The Ludwig von Mises Institute

Advancing the Scholarship of Liberty in the Tradition of the Austrian School

Source link: http://blog.mises.org/8271/murray-rothbard-an-introduction-to-his-thought/

July 10, 2008 by Stephan Kinsella

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{ 3 comments }

Bruce Koerber July 10, 2008 at 9:09 pm: I think it is good for everyone to know that Rothbard considered himself an Aristotelian and Thomistic thinker. This is the heritage of natural law which is the womb of subjectivism. These are our roots.
Miklos Hollender July 11, 2008 at 5:32 am: One of the things I always found hard to understand about Rothbard is that his thoughts is deeply rooted in the traditional thinkers (Aristotle, Aquinas) and yet he was a very dedicated opponent of every kind of Conservativism.

Which, understanding that C. politicans are usually idiots, is understandable, but I said “every kind”, and that I see as a problem.

It’s unusual to build upon traditional philosophy and yet have no friends amongst traditionalist/Conservative philosophers (not politicians, not journalists!).
Anthony Flood July 13, 2008 at 4:46 pm: Miklos, if we consider that Rothbard was an eclectic thinker, there is no problem unless we try to marry all of his sources in our systems. His notion of property, for example, was Lockean, but he was no “Lockean,” with the empiricist epistemology that implies. Similarly he acknowledged his debt to Thomas Aquinas for stimulating his own thinking on the natural law, but he was no “Thomist,” with the theistic belief that that label suggests. What “conservative” thinkers were doing with one or another of his sources was not a factor in how he creatively melded of all of them into his systematic thought.