involved in politics he did admire without reserve, and this was of course his great friend and fellow libertarian Ron Paul. He and Ron Paul worked together in defense of the gold standard, opposition to the Fed, and advocacy of a non-interventionist foreign policy. In these endeavors, they were joined by Burt Blumert and Lew Rockwell; and it is in his activities with these friends that one finds the essence of Rothbard’s political commitments.

Naturally enough, Murray had strong likes and dislikes. He loathed Bill Clinton, and Joey told me that when he was watching Clinton speak on television, she had to restrain him from rushing to the TV set and kicking in the screen.

His books resembled his conversation: they were packed with matter, as if he could not wait to convey to his readers the results of his prodigious reading. His Man, Economy, and State ranks as one of the foremost works of 20th-century economics, in the opinion of two judges of no mean caliber-Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt. The two volumes of his History of Economic Thought which, sadly, he did not live to see in print, show that he was a great intellectual historian as well as a great economist. Murray Rothbard was my friend for sixteen years.  After nearly a quarter of a century, I still find it hard to believe that I can no longer give him a call, to ask him about a new book and to experience his never-failing warmth and kindness. His support for me was never failing, and I owe him everything.  “I shall not look upon his like again.”

Reprinted with permission from Chronicles Magazine.