Jeff Riggenbach opens today’s episode of The Libertarian Tradition with these words:
Today — March 2nd — is Murray Rothbard’s birthday. Had he lived, he’d be 84 years old today. And there’s sadness in that, because 84 in the world of today, though still a “ripe old age,” is not really all that old. Lots of people live to be 84. Even libertarians do it. Both Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek lived to be 92. Milton Friedman lived to be 94. Henry Hazlitt lived to be 98. In Radicals for Capitalism, his important 2007 book about the history of the modern American libertarian movement, Brian Doherty centers his story around what he describes as “[f]ive thinkers … without whom there would have been no uniquely libertarian ideas or libertarian institutions of any popularity or impact in America in the second half of the twentieth century … Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Milton Friedman.”
“Four men and one woman,” Doherty writes, “four Jews and one Catholic; four economists and one novelist; four minarchists … and one anarchist … two native-born Americans and three immigrants; two Nobel Prize winners and three who remained not only aloof from most professional and intellectual accolades but generated a heated hostility from cultural gatekeepers.” Doherty makes no mention of it, but there’s yet another facile point of comparison he might have used in discussing his five major figures — their longevity. For of his five major figures, three (Mises, Hayek, and Friedman) lived into their 90s. The other two — Rand and Rothbard — never made it to 80. Rothbard never made it to 70. It’s almost as though radicalism makes you die young. Mises, Hayek, and Friedman were minarchists — classical liberals, to be more precise.
Rand was a minarchist, too, but of a more radical stripe. She required that her limited, night-watchman State get along without any power of taxation, which she rightly regarded as theft. And Rothbard, who lived the shortest life of them all, was, of course, an anarchist, the only writer among them with the courage to assert boldly that the State didn’t need limiting, it needed abolishing.
Murray N. Rothbard, born March 2, 1926Another way of putting this would be to say that Rothbard was the only pure libertarian among Doherty’s Big Five — not a classical liberal or even a more radical minarchist like Ayn Rand, but a thinker who saw the implications of the libertarian axiom, the nonaggression axiom, and unflinchingly accepted those implications, the only one among Doherty’s Big Five who was unafraid to follow his thinking where it must inevitably lead him. Brian Doherty calls Rothbard “the most uniquely and characteristically libertarian of libertarians; the one whose influence explains most about what makes the ideas, behavior, and general flavor of American libertarianism unique; the most illustrative and paradigmatic of the foundational figures of modern libertarianism.” It’s not for nothing that during the 1970s Rothbard came to be widely known as “Mr. Libertarian.”
{ 12 comments }
“Four men and one woman.” Does one rejoice or cry as to such a small number of deep thinkers who clearly understood the threat brought by the State? For myself, I have mixed emotions. I rejoice that these five demonstrate courage in their action and inspiration in their thoughts/works, but also I cry as to such a few in number points that the majority are beholden to the State and as such far outnumber those who are not.
One form or another of the state has been around ever since the beginning of mankind.
The state will exist to the degree that a monopoly on territory exists. As technology pushes the boundaries of where we can live (seasteading, space colonization) we will see an explosion in the choices available. Will it mean the withering away of the state? I doubt it, since even a single family household can be considered a small state to an extent. It will, however, mean that states will be increasingly subject to the forces of competition and to the effects of people voting with their feet and capital.
I’m sure Murray would be delighted to know that he is still making people laugh: on the ride home tonight I was listening to his NYPoly lectures (tonight was “Pietism and the Power Brokers”), and he made me laugh out load more than once.
It is amazing that so much knowledge was permanently at his fingertips, it seems that he knew every aspect of Western Civilization from The Greek Dark Ages through whatever was in the headlines each day. And he was able to apply it all seamlessly to give empiric examples of how economics actually works.
Long Live Rothbard.
I wore my ENEMY OF THE STATE t-shirt to class today before I knew it was Murray’s birthday. What a pleasant surprise.
Also, who was the “one Catholic,” Henry Hazlitt?
“Another way of putting this would be to say that Rothbard was the only pure libertarian among Doherty’s Big Five…”
*groan* Only if you consider libertarianism to be blind adherence to rules, instead of a general interest in the maximization of freedom, was Rothbard the only “pure” libertarian of the bunch.
“…the only one among Doherty’s Big Five who was unafraid to follow his thinking where it must inevitably lead him.”
I suppose it’s impossible that someone like Mises had the courage to follow the thinking where it led them, but also had the good judgment to realize that such thinking led them to an absurdity?
BTW, where’s the comment preview? Please bring it back!
Hayek was the Catholic
All five had great impacts and all can be ranked differently given specific topics.
For Economics I rank them,
1. Mises
2. Hayek
3. Rothbard
4. Friedman
5. Rand
For Political Philosophy
1. Rothbard
2. Rand
3. Mises
4. Hayek
5. Friedman
For Philosophy in general
1. Rand
2. Rothbard
3. Hayek
4. Mises
5. Friedman
And of course Rand was a novelist, and Rothbard was a historian
I _knew_ he was Pisces!!
(just kidding and testing the speed of the new blog)
Russ, Jeff Riggenbach uses the term pure to describe Rothbard’s libertarianism, because his purity rises from being the only one of them to take the idea of human liberty to its logical, coherent conclusion.
Minarchists, as well as any other statists who promote liberty, always fail to maintain coherency by introducing the necessary evil of violent political coercion to achieve some alleged social end, otherwise thought to be unobtainable.
In reality, there is nothing that is done that is not done by individuals. States “do” nothing other than to allow some individuals to be empowered over others, a situation some of recognize as slavery, the antithesis of liberty. Only Rothbard rose above this temptation to appear socially acceptable (aka PC) in the public eye, insisting upon instead being coherent.
It is for this reason that I rank Rothbard as the greatest champion of human freedom in the 20th Century. Quite frankly, some subjects are simply too important to compromise. Tu Ne Cede Malis, indeed!
Happy Birthday Murray!
Well, it looks like I missed a closing italics tag. Seems I need a preview function as well!
Interesting…I am gunna have to look into this a little more
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 1 trackback }