“I grew up in a Communist culture,” Rothbard once recalled. “The middle-class Jews in New York whom I lived among, whether family, friends, or neighbors, were either Communists or fellow-travelers in the Communist orbit. I had two sets of Communist Party uncles and aunts, on both sides of my family.” From the very beginning, though, “I was a right-winger and bitterly anti-socialist.”

“In one family gathering featuring endless pledges of devotion to ‘Loyalist’ Spain during the Civil War,” he recalled, “I piped up, at the age of 11 or 12, ‘What’s wrong with Franco, anyway?… My query was a conversation stopper, all right, but I never received an answer.”

As a graduate student at Columbia University , Rothbard signed up in 1948 with “Students for Thurmond,” a pro-segregationist, states’ rights group that (he later recalled) included “one New York Jew, myself.”

For 22 years Dr. Rothbard taught economics at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and from the mid-1980s he was S.J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada , Las Vegas .

Murray Rothbard’s writing was characterized by innovative insight and skepticism of all orthodoxy. His prodigious output — covering economic theory, politics, political theory, philosophy, sociology and history — included some 25 books and thousands of articles, essays, speeches and reviews, both popular and scholarly, that appeared in a wide range of journals, newsletters and newspapers.

Over the years Rothbard also served as editor or co-editor of Left and Right, Libertarian Forum and, at the time of his death, the Review of Austrian Economics, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and the Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

Probably his most influential work is Man, Economy, and State (1962). Possibly the finest text on economic theory ever written, this book provides a scholarly exposition of “Austrian school” methodology in economics, with ground-breaking insights in monopoly theory and other areas.

His 1963 work, America’s Great Depression, is the first major text to offer a revisionist indictment of Herbert Hoover as a pre-New Deal interventionist. Meticulously and brilliantly, it lays the blame for the great social-economic catastrophe at the door of government action, particularly in the form of inflationary Federal Reserve Bank credit expansion.

Rothbard’s final work, a two-volume history of economic thought, brought together many hitherto largely ignored contributions to economic and political theory from sources as diverse as the ancient Chinese individualist anarchist Chuang Tzu to the economic contributions of the late medieval Spanish Scholastics. The work also convincingly deflates the overblown reputation of Adam Smith.

In a just world, Murray Rothbard would have received a Nobel Prize.

Throughout his adult life, Rothbard was a zealous champion of individual liberty and a fierce enemy of the “welfare-warfare” state. Early on he enlisted with the “Old Right” opponents of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and with the “America First” foes of foreign military intervention.

Uncompromisingly hostile to war and war propaganda, he was one of the few who remained true to his convictions even during the stifling Cold War era. Along with Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn and Harry Elmer Barnes, he continued steadfastly to oppose the US military-industrial complex and the military adventurism that is an integral part of its “perpetual war for perpetual peace” policy.

To the end Rothbard remained an eloquent enemy of the establishment, battling both its liberal and neo-conservative wings. (One of his last published articles was a Washington Post essay blasting Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party’s “Contract With America.”) He was consistently scornful of the conservative intellectual establishment, accusing National Review chief William Buckley of having “purged the conservative movement of the genuine right.” Ironically, his anti-government, anti-war views brought him into a tactical alliance with the New Left during the Vietnam War.

Rothbard embraced historical revisionism in all its facets, including taboo issues of the Second World War. He was a colleague of Harry Elmer Barnes, whose last published work, “Pearl Harbor After a Quarter Century,” appeared in a journal co-edited by Rothbard. He also contributed an essay to the magnificent anthology, Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader.

While not religious, Rothbard had great sympathy and respect for Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, which he regarded as largely responsible for creating and preserving Western culture. He detested the dismissive attitude toward religion, Western culture and traditional morality of many fellow libertarians.

Rothbard’s scholarly writings do not, understandably, convey his infectiously vivacious temperament or the warmth of his personality. As Joseph Sobran observed in a memorial tribute:

“To the end he retained his headlong intellectual energy, his wide curiosity, and that wonderful combination of decisiveness and open-mindedness: he held a thousand strong opinions, yet he was always ready to change his mind as reason and evidence warranted. He delighted in changing his mind, because it was a real, living mind, eager to grapple with reality and to be surprised by it. To him a new thought was like a birthday present… In his deepest cogitations there was something of a kid having fun.

“In person he was earthy, unpretentious and wonderfully funny. He was so much fun to be around that you could easily forget what an imposing thinker he was; it never occurred to him to impress people.”

Just weeks before his death, Rothbard expressed “jubilation” that a sterile era in American life seemed, at last, to be coming to an end. This was in a lengthy essay about the recent publication and impact of The Bell Curve, the bestselling book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

For decades, wrote Rothbard,

“it was shameful and taboo for anyone to talk publicly or write about home truths which everyone, and I mean everyone, knew in their hearts and in private: that is, almost self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability.

“What used to be widespread shared public knowledge about race and ethnicity among writers, publicists, and scholars was suddenly driven out of the public square by Communist anthropologist Franz Boas and his associates in the 1930s and has been taboo ever since.

“Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.”

Comparing the impact of The Bell Curve to the bursting of a dam, Rothbard wrote that the book and its reception marks a “truly revolutionary” change in American society and thinking. “It looks as if the Left egalitarian blackout-and-smear gang has been dealt a truly lethal blow,” he joyfully concluded.

It is likely that, one day, the five decades following the end of the Second World War will be regarded as the most intellectually barren in American history. If our nation and way of life survive, future generations will remember Murray Rothbard with gratitude, recalling that during this bleak period he kept alive a precious light of sanity and reason, and cast it like a guiding beacon into the future.

His many friends and admirers — from the far left to the far right, and everywhere in between — will remember Murray Rothbard for his enthusiastic spirit, his irrepressible energy, his brilliant scholarship, and his passionate devotion to truth.

I first met Murray and Joey in the mid-1950s, soon after starting college, through George Reisman, who had been a friend of mine since junior high school. George and I formed part of a group of somewhat strange kids who had little in common with our fellow students. While we shared a wry sense of humor that kept us continually laughing whenever we were together, we each of us had our own private eccentricity, George’s being to read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations from cover to cover while still in the ninth grade. George had managed to find his way to Ludwig von Mises’ Thursday evening seminar at New York University and I began joining him when I moved back to New York City from Ithaca in 1956. It was there that I became acquainted with Murray and Joey and this soon flourished into a very close friendship.

From that time until Murray’s death in 1995 their apartment on 88^th Street and Broadway was a second New York home for me whenever I visited the city and I felt as comfortable there as at my mother’s apartment in Queens. Nor was I the only regular guest. Among the regulars were George Reisman, Ralph Raico, and Leonard Liggio who, together with Murray and Joey, spent most of our time together doubled over with laughter at our burlesques of the social democratic left and the National Review right.

Murray and Joey’s guests, especially we regulars, were always warmly received and made to feel welcomed no matter how late we stayed, which occasionally was as late as five or six in the morning. Joey was a terribly generous hostess and no matter how often I or other members of our group showed up, she would bring out a tray laden with liquor and mixes.

Since we were all ardent movie fans, we often went to the movie houses on Broadway, especially to the New Yorker, a revival house that served us in the same way as does Turner Classic Movies today. And it seemed that when we weren’t spoofing our enemies or composing parody operas (Murray’s magnum opus was a Randian operetta entitled “Mozart was a Red“) we spent our evenings playing board games (nothing as intellectual as chess, mind you, but those whose boxes were customarily marked “fun for ages 8 to 80″) like Mille Borne, Monopoly, Scrabble, and, if we felt particularly adult, Diplomacy. Our favorite was Risk, which gave rise to Murray’s perennial comment, which we were forever repeating: “Harry him in the Congo!”

We were all keen political buffs, Murray – who read three or four New York newspapers every day – far more than the rest of us, and we spent the time between going to movies and playing games discussing contemporary politics and libertarian theory. We were forever posing theoretical questions that hinged on some incredibly complex issue of responsibility and trying to work out its libertarian implications. “Should I be legally culpable for the destruction of someone’s property if I am ordered to destroy it under threat of your harming my wife?” “Who’s responsible if you throw me through someone’s plate glass window?” And on and on. We spent hours trying to work out the minutiae of libertarian theory, avoiding no hard issues from children’s rights to intellectual property.

And when not debating theoretical issues, we’d end up discussing some topic in history, economics, sociology, or that day’s headlines. It soon became evident to all of us how truly amazing was the depth and breadth of Murray’s knowledge. He appears to have read everything and could cite the relevant bibliography on almost any topic that came up. One of our more erudite games involved the Book Review section of the Sunday New York Times. One of us would read the book title and as brief a description as a quick scan of the review would allow and the others would then have to guess, given the political inclinations of the Book Review’s editorial staff, who had been chosen to review the book. Looking back on those days it is amazing to me how often we guessed correctly.

Everyone familiar with Rothbard’s writings is aware that he wrote a truly prodigious amount. What is not as well known is that he seems to have totally mastered the literature in those fields in which he had an interest. He had a vast library and unlike the books in my own library, all of Murray’s books had been read, and read with care. All one need do is scan a book out of Murray’s library and he will find marginal comments in Murray’s hands scribbled on each page (“Bull____!,” “Ugh!” “Right on!”, etc.) and that almost every line on every page was underlined. One of the great mysteries for all who knew him, at least at the outset, was where on earth he found the time to turn out the dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and literally thousands of letters he wrote and on top of it to read so much. In addition to have written a massive amount he seemed to have read everything that came within his grasp, newspapers, magazines, journals, newsletters, even flyers and advertisers.

I discovered the answer to this conundrum one day when reading an interview with W. Somerset Maugham, who was asked how he could turn out so many novels and short stories when he partied every evening. His reply was that if he devoted only four hours a day to writing, he’d be able to produce three or four pages each day. That meant, he pointed out, that if he were to keep to that schedule regularly, he could produce no less than 1,000 pages a year! I don’t mean to suggest that Murray’s schedule was the same as was Maugham’s, but he certainly devoted a good part of almost every day to reading and writing and even if he spent his evenings in conversation and otherwise enjoying the company of his friends, that left him each afternoon in which to work, which he did religiously. I don’t recall ever going over to his apartment without finding him in the midst of either reading or writing.

Murray composed at the typewriter, footnoting his material in the text itself. During my last year as an undergraduate at City College I agreed to take on the job of typing the second volume of Man, Economy, and State. I must say that it was one of the most pleasurable work experiences I’ve ever had. Not only was I provided with an endless supply of Pepsi-Cola and potato chips, but I got the chance to work under two good-humored and accommodating employers who excused every failing in their employee while at the same time having had the opportunity to read and discuss a first-rate text in economic theory. One of my major subjects as an undergraduate had been economics, but I confess to have learned more economics during the six-month period I spent typing Murray’s manuscript than I did during my whole undergraduate career.

There are few things more irritating than having to defend a proposition against someone who clearly has given almost no thought to the issue but is speaking off the top of his head and Murray, like most of us, had little tolerance for such people. However, when asked to explain a point one didn’t understand or about which one was unclear Murray was extremely patient and uncomplaining and doubtless this must have accounted for why he was regarded as a fine teacher at both Brooklyn Poly and UNLV while still being incapable of suffering fools gladly.

Those of us who knew Murray in the 1950s were aware that he disliked traveling and that he had a phobia about flying. In this, as in so many other ways, Joey’s forbearance was almost superhuman as she slowly enlarged Murray’s world to include places as far away as eastern Europe, Asia, and South America. I remember with absolute clarity receiving a postcard from Murray from Washington, D.C. after his very first flight, on which he’d written in bold letters: “Finally made it!”

Murray’s strong opposition to the Vietnam War and his sympathies with the New Left’s distrust of government led, in November 1970 to his being invited to speak in Los Angeles at what I vaguely recall was billed as a Festival of Light and Freedom, or some such New Age title. Among the other speakers, if my memory serves, were Thomas Szasz, the foremost authority on the relation between psychiatry and law, Tim Leary, the apostle of LSD, Paul Goodman, the author of one of the 1960s most influential books of social criticism and the guru of the New Left, and Nathaniel Brandon, who was then archbishop of the Randian Church. The organizers’ aim, apparently, was to bring together the establishment’s major critics in the hope of creating a grand coalition that would fuse elements of the drug culture, libertarianism, and opposition to the military-industrial complex into a new impregnable alliance. But despite the many cries of “Right On” that punctuated Murray’s speech, it soon became apparent that he and most of the audience were on very different wavelengths and that their attempt to fuse Rothbard with the Grateful Dead were doomed to failure.

Most of those who participated at the Festival were simply incapable of appreciating just how conservative Murray’s approach to social issues was and that neither he nor Joey carried around their own roach clip nor were either ready to join in sharing a plate of hash brownies. Murray might have sympathized with the some of the anti-orthodox elements of the counter-culture but those who knew him were keenly aware of where he stood on love-ins, dropping acid, and turning his back on industrialism in favor of the world of unspoiled nature.

In 1974 the Mt. Pelerin Society held its meetings in Brussels and, via separate routes, Murray and Joey and I arranged to meet there. I had flown to southern France to visit Lee Brozen, who had a summer home there. She and her two boys were planning a leisurely drive to Brussels and I had agreed to accompany them. It was a marvelous trip, made even more pleasant by our decision to use a Michelin restaurant guide to determine our route.

Meanwhile, Murray and Joey had met up with Ralph Raico in Germany and they made their own way by car to Brussels. As is customary, the Mt. Pelerin meetings were held in one of the most expensive hotels in the city as befitted the fact that almost all attendees were either think-tank executives traveling on expense accounts, South American latifundia owners, for whom hundred-dollar bills were small change, or the officers of the Society itself, a self-perpetuating oligarchy who, thanks to its members’ dues, traveled around the world in first-class accommodations.

One of my fondest memories of our stay in Brussels was our first evening there. Following dinner a number of us had found ourselves in Murray and Joey’s hotel room, laughing and joking as we recounted our recent European adventures. Over the course of the evening more and more people kept dropping by, to the point where the Rothbard’s room began to look like the Marx Brothers’ cabin in A Night at the Opera. We had started to sing and, in a fit of bravado, had decided to do the whole Cole Porter canon. Someone, I think it was John O’Sullivan, maintained that he needed something to lubricate his throat if he were to sound his best.

Since Cole Porter clearly had priority, Joey opened the room’s minibar and we all helped ourselves to whatever was available. Needless to say, by the time we left the room the bar was completely empty. Neither Murray or Joey gave a thought to what their hospitality would end up costing but I can imagine the bill turned out to be staggering. I know this because, while staying at the same hotel, I made the mistake of having the hotel do eight or nine days’ worth of laundry and cleaning. I had not had the opportunity to get anything cleaned while traveling from north from the Mediterranean and figured I’d splurge instead of waiting until I got back to New York. There is no way I could have predicted what I would have been charged for a week’s worth of laundering and cleaning. I shall never forget my final bill; while the room’s substantial cost was perfectly predictable, the cleaning bill was $225.00!

TRULY AWESOME

If only he were here to see how far we have come. Rothbard died on January 7, 1995. During the course of his sixty-eight years, he had written 28 books and hundreds of articles that, taken together, are the foundation stones of a mighty ideological edifice outlining a paradigm of pure liberty. As the leading student of Ludwig von Mises, the greatest figure of the “Austrian” or pure free market school of economics, Rothbard almost single-handedly implanted the Misesian flag on American soil – and not only that, but, building on the achievement of his mentor, Rothbard’s monumental Man, Economy, and State clarified and expanded what Mises had wrought; Power and Market pioneered new frontiers in refuting the legitimacy and efficiency of state action in every possible realm of human endeavor; America’s Great Depression exposed the role of bank-credit expansion, and not free market capitalism, as the true villain of that catastrophe. And then there is the capstone of his career, the two-volume Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought [Vol. I, Classical Economics; Vol. II, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith] – a work that gives new meaning to the word “awesome.”

KNOWING MURRAY

If Rothbard’s economic insights were the sum total of his contribution, that would have been enough for any man: but with Rothbard, that is just the beginning. As a social theorist, his interests – and encyclopedic knowledge – encompassed all of social science. There is Rothbard the historian: his four-volume set on the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, puts the first successful libertarian revolution in history in its political, economic, and socio-religious context, and is a veritable treasure house of knowledge, packed with nuggets of fascinating historical facts. There is Rothbard the political economist: his recently-republished The Ethics of Liberty is a model of theoretical and stylistic elegance. Then there is Rothbard the polemicist and best builder of an ideological movement: For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto is still the best introduction to libertarianism as a political worldview and program. Indeed, one could write a whole book on the subject of Rothbard and his intellectual impact – and that indeed is what I have done. An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard will be published in July by Prometheus Books. As a thinker and a towering figure in the libertarian movement, Rothbard had an enormous impact on my development as a writer and an activist. I met him in 1978, when he was the leading intellectual light of the Cato Institute, then based in San Francisco. As part of a group of self-styled “radical” libertarians centered in and around the libertarian student organization, I was amazed and delighted when Rothbard took a personal interest in our intellectual and political development: here was this intellectual giant who not only paid attention to our juvenile polemics, but also was a whole lot of fun to be around. Knowing Murray was an education and a joy – the two things most young people today assume are opposites in a dichotomy. The bonds of our friendship were both personal and ideological, and as far as the latter is concerned what really struck me, at the time of our first meeting, was the great emphasis that Rothbard put on opposition to globalism and imperialism. It was really the key to understanding his politics, and his ideological odyssey from the Old Right to the New Left and back again.

A YOUNG OLD RIGHTIST

In the late forties and early fifties, when Rothbard came of age and began producing the veritable flood of political journalism that supplements his more scholarly work, the old “isolationist” (that is, noninterventionist) conservative movement was passing away, its defeated leaders and publicists either retiring or forced out by the triumphant (and vengeful) War Party. As an economics student at Colombia University, young Rothbard had entered this overwhelmingly leftist milieu as a convinced free marketeer of the “limited government” variety – and he was literally a minority of one, at least on a campus where the Social Democrats constituted the “right-wing,” the Stalinists occupied the “Center,” and the Trotskyists claimed the Left. Where was a budding young libertarian scholar to find solace and support? The answer came, one day, as he perused the Colombia University bookstore newsstand, bulging with the usual Trotskyist newspapers and Stalinist tracts – and perhaps the latest edition of The New Leader – when his eyes locked on to a pamphlet whose title stood out as if on fire: “Taxation is Theft!” It was a pamphlet by Frank Chodorov, a disciple of Albert Jay Nock, and Rothbard fell upon it like a starving man on a morsel. Chodorov had just been fired from his job as editor of the Georgist periodical The Freeman for his opposition to World War II and was living in a loft in lower Manhattan, eking out a precarious living as editor of Analysis, a broadsheet with at most 1500 subscribers – and Rothbard eagerly joined their ranks. “This,” recalled Rothbard years later, “was it” – he had found his libertarian lodestar, and his course was set.

CHODOROV, THE TEACHER

Chodorov was an impressive man, a great raconteur and teacher, and he made a huge impression on young Murray Rothbard: he also ran a small libertarian book service: and their correspondence is filled with Rothbard’s book orders along with a detailed account of his joy at discovering H. L. Mencken, Nock, Garet Garrett, Isabel Paterson, all the libertarian greats. Chodorov was a keen critic of the globalist policies of our ruling elites: in launching a crusade against Communism, we would absorb and mimic not only the methods but the ideology of the enemy. Just as Americans fought and beat the national socialists in the trenches, and then came home to discover that they had lost the battle for liberty on the home front, so the foresaw that they would come home from the great war against the Reds facing a similar anomaly. In “A Jeremiad,” published in 1950, at the height of the cold war, Chodorov saw where it would all lead: “the net profit of The War will be a political setup differing from that of Russia in name only.” War (or the hysteria that precedes it) would stunt and threaten to destroy whatever hope there was for human liberty. “There will be a resurrection,” he wrote, “for the spirit of freedom never dies. But its coming will take much time and travail.” Rothbard absorbed this insight and saw clearly, early on, the centrality of the war question, proudly referring to himself as an “isolationist,” an epithet that he wore as a badge of honor. Now this label was in the category of a political swear word in the postwar period, even more than it is today: the War Party, having dragged us successfully into the European conflict, was intent on driving anyone who had ever opposed them out of politics and into disgrace. As I detailed in a previous column, they even staged sedition trials in the wake of their great “victory,” and the triumphalist mood was inescapable – and oppressive especially to Rothbard, who instinctively rebelled against the atmosphere of intellectual conformity and intimidation that permeates a country in wartime.

A MINORITY OF ONE

He struck back in the pages of Faith and Freedom, a libertarian journal put out by Spiritual Mobilization, a Christian group that had developed a consistently anti-statist ideology based on their interpretation of the fundamentals of Christian doctrine. Rothbard, a New York Jew, not to mention an agnostic, was perfectly willing to find any allies he could in a world dominated by collectivism, mostly of the left, be they Protestant, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Buddhist – as long as they opposed the depredations of the State, and especially its penchant for periodic bouts of mass murder, his tolerance and willingness to work in a coalition was practically unbounded. This was in part due to his essential good humor, and in part the legacy of long years of being a member of a small minority – all too often, in those days, a minority of one, a lone anarcho-capitalist and isolationist living in the postwar world of collectivism and global intervention. But his voice did not go unheard. Writing under the pen-name “Aubrey Herbert,” Rothbard wrote a monthly column in which he plugged away at the idiocies of the cold war: in “The Real Aggressor,” published in 1954, Rothbard attacked the conservatives who had jumped on the cold war bandwagon with such unseemly alacrity. Once champions of peace and noninterventionism, these very same people “have now become outright internationalists.” Stating his case with characteristic directness, he wrote:

“Here I think one point should be made and made bluntly. Some people may prefer death to communism; and this is perfectly legitimate for them – although death may not often be a solution to any problem. But suppose they also try to impose their will on other people who might prefer life under communism to death in a ‘free world’ cemetery. Is not forcing them into mortal combat a pure and simple case of murder? And is not anti-Communist murder as evil as murder committed by Communists?”

WAR PSYCHOSIS

Conservatives were “sinking into a war psychosis” and fast abandoning their devotion to free markets and individual liberty in the interests of pursuing the anti-Communist jihad. This was, he believed, because they misconceived the nature of the State as a policeman, instead of a criminal gang with a monopoly on crime, a legitimized and considerably more powerful version of the Mafia – except without their code of honor. After all, Mafia hit men only carryout small scale massacres: a dozen at a time, at most. The State is truly the engine of mass murder – and this insight was what drove Rothbard to swim determinedly against the tide and make one last isolationist stand against the rising tide of “anti-Communist” interventionism. At Rothbard’s suggestion, an all-isolationist issue of Faith and Freedom was published, featuring not only “The Real Aggressor” but a gem of a piece by Garet Garrett and an excellent article by the industrialist Ernest T Weir. This unusual event – a sudden resurgence of dreaded “isolationism” on the Right – brought the nascent libertarian movement to the annoyed attention of The New Leader, the semiofficial organ of social democratic anti-Communism. In its pages William Henry Chamberlin charged that Rothbard had “laid down a blueprint for American policy tailor-made to the specifications of the Kremlin.”

BACKGROUND TO BETRAYAL

It was a shock being red-baited, but the shock soon wore off. Here he was, sitting at the feet of Ludwig von Mises, absorbing the profoundly anti-collectivist doctrines of the most consistent and radical advocate of the free market – and at the same time researching and writing his own seminal works that would be the foundation stones of a thoroughgoing philosophy of freedom – and the conservatives of the “New Right” variety were calling him a Commie! The great irony was that William Henry Chamberlin had been highly critical of US intervention in World War II, and had in fact staunchly opposed it, even going so far as to write an entire book detailing the reasons for his stance: America’s Second Crusade, as Rothbard pointed out in a letter to The New Leader. But the irony was lost on the humorless and fanatical wackos who were in the process of taking over the conservative movement. Most of them were ex-Communists or some kind of exotic anti-Stalinist leftist, and were consumed with a desire to wreak vengeance on the god of their youth, which had so conspicuously failed and betrayed them.

ROTHBARD RED-BAITED

Rothbard took up the cudgels on behalf of the old isolationism, but it was a struggle he was doomed to lose – at least for the moment. In column after column he lashed out at the bloody and profitable business of the cold war – bloody for most of us, profitable for a few. In 1955, he took on the powerful China lobby, which had built up a large base of support in the American conservative movement: “Why Fight for Formosa?” was published in the summer of 1954, and it caused a controversy that led to Rothbard’s departure from the magazine. How would we react if there was a large Communist contingent parked on a island somewhere very close to the American coast, just bristling with weaponry? It would be a few years yet before Americans – horrified by the Cuban missile crisis – would be able to answer such a question with any honesty. At any rate, such impertinence caught the eye of one Willi Schlamm, an ex-Commie turned “conservative” who had once edited Red Flag, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Germany: Schlamm attacked Rothbard in the pages of Faith and Freedom: it was yet another cheap red-baiting slur. “Why do the pro-war conservatives,” asked Rothbard, in his rebuttal, “supposedly dedicated to the superiority of capitalism over Communism, by thirsting for an immediate showdown, implicitly grant that time is on the side of the Communist system?” Schlamm sneeringly replied:

“The trouble with libertarian economists is that they presume everybody else to be guided by their own genteel value system (in which productivity excels). They are right as economists, but fatally wrong as theologians: they do not perceive that the Devil is real and that he can generously satisfy powering human cravings.”

THE MTYH OF SOVIET POWER

As a student of Mises, Rothbard knew that communism could not endure: Mises had demonstrated the economic impossibility of socialist economic planning as early as 1926, and all attempts to refute him had failed. What Schlamm and his ilk did not realize is that being right as an economist is quite enough; that productivity is not only a nice luxury to have around but absolutely necessary to human survival. While the socialist Devil is indeed real, the great paradox is that he defeats his own followers to the extent that they are successful. Communism had to fail: it could not possibly compete with the relatively free economies of the West, and would soon fall behind in every respect. But the Potemkin village of the old Soviet Union was, at the time, pictured in the Western media as a mighty colossus by both the Left and the Right, albeit for different reasons. The Left because they admired this power, or wanted to, and the Right because they feared it: both contributed to the myth of Soviet invincibility.

THE NEW DISPENSATION

Chodorov had gone on to edit yet another journal titled The Freeman, this one run by the libertarian Foundation for Economic Freedom. But this new position did not last very long, for he would not go along with the holy war against the Soviet Union, and in a spirited exchange with the indefatiguable Willi Schlamm Chodorov declared once again his implacable opposition to the new internationalist dispensation: the old isolationists of the 1940s, he wrote, had accurately predicted the results of the late world war: conscription, centralization, confiscatory taxation, the loss of individual liberties, inflation and mountains of debt. “All this the isolationists of the 1940s foresaw,” he concluded,

“not because they were endowed with any gift of prevision, but because they knew history and would not deny its lesson: that during war the State acquires power at the expense of freedom, and that because of its insatiable lust for power the State is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates.”

THE GREAT PURGE

Words to remember – but they were written to no avail. Chodorov was soon out as editor of The Freeman, and shortly after that Rothbard’s column at Faith and Freedom discontinued. With the death of Garet Garrett, and the legendary Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the isolationist publisher of the Chicago Tribune, and the retirement of others such as John T Flynn, the purge of the old isolationists from the American Right was complete. The America First generation gave way to the William Buckley generation – a degeneration that Rothbard found increasingly intolerable.

THE GREAT DEBATE

The really juicy details of the Rothbard-Buckley encounter – as well as Rothbard’s stormy relationship with Ayn Rand – are between the covers of my book, and I won’t spoil it for you: suffice to say that he passed rather quickly through these circles, writing a lot of book reviews for National Review and socialized to some extent with the Buckley circle. But he soon found the atmosphere of cold war hysteria prevalent among the editors to be utterly intolerable. In a memoir of that time, he recalls listening to an argument between a National Review editor and his wife over luncheon: the subject of their debate was whether, upon launching a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, we should or should not give them some warning.

A LETTER TO BILL BUCKLEY

In a letter to Buckley, Rothbard detailed the reasons for his optimism that the Soviet state was even then withering at its core. The revolutionary spirit had gone out of the Soviet rulers, and while they make motions in the direction of the old Marxist icons, “the point is that the new opportunists do not care anymore.” The old dream of a world communist revolution has been abandoned by the nomenklatura, which is only concerned with feathering its own nest. Far from overthrowing capitalism in the West, the Soviets were faced with the high probability of a revolt at home – and soon. “I am not expert enough to say how far this process has already gone in the Soviet Union,” he wrote,

“But the point is that it must, in the nature of things, be underway already, and its importance will grow as time goes on. If we realize this, and remember also that revolutionary inspiration has always, historically, died out after a time, we will see that Time is on our side, and we will realize that we need not dig in for a long and bloody battle to the death with an enemy that is even now withering from within.”

A RADICAL PROPOSITION

In the winter of 1957, with the cold war never colder, this was a radical proposition. It was also radically right. But Buckley, who has strongly implied if not actually stated that he was working for the CIA at the time – and I’m inclined to believe him, since they were apt to pick up any number of intellectuals-for-sale at this time – was not at all amenable to this view, and so they parted ways. Rothbard also parted ways with Ayn Rand: The occasion was a silly “trial” staged by the Randians, in which he was cast into the outer darkness for the sin of refusing to give up his Episcopalian wife (the Randians were atheists). But another major reason for the break was Rand’s ignorant endorsement of the cold war, and her crazy contention that the West had a moral right to launch a military invasion of any communist country at any time. As Americans went about their business while a nuclear sword of Damocles hung over their heads, the “Objectivists” (as Rand’s followers called themselves) sat at the feet of the Master and absorbed her abysmal ignorance of and indifference to foreign affairs.

THE NEW TURN

The growth of the movement against the Vietnam war and the draft was the impetus that set an independent libertarian movement on its course, and Rothbard was the catalyst. With Leonard Liggio, he developed a new analysis of American corporatism and its relationship to foreign policy, with an emphasis on historical revisionism. He and Leonard, who became prominent in New Left circles, were applying the insights of the Old Right to a new situation in which war, once again, was the number one topic of discussion. Together they founded Left and Right, the seminal journal of modern American libertarianism, devoted to creating a New Left-Old Right alliance against imperialist war, featuring scholars from all sides of the political spectrum, as well as the work of libertarians and the important essay, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Rothbard’s manifesto breaking with the old conservatism and raising the banner of a reborn classical liberalism. Strategically, this meant an alliance with the New Left against the liberal-conservative pro-war “center.” Later Rothbard recalled his jubilation at the first big demonstrations against the Vietnam war:

“Here at last was not a namby-pamby ‘peace group like SANE [the Committee for a Sane Nuclear policy, made up of cold war liberals] but a truly radical antiwar movement which zeroed in on the evils of American warmaking; and here was a movement that excluded no one, that baited neither reds nor rightists, that welcomed all Americans. Here, at last, was an antiwar Left that we could be happy about!”

ROTHBARD AND THE NEW LEFT

Anti-militarism pervaded the New Left critique of the university, Rothbard noted, with the left-libertarian complaints of anarchists like Paul Goodman echoing the Nockian analysis of mass education as a contradiction in terms. Conservatives had criticized the massification of education and its increasing subordination to the State for years – yet now that the students were finally rebelling, the Right could only demonize them. Some people are just so hard to please, but Rothbard was clearly delighted with this new upsurge of protest. Left and Right took off, and wound up in the back pockets of growing numbers of libertarian activists organizing on campuses nationwide. Merging the insights of the New Left historians, such as William Appleman Williams and his students, with the wisdom of his Old Right forebears, Rothbard evolved a comprehensive analysis of imperialism as a function of corporate state capitalism. Using the State as their instrument, “big business, big labor, and the Big Intellectuals” had entered in a Tripartite Alliance for the perpetual maintenance of their mutual power and profit. The Marxist analysis of the state and revolution was a mild, centrist compromise: the Left recognized the criminal character of the State, but only wanted to have it “wither away” over a long period of time – during which, as the Leninists would have it, we would be subject to the vagaries of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Rothbard was fully confident that libertarians could more than hold their own against this kind of confused centrism. In view of the fact that ruling elites never give up their power voluntarily, the prognosis for the commie State “withering away” of its own accord was poor, at best: libertarians, on the other hand, insisted that it be abolished (or at least radically reduced in size) as soon as possible. Next to libertarianism, the recycled Marxism of the Maoists, Panther-worshippers, and dime-store Stalinists was tame stuff indeed. This, at least, is what Rothbard expected would happen if libertarians entered the antiwar movement, and joined with the New Left in opposing the bloody debacle then unfolding in Southeast Asia: that the Marxists would lose the intellectual competition, and that libertarians would make substantial headway. And he was right: hundreds and then thousands were won to the libertarian movement in this period. Left and Right, a quarterly, became the Libertarian Forum, a biweekly, and then the organized libertarian movement really took off. But then radical movements for social change were springing up all over the place, and in relation to the others libertarianism went practically unnoticed for a long time, until well into the seventies.

MINUS THE JUICY DETAILS

By then, the Libertarian Party (LP) had been founded, and I will leave even the basic outlines of that long story to readers of my Rothbard biography. But it needs to be said here that, for years, it was Rothbard and his close friend and colleague Williamson Evers who – almost alone – successfully fought the Randians in the party who had inherited Rand’s unreasoning militarism and sought to enshrine their ignorance of foreign policy in the LP platform. Throughout his long association with the LP, Rothbard fought to keep Libertarians in the forefront of any and all opposition to war: it was an often lonely and difficult fight, but he won it and the LP – whatever its other problems – has to this day strictly adhered to noninterventionism. This is also true in the case of another institution he was in on the founding of: the Cato Institute, which was born basically in Rothbard’s fertile brain, where the dream of a libertarian thinktank (properly endowed) had long incubated. Without going into any of the juicy details, once again, Rothbard’s relationship with the Cato Institute was seminal – and stormy, eventually leading to a break. While not acknowledging the man who is for all intents and purposes their founder, the Cato Institute, like the LP, has stuck to its early noninterventionism with admirable consistency.

A STEP AHEAD

Rothbard was always one step ahead of his followers, often so far ahead that they lost sight of him: such was the case when his prediction of the Communist collapse came true and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down – and, with it, the political boundaries and labels that had kept him out of the conservative movement for as long as the cold war lasted. The great Thaw meant that the isolationist and nationalist impulses of American conservatives were reawakened – and here Rothbard saw a great opportunity, one that was not to be missed. Getting back to his Old Right roots – to a conservative movement that once more had room for an old isolationist – Rothbard started new periodical, with his friend and colleague Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and announced the formation of a paleo-libertarian movement, which hearkened back to its Old Right origins and rejected the cultural nihilism of the counterculture, which had come to predominate in libertarian circles. He found new allies: in the paleo-conservatives of the Rockford Institute, whose brilliant magazine Chronicles lights up the darkness of our neo-barbarian culture – and also in the 1992 presidential campaign of Patrick J. Buchanan.

THE OLD RIGHT – TOGETHER AGAIN

Against the smears of the rabid neoconservatives, who hate any and all manifestations of “isolationism,” Rothbard defended Buchanan in broadsides of increasing length and passion: Buchanan had won his support on the basis of his stalwart noninterventionism, particularly his brave and very public stance against the Gulf War. He put together an “Encyclopedia of Anti-Buchananiana” that catalogued all the various smears against Pat, categorized them by type, and then systematically refuted them. He attended the 1992 Republican convention as the guest and toast of the Buchanan Brigades, where he schmoozed with Phyllis Schlafly, and, although later somewhat disappointed by what he considered undue emphasis on protectionist economic nostrums, always had a great admiration and liking for Buchanan.

THE OPTIMIST

Rothbard’s turn toward the New Left in the sixties had been prefigured by his support for Adlai Stevenson in 1956 against the far more ominously militaristic Eisenhower. Stevenson had been for taking steps toward nuclear disarmament, and the aggressive behavior of the US during the Eisenhower years – typified by the infamous U-2 incident, in which an American spy was shot down flying over Soviet territory and the pilot captured – horrified Rothbard because it raised the real possibility of nuclear war. Rothbard’s turn toward the revived Old Right in the nineties was prefigured by his enthusiasm for Buchanan, who explicitly invoked the spirit of the old America First Committee and those brave isolationists, of Chodorov’s rank, who had stood up to the War Party in the 1940s. Ever the optimist, he always gave his champions the benefit of the doubt – and if he was disappointed, his optimism, based on an inner certainty, was easily revived.

THE LEITMOTIF

Of course, the Murray Rothbard story cannot be told in a single column – after all, my book is some 360 printed pages, not including a section of photographs, and it’s useless to try to fit it all into the space of this piece. I can only add that, if Rothbard was an enemy of the State, then he was also – as a corollary – an enemy of the War Party; indeed, among the biggest. And that is why his memory, and his work, is of interest to today’s antiwar movement, and indeed to anyone who finds our forced march to the New World Order just a little bit ominous. In his writings, and his actions, Murray N. Rothbard was an exemplar of the antiwar activist: his passionate opposition to the mass-murdering foreign policy of imperialism and New World Order-ism was the leitmotif of his politics and vital to understanding his conception of libertarianism.

CHECK IT OUT

At this year’s fantastically successful Antiwar.com conference, the question I heard the most was: what inspires you to write so much, and still be able to organize events like this convention? I could only shake my head, look tired, and shrug. Now that An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard is finally coming out, all I have to do is point to it and ask: “Have you read my book?” Inspiration is hard to come by, these days, but take my word for it: you won’t be disappointed. Not only libertarians, but antiwar activists of all hues will be fascinated and charmed by Rothbard the man and the thinker. Just click on the above title and check it out.

I discuss my own relationship with Rothbard in an essay entitled “How I Became a Libertarian“:

While an undergraduate, I met Murray Rothbard. I was a founding member of the NYU Chapter of Students for a Libertarian Society. We got Rothbard to speak before the society several times. I struck up a cordial relationship with Murray, and learned much from my conversations with him. He was a real character, very funny, and quite entertaining as a speaker. When I went into the undergraduate history honors program, Murray gave me indispensable guidance. … In later years, I don’t think Murray was too thrilled with some of the criticisms I made of his work, but he was always cordial and supportive. I’m only sorry that Murray didn’t live to see my published work on Rand, which greatly interested him, or my Total Freedom, which devotes half of its contents to a discussion of his important legacy.

 Here, let me provide a small hint of the extent of that legacy.

Rothbard, Austrian Economist

Rothbard’s reconstruction of the Misesian approach to Austrian economics can be found in such monumental masterpieces as Man, Economy, and State, and Power and Market. (Both of these books are online here.)  Additional writings have been collected in hefty volumes such as The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School, and The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School. Among his important essays are those on “praxeology” (the “science of human action”), which replace the Kantian presuppositions of Mises’s approach with a firmer Aristotelian foundation; “utility and welfare economics,” which question many presuppositions in standard neoclassical theory; extensions of Austrian monopoly and business cycle theory; and, finally, work on the history of economic thought, including two path-breaking volumes: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume I: Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, and Volume II: Classical Economics. (Many of these works are available in PDF form here.)

Rothbard, Historian and Social Theorist

Aside from his books on the history of thought, Rothbard authored many significant works on various aspects of American history: Conceived in Liberty, a colossal four-volume work on the American colonial and revolutionary eras (a fifth volume remains unpublished); The Panic of 1819 and America’s Great Depression, seminal works on two of the most important events in the history of money and banking, and superb applications of Austrian theory to real historical-economic phenomena; and important essays on the genesis of the welfare-warfare state in the Wilson and FDR eras, including those published in an anthology co-edited with Ronald Radosh, entitled A New History of Leviathan.

Additionally, Rothbard’s works in the area of social philosophy and social theory remain worthwhile and challenging, insofar as they resurrect a specifically libertarian view of “class conflict” and structural crisis in contemporary political economy, as well as a radical neo-Lockean view of individual rights: Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature; For a New Liberty; and The Ethics of Liberty.

Rothbard and Rand

Rothbard himself, not unlike other passionate thinkers of his generation, had many personal and intellectual squabbles and breaks with various people. One of those breaks was with Ayn Rand. I’m not interested in exploring here the specifics of that break, which have been beaten to death in many forums and books. The break must have been bitter because Rothbard refused, for many years thereafter, to give much credit to the Randian impact on his thought. But it’s not as if Rothbard never acknowledged that debt. As Larry Sechrest and I point out in the forthcoming introduction to “Ayn Rand Among the Austrians,” a Spring 2005 Journal of Ayn Rand Studies symposium (the second of two in honor of the Ayn Rand Centenary):

At first, Rand had developed a collegial relationship with Mises’s protégé, Murray Rothbard. Though they had met after the publication of The Fountainhead, their steady intellectual engagement did not begin until 1954. Early on, Rothbard told one of his libertarian correspondents, Richard Cornuelle, of his “particularly depressing” experiences with Rand’s inner circle, and profound reservations about some of her claims. Yet, in 1957, upon reading Atlas Shrugged, he expressed to Rand in a personal letter his view that it was “the greatest novel ever written,” one with “a completely integrated rational ethic, rational epistemology, rational psychology, and rational politics, all integrated one with the other.” He had even compared Rand’s achievements in Atlas Shrugged to those of Mises in Human Action. Rothbard went on to defend Rand’s novel in print in Commonweal magazine (1957) and in National Review (1958), and he attended the first courses offered by the Nathaniel Branden Lectures (which developed into NBI). As an anarchocapitalist, Rothbard certainly rejected Rand’s concept of limited government, but he nevertheless told Rand’s biographer, Barbara Branden, that he was “‘in agreement basically with all her philosophy’ and that it was she who convinced him of the theory of natural rights which his books uphold.”

Conclusion

One can disagree, and disagree strongly, with various aspects of Rothbard’s work, and still be awestruck by the sheer depth and breadth, quantity and quality, of his remarkable output as a writer and thinker.

I certainly had my own serious differences with Rothbard’s approach, which I outline extensively in my book, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.  In that book, I argue that Rothbard forges dualistic distinctions between personal morality and political ethics, cultural specificity and libertarian ethos, abstract normative political principles and historical context, voluntarism and coercion, and, finally, market and state. I take issue with his defense of anarchism. I take issue with his ideological turn, late in life, toward the “paleoconservative” or “paleolibertarian” model.

But his work deserves critical and respectful engagement from all those who are serious about the creation and sustenance of a free society.

Eventually, this realization was to have profound implications for my thinking. At the time, though, it did nothing to dampen my burgeoning enthusiasm for William F. Buckley, Jr.’s 1963 collection Rumbles Left & Right: A Book About Troublesome People & Ideas and U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1960 polemic The Conscience of a Conservative. Nor did it prevent me from signing up (albeit rather briefly) with the local branch of Teenage Republicans for Goldwater during my senior year, early in 1964.

It was during this period also that I read my first issues of The Objectivist Newsletter, edited by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden (whose book Who Is Ayn Rand? I read during the summer between my junior and senior years), and attended my first Nathaniel Branden Institute lecture at the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. At the University of Houston, where I spent the later part of the 1960s, I became involved in a campus Ayn Rand club and there met people who introduced me to other writers and other works – Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, Robert Le Fevre’s This Bread is Mine, Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, & State. The seeds planted in my mind by these authors and their books would bear fruit a few years later. But for now, my chief intellectual influence was Ayn Rand.

The Society of New Intellectuals (SNI), as our campus group was rather pretentiously known, published a tabloid newspaper, The SNI Alternative, which was distributed free at the U of H and at one small, off-campus bookstore whose proprietor was a conservative teetering on the edge of libertarianism. I served as editor and principal writer, analyzing current issues from an Objectivist perspective. I had planned to go on to graduate school after finishing up at the U of H, but when the time came I decided I simply couldn’t tolerate any more schooling. For most of a decade, all of the books and ideas I had found most exciting and compelling were ones I had encountered outside of school. And when I attempted to talk about Objectivism or libertarianism with my professors, I ran into a stone wall of ignorance and hostility. I decided I’d had enough formal education. I decided to forget about becoming a professor; I’d pursue a career in journalism instead. I had worked my way through college as an evening newsman at a local radio station, KNUZ. I began looking for better jobs in more interesting places.

By 1972 I had moved to Los Angeles to take my first job at an all-news radio station – KFWB. On the side, I continued my education in libertarianism, scouring the local used bookstores (so much bigger and more numerous than the ones in Houston!) for copies of libertarian works I had heard of but had had trouble finding. I was particularly successful with regard to the works of Robert LeFevre. I found The Nature of Man and His Government, The Philosophy of Ownership, and perhaps most important of all, several back issues of the Rampart Journal, the quarterly LeFevre had edited in the mid-1960s when he was running Rampart College in Colorado. In one of these I found an amazing essay called “The Anatomy of the State” by a writer I had known up to then only as an economist, Murray N. Rothbard. Here, Rothbard was writing not about economics but about history and political philosophy, and what he told me shook me to my foundations.

I still thought of myself at this time as a Student of Objectivism and as an advocate of Ayn Rand’s version of limited government. Reading Bob LeFevre and attending his lectures (he too now lived in Southern California) had piqued my interest in individualist anarchism and left me struggling for arguments against his position, but they had not converted me to that position. When I read “The Anatomy of the State,” however, I felt the first pangs of conversion. I followed up the leads in Rothbard’s essay. I read Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State. I read LeFevre’s Pine Tree Press edition of Lysander Spooner’s No Treason VI. Then, in search of more information on Spooner, I read James J. Martin’s Men Against the State. Within months, I was an anarchist.

Since 1972, the year I arrived in L.A., I had been writing for Objectivist and libertarian publications that had a little further reach than the confines of the University of Houston campus. My byline was appearing in Academic Associates’ Book News (an Objectivist monthly edited by Barbara Branden), Roy Childs’s Books for Libertarians (soon to evolve into The Libertarian Review), and Reason (then in Santa Barbara, where its editors – Bob Poole, Lynn Kinsky, Tibor Machan, and Manny Klausner – had only a short time before been University of California graduate students). I continued to write regularly for Reason throughout the ’70s and ’80s. From 1984 to 1990, I was listed on the magazine’s masthead as a contributing editor. Earlier, from 1978 to 1982, I had been Roy Childs’s editorial second-in-command at The Libertarian Review (LR). Then, from 1982, when LR merged with Inquiry, to 1985, when Inquiry ceased publication, I was a contributing editor of Inquiry. From 1977 to around 1990, when (amid continual promises to resume regular publication) it effectively ceased publication, I was a contributing editor of Samuel Edward Konkin III’s New Libertarian.

Meanwhile, my career in mainstream journalism was coming along nicely. Over a nearly twenty year span (1977–1995) I freelanced for newspapers, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, among others, publishing more than three hundred bylined articles, mostly Op-Eds and book reviews. During the mid-’80s, I worked as an editorial writer at the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, as an editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County (Calif.) Register, and as the daily (Mon.–Fri.) economics commentator for CNN Radio. Whenever possible, I did pieces, whether for newspapers or for radio, that promoted libertarian ideas. And throughout the ’80s, I was able to put my expertise as a broadcaster in the direct service of those ideas by producing and syndicating the daily radio program Byline for the Cato Institute. This award-winning program, which was heard Monday through Friday on more than two hundred stations coast to coast between 1979 and 1990, featured commentary on current issues and events from liberals and conservatives who were sympathetic to certain libertarian positions (Howard Jarvis, Nat Hentoff, Nicholas von Hoffman, Tom Bethell) as well as commentary from conscious libertarians like Ed Crane, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Susan Love Brown, Robert Hessen, Tom Hazlett, and me.

When I moved up to San Francisco in 1978 to join the staff of The Libertarian Review and began producing Byline for the Cato Institute, I had an opportunity to meet and work directly with several legendary figures in the movement, first among them Murray N. Rothbard. Murray was living on the peninsula south of San Francisco, about forty miles out of town. But he spent a day or two each week in his office at the Cato Institute, and about once a week he showed up at the somewhat less impressive building down the street where the offices of The Libertarian Review, Students for a Libertarian Society, and the Libertarian Party of California were to be found. He was always available for conversation – about economics, history, the movement, strategy, tactics, whatever anybody wanted to talk about.

Today I regret not having taken the time to engage in more of those conversations. I was young and expected to live forever. Naively, I thought Murray would always be there – oh, maybe not in the next office, but within easy reach by telephone or the U.S. Mail. Had I had more of the common sense the young so often lack I would have taken better advantage of the opportunity I’d been afforded: I’d have had more of those spur-of-the-moment conversations with Murray. The ones I remember best focused mostly on historical issues, and they left me with a cornucopia of tips for further research that I still haven’t exhausted.

Looking back, I realize now that my earlier enthusiasms – for the political works of Ayn Rand, for example, and for the works of Bob LeFevre – though they taught me much, were really just way stations along a road that would eventually lead to a fully coherent and systematic grasp of both libertarianism itself and its implications for the humanities and social sciences. The thinker who finally provided me with the basic elements of that sort of understanding of libertarianism, I have belatedly come to realize, was Murray N. Rothbard.

I quickly became an ardent anti-Communist but knew little else about politics or political philosophy until Barry Goldwater began to campaign for the Republican nomination for President when I was 13 years old. His firebrand anti-Communism greatly appealed to me at the time and after reading an article about him in Life Magazine in late 1963, I became aware of the conservative-liberal political spectrum and immediately proclaimed myself a conservative, much to my father’s chagrin. My conservatism was reinforced by reading Goldwater’s book Conscience of a Conservative and his biography, Barry Goldwater: Freedom Is His Flight Plan by Stephen Shadegg. A voracious reader of science fiction and political fiction, I also discovered the novels of Ayn Rand and read Anthem and Atlas Shrugged at about the same time. By the time I entered high school, I was a full-blown Goldwaterite conservative and Cold Warrior, who, inconsistently, believed in the inviolability of the rights to liberty and property.

I attended St. Joseph’s High School, an all-boys Catholic institution, where, in the fall semester of my freshman year, my teacher for both English and Speech was a young former marine, Bill Murray, who also passionately detested Communism. After I delivered a speech to the class mocking the military capabilities of the People’s Republic of China, he was so enthusiastic he expostulated: “Salerno, you beautiful anti-communist, you.” During the same semester, in my American History class, the teacher organized a debate between the supporters of Goldwater and the supporters of Lyndon Johnson. I was one of the seven students who self-consciously fidgeted on the Goldwater side and faced down the horde of thirty or so Johnson partisans, but we gave as a good as we got, at least according to the teacher’s assessment.

My interest in political issues and my conservative convictions intensified during my high school years. It was the mid-1960’s, the era of free speech and Vietnam War protests on college campuses, and just a few miles down the road at Rutgers University Eugene Genovese was dismissed from the faculty for having publicly dissented against the Vietnam war. The atmosphere at my high school was highly charged politically. A few of the younger members of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, the order that administered and staffed the high school, were deeply committed to Vatican II liberal Catholicism and New Frontier-Great Society political liberalism, as were some of the younger lay faculty. They were also very eager to debate the issues in the classroom and encouraged the airing of opposing points of view. But the faculty was by no means ideologically monolithic and, in my sophomore year, the school hired as head varsity basketball coach and English teacher a hardcore member and chapter organizer of the John Birch Society. Bill Schreck was very charismatic and articulate and influenced Mr. Murray, the anti-Communist English teacher, to become a Bircher too. Mr. Schreck also openly propagated his views to my class as our study hall proctor. He eventually persuaded me and some other conservative students to attend a meeting of the local chapter of the Birch Society. However, I quickly lost interest in Birchism when I heard that Mr. Schreck had asserted in another class that the Beatles’ music was manufactured by a communist computer secreted in the English countryside with the aim of corrupting the minds and morals of American youth. My English teacher in my sophomore year, Mr. Walko, although he had no apparent association with Mr. Schreck or the Birchers and revealed no political biases in class, initiated an extracurricular reading club that I joined. The first book we discussed was None Dare Call It Treason by Bircher John Stormer.

By my junior year, I had become recognized among the faculty as one of the most outspoken of the group of conservative students informally known as the “Lower Ten Percent.” This label emerged from a debate in Religion class over the Catholic view of the Vietnam War wherein I called Pope Paul VI’s position on the war “quixotic” and another conservative referred to it as “asinine.” This infuriated our Religion teacher who abruptly halted the debate. The next class the Brother informed us that there would be no more discussion of current events in class, noting cryptically that in some bushels of apples the “lower ten percent” begins to rot prematurely and threatens to spoil the rest. Of course we conservatives perversely seized on his words and proudly touted them as our new moniker.

Late in my junior year I tried to foment a petition drive among my fellow students in the A class to protest the rumored integration of the A, B, C and D classes in our senior year. When my cohort had entered as freshmen, we had been placed according to our scores on special placement exams. Each class moved from subject to subject (except for languages, I believe) en bloc. One significant result of this rigidly hierarchical system, which had existed since the founding of the institution, was that the classes competed ferociously with one another in intramural sports. Most importantly the A class, which took mostly accelerated courses, was supposed to have its grades more heavily weighted in calculating grade point average for the purpose of class ranking in senior year. Needless to say my anti-egalitarian and pro-tradition petition drive was ruthlessly quashed by the administration, and a few of the smarter B class kids were seeded amongst us in senior year. However, the administration did continue its policy of more heavily weighting grades for accelerated courses, while we “native” A class students employed informal methods of persuasion to ensure that the integrity of our intramural teams was not breached.

It was early in my senior year when I first became acquainted with the science of economics. My economics teacher was an enthusiastic young adherent of Great Society liberalism and the improbable brother-in-law of the Bircher Mr. Schreck. Mr. Mautner assigned us to read John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society and then parts of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Completely unacquainted with economics and distracted by Galbraith’s relentlessly sententious and laboriously styled prose, I could not follow and did not care much for The Affluent Society. The Wealth of Nations was another matter. I was enthralled by Smith’s straightforward and non-moralizing analysis of the free market economy and its social benefits. It dawned on me that economics offered a scientific argument for the free society that complemented the moral argument in its favor. By the time I finished reading the assigned passages in Smith’s book, I knew that I wanted to be an economist and I never really deliberated upon the matter again.

There was a pre-graduation tradition at St. Joseph’s in which the senior class presented a burlesque amiably mocking the speech, dress and mannerisms of its favorite – and not so favorite – teachers and the faculty returned the favor by bestowing frivolous legacies on selected seniors. My legacy read: “To Joseph Salerno, leader of the Lower Ten Percent, we leave a pair of binoculars with which to look down upon your fellow man.”

In 1968, I enrolled – or rather my father enrolled me – in Boston College, a Jesuit institution of higher education, which was actually a university not located in Boston but in the toney suburb of Chestnut Hill. In my freshman year I squirmed through the typically dreary two-semester principles of economics course taught by a graduate student from Samuelson’s Principles of Economics, 7^th edition. However this experience did not deflect me from my career goal and I declared economics as my major sometime during my freshman (or sophomore) year. That year I also began reading the New Guard, a periodical published by the conservative Young Americans for Freedom, where I encountered for the first time the schism in the conservative movement between “traditionalists” and “libertarians.” I was impressed by the arguments presented by the libertarian contributors and in short order jettisoned the Goldwater-Buckley conservatism of my early adolescence and adopted the libertarian positions to abolish the draft, legalize drugs and other victimless “crimes,” and immediately end the Vietnam War. In my sophomore year I began to read Rand’s nonfiction works including Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. It was in the latter work that I first saw a reference to Ludwig von Mises, although I did not realize his significance at the time.

It was in mid-April of my sophomore year that a general student boycott of classes at Boston College began as a protest against a large tuition increase. Leaders of the campus SDS quickly gained control of the amorphous movement and by early May the boycott metamorphosed into a general student strike against the draft and the Vietnam War. A few hardy souls defied the strike and continued to attend classes – which attendance the squishy-soft liberal president of BC declared to be “optional,” with mid-term grades being the default final grade for those who chose to strike – while most earnestly participated in the innumerable informal “teach-ins” conducted by clueless liberal faculty on the war, women’s liberation, racism, ecology etc. I did neither. A select group of more entrepreneurial students carrying midterm grades of B or higher alertly seized the essentially “costless” opportunity to frolic and carouse with like-minded students of other striking colleges, along the Charles River, in the Boston Gardens and amidst other landmarks of lovely springtime Boston.

The break from course work did not preclude me, however, from learning a very important lesson concerning radical political change, although its importance and relevance for libertarian strategy was clarified for me only many years later by Murray Rothbard. One day during the strike, a coalition of left-wing organizations called for a march to the Boston Commons where assorted Yippies, peaceniks, and left-wing academics were to address an antiwar rally. Abbie Hoffman was there as, I vaguely recollect, were Noam Chomsky and Jerry Rubin. Despite my deep personal disdain for these men and for the mainly leftist hippie students who would turn out for the demonstration, I participated because I was opposed to the war and because I anticipated that many coeds of like mind would participate. The march commenced on the outskirts of Boston composed mainly of disheveled, although reasonably well-behaved, college students but as the crowd swept down Commonwealth Avenue, a main artery into the downtown area, I noted young middle-class adults pouring out of residences and office buildings to join us. As the demonstration was swelled by what Murray Rothbard would later call “real people,” – people with real jobs and family responsibilities – a palpable change occurred in the demeanor of the police monitoring the march. Initially coldly detached if not mildly hostile, they began to appear progressively anxious and forlorn, unsure of their positions as representatives of a State whose legitimacy was suddenly being seriously questioned by tens of thousands of ordinary Americans. Some of the younger officers even seemed as if they would have liked to shed their uniforms and join us. At the rally itself the greatest response from the crowd occurred when the clownish but charismatic Abbie Hoffman pointed to the John Hancock building looming over the Commons and roared “John Hancock wasn’t an insurance salesman, he was a f—–g revolutionary.”

The ability of charismatic leaders to imbue ordinary middle-class Americans with a radical anti-state mentality by demonstrating how specific government policies exploited and victimized them and disrupted their families and communities was actually brought home to me a year earlier when I attended a rally for George Wallace at the same Boston Commons in the waning days of the Presidential campaign of 1968. Campaigning on an anti-establishment third party ticket Wallace roused the crowd by hammering on the absurdity of the despotic and unconstitutional judicial mandate that prevented white and black students in Boston from attending schools near their homes and coercively bused them to schools in strange and distant, and sometimes dangerous, neighborhoods. At the end of his talk the feisty Wallace waded into the dispersing crowd to shake hands and engage a gaggle of leftist student hecklers in good-natured repartee. I was standing a few feet away from Wallace when he jovially suggested to one of the students, “Why don’t you bring your sandal over here, hippie, and I’ll autograph it for ya.” After the laughter abated Wallace surprised and disarmed his erstwhile hecklers by standing among them and amiably responding to their questions and criticisms.

I was deeply impressed by these two episodes, although at the time I could not have articulated the reasons why, let alone recognized their general implications for a coherent libertarian strategy of political change. It was only many years later that I was enlightened on this matter by Murray Rothbard’s analysis of the Joe McCarthy phenomenon of the early 1950’s. Rothbard delighted in standing the established view of McCarthy on its head. The entire political and academic establishment, from New Deal/Truman Democrats to Eisenhower Republicans, from moderate liberals to moderate conservatives, concurred in the necessity of waging a Cold War to contain the alleged Soviet conspiracy to take over the so-called “Free World” and therefore were in explicit agreement with McCarthy’s ultimate goals. What they detested, they said, was McCarthy’s means. Rothbard, in sharp contrast, never believed that the Soviet Union, albeit a bloody and repressive dictatorship, had the ability or intention of taking over the West. Rather he argued that the Cold War was a ruse devised by the American ruling elite to justify the continuation and expansion of the massive, tax-consuming, welfare-warfare state built up during World War II at home and to rationalize postwar U.S. imperialist ambitions for assorted military interventions abroad. While dismissing McCarthy’s ridiculous and contrived Cold War ideology – which, to repeat, he shared with most of his respectable establishment detractors – Rothbard had a profound appreciation for the means McCarthy employed. According to Rothbard (The Irrepressible Rothbard, 2000, p. 13):

The unique and glorious thing about McCarthy was not his goals or his ideology, but precisely his radical, populist means. For McCarthy was able, for a few years, to short-circuit the intense opposition of all the elites in American life: from the Eisenhower-Rockefeller administration to the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex to liberal and left media and academic elites – to overcome all that opposition and reach and inspire the masses directly. And he did it through television, and without any real movement behind him; he had only a guerrilla band of a few advisers, but no organization and no infrastructure.

The strategy of directly appealing to the exploited middle- and working-class masses and short-circuiting the entrenched political and media elites is what later led Rothbard to support the Presidential candidacies of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan.

The academic year following that of the student strike was my junior year. The concurrence of a number of events marked it as a pivotal year in my intellectual development. To start with, soon after my return from summer break I discovered that a chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) had begun operating on campus. Its eclectic membership included Buckleyite traditionalist conservatives, fusionist libertarian-conservatives, laissez-faire capitalist Randians and a few nearly pure libertarians. Although I do not believe I joined the organization immediately, I began spending my spare time in their office participating in informal discussions and debates. This marked the first time that I had interacted with a group of my peers whose political philosophy even loosely paralleled my own and I found the experience exhilarating. Also, the friendly verbal sparring with thoughtful young “conservatives” of various stripes helped clarify my own thinking and propelled me toward a progressively more consistent and radical libertarian position.

My transformation into a full-fledged libertarian was completed when, at the start of my second semester, I read in a white heat the cover article of the New York Times Magazine (1971) entitled “The New Right Credo – Libertarianism.” The authors, Stan Lehr and Louis Rossetto, Jr. were seniors at Columbia University and their article presented the first comprehensive account that I had read of the unadulterated libertarian political philosophy, carefully differentiating it from both establishment liberalism and conservatism as well as from the New Left, whose positions it shared on the abolition of the draft and all drug laws and an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. The article also portrayed libertarianism as a vital and flourishing political movement that drew inspiration from Rand and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, whose novels I had been reading since I began college. Jerome Tuccille and former Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess, unfamiliar names to me at the time, were identified as leading publicists and pamphleteers for the movement and their writings cited for their defense of radical libertarianism. More significantly, from the standpoint of my academic interests, the article referred to “economists of the Austrian school” – a school I had never been introduced to in my two-and-half years as an undergraduate economics major – as having demonstrated that recessions and depressions were not inherent defects of the free market but the result of government and central bank manipulation of the money supply. The article later quoted a passage from Man, Economy and State by Murray N. Rothbard, explaining why state management of the economy deprived of market prices was inevitably chaotic. As with the Austrian school in general, I had never heard Rothbard’s name mentioned by any of my economics professors and had no idea who he was. By the time I finished reading the article I had been converted to the pure libertarian position – a position the authors designated by the then novel term “anarchocapitalism,” – and my curiosity about Austrian economics had been piqued.

Back at the YAF office I mentioned my discovery of Austrian economics to my comrades. Shortly thereafter, one of them, Gerald Uba, produced and placed in my hands an odd-sized “minibook” (measuring 3.75″ by 5″) written by Rothbard and entitled Depressions: Their Cause and Cure. After reading Rothbard’s thirty pages of clear and scintillating prose, I knew I had learned more in one hour about business cycles or “macroeconomic fluctuations” then I had absorbed from two semesters of listening to lectures in Principles of Macroeconomics and Intermediate Macroeconomics and of poring over the jargon filled, opaquely written, deadly dull textbooks assigned in these courses. Moreover, my deep interest in economics was now transformed into a burning passion for the subject.

Serendipitously, in the same semester that I was introduced to Rothbard and modern Austrian business cycle theory, I was enrolled in a History of Economic Thought course taught by Robert Cheney, S.J. Father Cheney was a superb, if somewhat low-key, teacher and near the end of the course he introduced the topic of the marginalist revolution. Referring to the early Austrians, Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and the latter’s brother-in-law, Friedrich von Wieser, he characterized the formation of the Austrian school as a “unique event” in intellectual history. Never before, he declared, had such brilliant men worked so closely together to develop a common approach to economic phenomena. Father Cheney’s enthusiastic endorsement of the older Austrian school further bolstered my interest in learning more about the school.

As soon as I arrived back home that summer I began to devour all the libertarian and Austrian books I could lay my hands on. Through my local bookstore I ordered Jerome Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism: A Right Wing Alternative. Although some of its illustrations are now a bit dated and it contains a few minor “lifestyle libertarian” confusions and deviations, it served, and still serves, as a compelling introduction to the radical libertarian philosophy and movement.

I next began to scour public libraries in the suburbs of central New Jersey for books by Rothbard and the two Austrian business cycle theorists he had referred to in his booklet, Mises and Hayek. Needless to say, I did not have much luck at first. Desperate, I then decided to venture into the Plainfield Public Library. Plainfield was a small city that, like Newark had been torn by race riots in 1967. A city policeman chasing looters had been set upon by a black mob and beaten to death with a shopping cart. The National Guard, which had then been sent in to quell the riot, conducted an indiscriminate and warrant-less house-to-house search for weapons that inflamed even the most peaceful black residents and left lingering bitterness and racial hatred. Anyway, by the summer of 1971, “white flight” from the beautiful Victorian houses and Dutch colonials that encircled the once thriving shopping district of the city was almost complete leaving the large well-stocked library, housed in a new glass-walled building next to the increasingly rowdy high school, nearly always deserted. It was there one late spring evening that I finally located musty copies of America’s Great Depression, The Theory of Money and Credit, Human Action, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, and Prices and Production. Despite the fact that I was an out-of-towner I somehow or other finagled a library card from the sympathetic and lonely librarian and was able to withdraw the books.

That summer I worked as a janitor at an engineering facility for AT&T. I always completed my assigned tasks quickly and distinctly recall spending a great deal of time ensconced in a stuffy broom closet with a naked overhead light bulb reading America’s Great Depression. Although the Mises and Hayek volumes presented more of a challenge because of some unfamiliar terminology and stylistic idiosyncrasies, by summer’s end I had grasped enough of the substantive theory to consider myself a reasonably well-informed student of Austrian business cycle theory.

As my senior year began I discovered the Books for Libertarians catalogue and ordered Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State, Power and Market, and What Has Government Done to Our Money? as well as the first modern anarcho-capitalist treatise, The Market for Liberty by Morris and Linda Tannehill.

The most memorable course my senior year was Political Economy taught by Professor Barry Bluestone, a young Marxist economist and member of URPE (Union of Radical Political Economists) newly hired by the department. Professor Bluestone knew and had worked with David Friedman on an anti-draft coalition and was familiar with Rothbard’s writings. He was also somewhat conversant with the radical libertarian position. One day, while explaining this position to the class, he stated with a smirk that some libertarians actually believed that law could be enforced through private competing police agencies, although even they conceded that the functions of lawmaking and the judicial system would have to be monopolized by the State. I immediately raised my hand and pointed out that there were libertarians, myself included, who would relegate even these functions to private competition. I went on to explain why, under competition, honest courts would drive the corrupt and biased courts, such as he had told us existed in “Amerika,” out of business. A good speaker and teacher, never at a loss for words, he was momentarily struck speechless.

After graduation from Boston College I proceeded on to the graduate program in economics at Rutgers University, just ten minutes away from my parents’ home in New Jersey. Graduate school was hugely entertaining owing to the eclectic mixture of the Rutgers graduate economics faculty. The most noteworthy among the faculty included: Paul Davidson, the prominent post-Keynesian who taught macro and monetary theory; Hugh Rockoff, a Chicago Ph.D. and eminent economic historian who published a number of seminal articles on the free banking era in the United States; Alexander Balinky, a Marx scholar, who claimed the distinction of having been Joseph Schumpeter’s last graduate assistant and whose office was occasionally picketed by the Maoist Progressive Labor party over some arcane point of Marxist dogma; Marc Miles, a student of Arthur Laffer’s, who later co-authored an international economics textbook with Laffer and also published a book on supply-side monetary theory and policy; and the prolific international economist, H. Peter Gray, a former student of William Fellner’s at Berkeley and a strict, but tolerant and well read, Keynesian who was to become my dissertation adviser. To Professor Gray, I owe a debt of gratitude for introducing me to the classical “monetary” approach to the balance of payments and exchange rates, an approach that was later revived and elaborated by Ludwig von Mises and that I investigated in my dissertation.

Overall, I was quite pleased with my experience at Rutgers. The diversity among the faculty led to my exposure to a broad range of literature and also to toleration of my vigorously expressed Austro-libertarian views by my professors and peers alike. My dissertation committee comprised a Keynesian, a monetarist and a supply-sider. Perhaps as important, the transmogrifying of economics into a branch of applied mathematics, which had begun in the 1960’s in American economics, had not yet progressed very far at Rutgers. Indeed, it was this trend that led to my enrolling at Rutgers. After I had received my GRE (graduate record exam) results in my senior year at BC, I went to see my faculty adviser to discuss my prospects for graduate education. Having scored in the 99^th percentile in the verbal part of the exam and just below the 90^th percentile in the economics part and on track to graduate with honors from BC, I thought I could write my own ticket to graduate school. I asked him what he thought of Princeton, where he had received his Ph.D. He took one look at my mediocre score in the math part (76^th percentile) smiled indulgently, and said: “With that score you won’t get into Princeton and if you do, you won’t make it through. I suggest you apply to a school just up the road, Rutgers University.” Although I was stunned and dismayed at the time, I remain grateful today for his straightforward advice.

It was while I was attending graduate school that I met Murray Rothbard. Shortly before my first semester began I was involved with the founding of the New Jersey Libertarian Party, of which I was subsequently elected Treasurer. Our first convention was scheduled for February of 1973 and we required a keynote speaker. In November 1972, the President of the NJLP Bob Steiner and myself attended a libertarian conference in New York City whose featured speakers included Rothbard, Bob Lefevre, and Karl Hess, among others. It was the first time I had seen any of these giants of the nascent libertarian movement in person and I was excited especially at the prospect of hearing Rothbard speak. Rothbard followed LeFevre on the program and, although I do not recall the precise topic of his talk that day, I was extremely impressed with the joyfulness, affability, and sense of humor he projected. The latter was especially on display during the question and answer period following his talk. When someone asked him his view of the extreme pacifism of LeFevre’s “autarchist” philosophy – which prohibited any form of violence even in self-defense – Rothbard replied: “Well, if someone was brandishing a mallet at me and I had a gun, I’d plug him.”

We subsequently invited Rothbard to give the keynote address at the NJLP convention, and he graciously agreed to do it for the rubber chicken dinner and paltry $75 we were able to offer him. Prior to his talk, I introduced myself to him and we spoke for a while about libertarian issues before I mentioned that I was graduate student in economics and was going through Frank Fetter’s articles, the references to which I had gleaned from reading Man, Economy, and State. I never expected his reaction to my casual remark. His eyes immediately lit up and he seemed like he could barely contain his enthusiasm. He feverishly searched for a pen and asked me for my address and phone number and told me that he would pass on this information to people in New Jersey who had formed an Austrian reading group. The following Monday I received a call from a student member of this group who invited me to attend the meetings of this reading circle, which was directed by Walter Grinder and included another one of my libertarian heroes, Walter Block. In the year-and-one-half that followed I enjoyed increasing personal contact with Murray Rothbard, including visits to his home, meetings with him in his office at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and arranging for him to address the graduate economics faculty and students at Rutgers. Rothbard also encouraged me to write a review essay on David Friedman’s book, The Machinery of Freedom, for The Libertarian Forum, and this became my first publication.¹ Thus when I disembarked from Don Lavoie’s car in South Royalton, Vermont in June 1974 to attend the first Austrian economics conference to be convened in the United States, I, like Don and most of the other attendees, had arrived by way of Murray Rothbard.

Note

[1] Joseph Salerno, “The Machinery of Friedman,” The Libertarian Forum 5 (December 1973), pp. 5–6.

Objectivism is strong medicine, especially for those like myself who had spent their college years avoiding courses in the social sciences because of their apparent lack of structure and reason. Rand’s Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal was full of structure and reason and provided a moral foundation for a free society. The Austrian economists, featured in this book’s recommended readings, would show just what is—or ought to be—sitting on Rand’s foundation. Austrian economics is appealing to an engineering mind: basic principles, law-like propositions, unequivocal conclusions—all grounded in logic and applicable to the world as we know it. Authors that Rand believed to be worthy of attention are listed in alphabetical order. I look back now at my yellowed paperback purchased more than a quarter-century ago and note the neatly drawn check marks that track the progress of my reading: books by Benjamin Anderson, Lawrence Fertig, Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises. Although my imperfect memory tells me that Murray Rothbard’s books were included in this list, I see now that they are not. But Rothbard had been publishing for several years and was for a time a member of Rand’s inner circle. Any enthusiastic reader would soon find his books.

I obtained a copy of America’s Great Depression through an inter-library loan. I found Rothbard’s account of boom and bust absolutely compelling and especially significant in light of the stark contrast between the views of the Austrian economists and those of the “educated” citizenry. With a monopoly on money creation, the government could artificially cheapen credit and orchestrate a business expansion, which eventually and inevitably would collapse. Policies commonly defended in the name of stability and growth led instead to instability and decay. In later years, I would attach even more significance to this early book of Rothbard’s as I discovered how badly other schools of economic thought had botched their accounts of business cycles.

With the engineering market glutted in the early 1970s when I and many of my peers were set free by the military, a popular option was to work on an MBA degree. I chose to pursue a masters in economics instead, thinking (erroneously) that the MA would be as marketable and the coursework more interesting. I entered the masters program at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. The courses on macroeconomics offered a steady diet of Keynesian analysis in the conventional form of interlocking diagrams that jointly determine the equilibrium values for the economy’s income and its interest rate. The substantial investment involved in mastering the diagrammatical technique seemed to give professors and students alike a special interest in defending Keynesian views.

In late 1972 I began to devise an Austrian counterpart to the Keynesian diagrams. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State provided the primary source material. In the end, I was able to draw together individual diagrams taken from or inspired by Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Böhm-Bawerk and Wicksell and show that they all fit together into a coherent story about boom and bust. Titled “Austrian Macroeconomics: A Diagrammatical Exposition,” the paper was submitted as partial fulfillment of the course requirements in macroeconomics. The professor, whose preferred brand of economics was institutionalism as exposited by Thorstein Veblen and Clarence Ayers, gave me a high mark on the paper but confessed that he hadn’t actually worked through the graphical analysis and wasn’t familiar with Austrian economics. To my surprise, though, he offered to arrange for me to present the paper at the Midwest Economic Association meetings to be held in Chicago in April 1973.

With some urging from this professor, I agreed to go to Chicago. I soon realized, however, that neither he nor anyone else had provided me with any critical feedback. No one, in fact, had actually read the paper. And I was to present it to a professional audience in April! The one action item that occurred to me was to mail a copy of the paper to Murray Rothbard. Maybe he would respond in time to give me some confidence about Chicago—or to allow me to renege on my agreement to go.

About a week after mailing the paper, I got a phone call—from Joey Rothbard. She introduced herself with a very pleasant voice and said that her husband would like to speak with me. I then listened for the voice of a learned professor but heard instead an exceedingly jolly voice, interspersed with an infectious cackling and irreverent asides about modern-day graduate programs. Rothbard was clearly enthused about the diagrammatical exposition; he saw it as beating the Keynesians at their own game. “Would you be coming to New York anytime soon?” he asked. Although I had no plans whatever to go to New York, I managed to announce: “I’ll be there during spring break,” at which point he invited me for dinner and further discussion of the diagrams. 

Dinner guests at the Rothbards’ are made to feel like special people. I was treated to a memorable dinner with the warmest hospitality amid the book-lined walls of the Rothbards’ upper-westside apartment. After dinner more guests arrived: Walter Block, Walter Grinder, and William Stewart, all of whom had carefully read my paper. The discussion was lively, mostly positive, and full of good suggestions for revision and further development. I took notes in the margins of my own copy. The evening passed quickly, and I began to worry about overstaying my welcome. But no one else seemed to be aware of the late hour. As midnight neared, I began packing my papers away and thanking the Rothbards for an unforgettable evening. The host and other guests seemed puzzled and almost insulted by my tenuous movement in the direction of the front door. I did not know that Murray was a complete and incurable night owl. For him the evening had just begun. We had lots of discussion ahead of us including some history and some methodology and quite a little bit of slightly gossipy banter about people in the Libertarian/Austrian movement. As best I can remember, I was allowed to leave around 4:00 a.m., after an invitation was extended (and accepted) to attend a class later in the day at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, where Murray taught economics to engineering students—and to stop by Laissez-Faire Books, where he would be autographing copies of his just-released For a New Liberty (See photo). The evening had crystallized into a major stepping stone in my own professional development. But there was something else that had happened which now has a special meaning for me. In the course of a single evening, Murray Rothbard, whose name continued to signify eminence in economics, history, and philosophy, had become for me just “Murray.” 

The presentation in Chicago was a virtual non-event, which, as I learned later, is typical of sessions at professional meetings. But the disappointment was overshadowed by the fact that Murray had invited me to attend a week-long conference on twentieth-century American economic history sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies to be held in the summer at Cornell University. He and Forrest McDonald were to lecture for a week to an audience consisting mainly of student historians. As it turned out, I was one of only a few economics students to attend. Near the end of the week, Murray asked me to present my diagrammatics in an informal afternoon session. I foolishly agreed. Since the audience of historians was largely unschooled in macroeconomics, I felt I had to present first the mainstream Keynesian diagrammatics (which typically takes a semester in undergraduate economics programs) and then counter it with my own Austrian diagrammatics. Needless to say, the session was a disaster. The audience, largely baffled, did include one economist, who criticized me roundly at every turn. But I forgave Murray for asking me to do the presentation and soon enough came to appreciate the criticisms offered by the lone economist. She is to be thanked rather than forgiven.

Although the week at Cornell was rewarding in its own right, it benefited me mainly by putting me on the invitation list for upcoming conferences in Austrian economics. The following year (1974) was the South Royalton conference, a conference that came to be widely recognized as the take-off point of the Austrian Revival. There, Murray, teamed up this time with Israel Kirzner and Ludwig Lachmann, gave stimulating lectures dealing with method, theory, and policy, all published later on as The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, edited by Ed Dolan. Henry Hazlitt and Bill Hutt added much insight and perspective to the discussions. Milton Friedman was there for the opening banquet. His now-famous remark that “there is no Austrian economics—only good economics and bad economics” had a certain—but unintended—galvanizing effect on conference. The list of listeners, most meeting one another for the first time, now reads like a Who’s Who in Austrian economics: Armentano, Block, Ebeling, High, Lavoie, Moss, O’Driscoll, Rizzo, Salerno, Shenoy, Vaughn. One purpose of the conference was to persuade Lachmann that there was sufficient interest in Austrian economics to justify his coming out of semi-retirement and teaching at New York University. By week’s end, the interest was not in doubt, and Lachmann soon began teaching at NYU.

For the two follow-on conferences held in successive years, F. A. Hayek joined the original South Royalton faculty. In 1975 the Austrians met at the University of Hartford in Connecticut; in 1976 they met in England in Windsor Castle. At both conferences, papers by South Royalton participants were presented and discussed. The Windsor Castle papers, among which was my newly revised “Diagrammitical Expostition,” were eventually published as New Directions in Austrian Economics, edited by Lou Spadaro. This unique three-year sequence of conferences on Austrian economics, engineered largely by Murray, nicely overlapped my years in the graduate program at the University of Virginia, a school I had chosen on Murray’s recommendation.

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 twenty-two 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. We owe much to Murray for the fact that the years since South Royalton have seen a steady growth of Austrian economics in universities both in the U.S. and abroad. Beginning in 1976 there have been teaching conferences almost every year—at Newark, DE, Oakland, CA, Boulder, CO, Milwaukee, WI, Auburn, AL, Palo Alto, CA, Claremont, CA—sponsored first by the Institute for Humane Studies and then by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. This year, the conference, billed as the Mises University, will be held in Auburn and promises to be a most significant event. Dedicated to the memory of Murray Rothbard, it will feature more than two dozen faculty members lecturing on a wide range of topics in economics, history, and philosophy.

Can Austrian economics survive without Murray? Yes, it can and will survive and grow. Although his passing leaves us all with an enduring sense of loss, we can see his life as the virtual personification of dedication and purpose. His legacy will provide us with the wisdom and the spirit to press on.

Rothbard was a system builder. Unsatisfied with past attempts to present a “philosophy of freedom,” Rothbard sought to create an interdisciplinary system of thought that used the struggle between Liberty and Power as its integrating theme. He explained, “Strands and remnants of libertarian doctrines are, indeed, all around us. … But only libertarianism takes these strands and remnants and integrates them into a mighty, logical, and consistent system.”2 Without such a systematic world view, he believed Liberty could not succeed.

In forty-five years of scholarship and activism, Rothbard produced over two dozen books and thousands of articles that made sense of the world from a radical individualist perspective. In doing so, it is no exaggeration to say that Rothbard created the modern libertarian movement.3 Specifically, he refined and fused together:

* natural law theory, using a basic Aristotelian or Randian approach;
* the radical civil libertarianism 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.

As a result of the fusion, libertarianism blossomed in the ’60s as the philosophy of absolute individual rights based on natural law – of rights that were expressed domestically through the free market and internationally through non-aggression (isolationism) with its corollary of unbridled free trade. But more than this. Following in the footsteps of his mentor, the pioneering Austrian Economist Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard grounded human liberty in human nature. Developing an explicit philosophy of Liberty, he drove his insights through history to re-examine the real implications and meaning of events, such as the American Revolution. He laid a moral foundation for freedom, then used it to springboard into a strategy by which to achieve it. The integration was a stunning accomplishment. And one that stirred the love of Liberty within a generation of scholars and activists who proudly called themselves ‘Rothbardians.’ I include myself in those ranks.

Given that he was a lightning rod for controversy and critical analysis, it may seem that all aspects of Rothbard’s work have been exhaustively explored. But Rothbard has not received sufficient credit for the monumental task of integration that he achieved with such elegance. There are a number of reasons for this oversight. One of them is the short shrift that academia gives to system-building in preference to extreme specialization within disciplines that are already carefully defined.

Rothbard once complained, “Probably the most common question that has been hurled at me – in some exasperation – over the years is: ‘Why don’t you stick to economics?’” Calling the question a “said reflection on the hyperspecialization among intellectuals,” Rothbard continued, “…this syndrome has been carried so far that they scorn any attention to politico-economic problems as a demeaning and unclean impurity…”4

Yet, Rothbard observed, the economists he knew “became interested in economics because they were interested in social and political problems and because they realized that the really hard political problems cannot be solved without an understanding of economics.”(ix) Rothbard simply refused to give up the youthful passion for solving social problems. Instead, he quoted the call-to-arms of Randolph Bourne, “The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit shall never be lost…. To keep one’s reactions warm and true is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation.”5

Another reason Rothbard has been denied due status as an integrator has been his tendency to include what most academics would view as “dubious” cultural references in his economic and ethical writings. For example, in his iconoclastic essay “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature,” Rothbard unabashedly discusses the plot of “the British anti-Utopian novel Facial Justice, by L.P. Hartley.”6 This unpretentious approach to ideas reflected Rothbard’s eagerness to popularize the ideas of liberty in addition to providing a scholarly basis from which to argue toward strategy. He had a rare talent: he could express the same argument in pop-culture or in academic terms. As he once wrote, “Especially in an age of galloping statism, the classical liberal, the advocate of the free market, has an obligation to carry the struggle to all levels of society.”7

Although Rothbard’s popularizing of ideas is a key ingredient that makes his works fresh and entertaining, even when read repeatedly, academia would certainly frown upon using science fiction to illustrate ethical points. In short, not only did Rothbard stray outside of a narrow specialty – not only did he not know “his place” – Rothbard displayed an irreverent and joyous love of ideas, no matter where they came from. Translation: his more popular books were not deemed ‘serious’ works.

I have sympathy with at least one reason for which people overlook Rothbard’s status as a system builder. His “philosophy of liberty” is a superbly consistent whole but, for those who browse it casually without being familiar with classical liberalism, his system may appear to be a ill-fitting synthesis of opposites. To those steeped in the traditional left/right analysis of politics, his insistence on radical civil liberties may seem utterly at odds with his championing of laissez-faire capitalism. His anarchism may seem antagonistic to individualism, since that political position is far more generally presented in collectivist terms.

To clear up what might be a reasonable confusion as to the consistency of Rothbard’s meticulous system, it is valuable to explore the manner in which it was constructed.
The Construction of a World View

Rothbard self-consciously built upon traditions. The tradition that was core to his passion and vision may well have been Austrian economics. He considered Mises’ great work Human Action (1949) to be pivotal in his intellectual formation because it resolved the many contradictions in economics with which he had grappled as a doctoral student at Columbia University. When Mises held his famed seminars at New York University, Rothbard attended eagerly from the very beginning.

Mises emphasized the key role that human psychology and behavior – that “acting” man – played in economics. He contended that the marketplace was not an equation that functioned according to mathematical calculations. It was not a precise machine, but one driven by uncertainties. It was the collective expression of human preference and judgment, and many of its ‘mechanisms’ were best described in psychological terms. For example, marginal utility is analysis of how human beings value goods more as they become scarcer and, thus, each unit must be put to its highest use. I do not shower with water that is essential for drinking purposes.

In Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (2 vols., 1962), Rothbard embodied and extended Mises’ broad approach to economics. Llewellyn Rockwell, head of the Ludwig von Mises Institute wrote, “Beginning with the philosophical foundation, Rothbard built an edifice of economic theory and an unassailable case for the market…. The book treated economics as a humane science, not as a branch of physics.” He concluded, “…Rothbard’s great work, was the key to the resurgence of Austrian economics after Mises’s death.”8 It is difficult to overstate the impact of Man, Economy, and State in certain circles of scholarship. Its influence was not limited to students of economics. For example, Rothbard’s magnum opus was solely responsible for turning me from the advocacy of limited government to a lifetime of work within the individualist-anarchist tradition. My experience was a microcosm that repeated itself within thousands of others, each reacting in his or her own manner.

For several years after the appearance of Man, Economy, and State. Rothbard focused on historically documenting his case for economic liberty by dealing with specific issues. The books from this period included The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (1962, and his Ph.D. dissertation), America’s Great Depression (1963), What Government Has Done to Our Money (1964), and Economic Depressions: Causes and Cures (1969). These works fleshed out and gave context to his economic insights. They also defied the common economic wisdom of the day.

For example, in the words of Rockwell, America’s Great Depression [applied] the Misean theory of the business cycle to show that the 1929 crash resulted from Federal Reserve credit expansion.”9

The true intellectual sequel of Man Economy and State, however, was Power and Market: Government and the Economy (1970) which carried on the earlier book’s logic by providing an overview of the devastation caused by state intervention, with special emphasis on the destruction wrought by taxation. The book also offered a tantalizing but sketchy model of the stateless society.

Rothbard was acutely aware of the deficiencies of these works with regard to establishing a solid base for freedom. He wrote, “Economics can help supply much of the data for a libertarian position but it cannot establish that political philosophy itself. For political judgments are necessarily value-judgments, political philosophy is therefore necessarily ethical, and hence a positive ethical system must be set forth to establish the case for individual liberty.”10

Much of Rothbard’s subsequent writing aimed at providing the necessary “political philosophy” that would allow liberty to flourish. Ethics of Liberty (1982) became his overriding moral defense of a free society. Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (1974) was a popular version of this defense. It is useful to examine both works.

The Popular Moral Case for Liberty

The collection of his essays entitled Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature is a much neglected tour de force in terms of popularizing the basics of liberty.

In the foreword to this collection, the political commentator R.A. Childs, Jr. remarked upon a contention he had heard bandied about in intellectual circles: namely, that anarchist theory contains no great system-builders. By this criticism, critics meant to observe that anarchism has not benefited from the presence of profound thinkers who have integrated divergent schools of thought – e.g. philosophy, history, psychology, economics – into a coherent and cohesive world view. Anarchism has lacked a system-builder, like Karl Marx, who could create the stern stuff of ideology.

Childs disagreed. The anarchist world – and, specifically, individualist (or libertarian) anarchism – had produced at least one great system-builder: Murray N. Rothbard. Although Childs gave a well-deserved nod of respect to the theoretical contributions of Spooner and Tucker, it is to Rothbard whom he points as the integrator and synthesizer of theory. It was Rothbard who provided “the entire libertarian worldview, the unique way of viewing history and world affairs…”(v)

The essays in Egalitarianism express this integration and achieve, in a popular non-scholarly style, nothing less than “the discipline of liberty” upon which modern libertarianism rests. The lead essay, bearing the same title as the book itself, sets the tone by going back to absolute fundamentals in human nature. That is, the essay establishes a biological case for human diversity, a diversity upon which individual liberty must rest. As Rothbard noted, “if individuals were as interchangeable as ants, why should anyone worry about maximizing the opportunity for every person to develop his mind and his faculties and his personality to the fullest extent possible?”(x-xi) Following the example of his mentor, Mises, he looked to ‘acting man’ in order to ground “libertarianism in individualism and individual diversity.”(xi) Indeed, the denial of diversity (individualism) is a denial of “the very structure of humanity and of the universe.”(p.13)

In its broadest terms, then, this was Rothbard’s framework for liberty. Human diversity, and the need to respect that condition as one of the most basic facts of human nature, formed the immense outer structure within which Rothbard rolled up his sleeves to construct the specifics.

The next essay in the collection, entitled “Left and Right,” begins the task of sculpting specifics by placing the “current movement and ideology [of individualism] in a world-historical context and perspective…”(xi) It asks the empirical question, “What…of the prospects of liberty?”(p.14) In a spirit of optimism, Rothbard contended “while the short-run prospects for liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude for the Libertarian to take is that of unquenchable long-run optimism.”(p.15) He based his optimism on a sweeping worldview of the struggle between Liberty and Power, which transcended the traditional Left/Right political distinction.

Rothbard pushed his theme of Liberty vs. Power through centuries and through the works of such divergent writers as Lord Action, Karl Marx and George Bernard Shaw to arrive at post World War I America. Here, even with the surging socialism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rothbard saw nothing but hope. He chided the reigning individualists of that day – Albert J. Nock and H.L. Mencken – for adopting “the great error of pessimism” and “despairing.”(p.28) They simply did not understand that the world had become industrial and “only liberty, only a free market, can organize and maintain an industrial system, and the more that population expands and explodes, the more necessary is the unfettered working of such an industrial economy.”(p.29)

Thus, with a broad framework of Liberty based in human nature and set in the historical perspective of optimism, Rothbard marched with a jaunty step straight toward the single greatest enemy of Liberty: the State. The next essay is entitled “The Anatomy of the State” and it systematically argues that statism is the antithesis of individualism. In religious terms, it is the Antichrist. This essay begins by addressing “What the State Is Not” (pp.34-35), “What the State Is” (pp.35-37) and, then, proceeds into a now-classic analysis of how the State acts primarily to preserve and expand itself. (pp.37-52) The concluding section on Social Power v. State Power briefly describes the conflict between those who live through productive labor (society) and those who live by usurping the products of others (the State). It springboards directly into the fundamental principles through which Social Power can be encouraged and maintained.

The essay, “Justice and Property Rights,” provides the “philosophic groundwork for the libertarian axiom of non-aggression against person and property” then goes on to derive a theory of “justice in property rights.”(xi) In a traditionally libertarian manner, Rothbard grounds property rights in what he calls two “fundamental premises”: “(a) the absolute property right of each individual in his own person, his own body; this may be called the right of self-ownership; and (b) the absolute right in the material property of the person who first finds an unused material resource and then in some way occupies or transforms that resource by the use of his personal energy. This might be called the homestead principle…”

The essay applies these premises to a panorama of issues, from land to intellectual property to so-called ‘animal rights.’ In non-scholarly terms, it provides broad guidelines by which to translate the principles of property rights into a system of justice. “To sum up: all existing property titles may be considered just under the homestead principle, provided (a) that there may never be any property in people; (b) that the existing property owner did not himself steal the property; and particularly © that any identifiable just owner (the original victim of theft or his heir) must be accorded his property.”(p.69)

(At this point in Egalitarianism, Rothbard skipped an important step in the construction of a philosophy of liberty; it was an oversight that he corrected elsewhere in his writings. Namely, Egalitarianism gives no sense at all of how the free market institutions of justice could be best constructed or encouraged to evolve. There is no hint of a blueprint. Without the institutionalization of liberty through the establishment of e.g. anarchist defense agencies, the prospects of freedom are diminished.)

In the fifth essay of Egalitarianism, entitled “War, Peace and the State,” Rothbard explicitly interwove the isolationist foreign policy attitudes of the Old Right into the core of libertarian theory. Having noted elsewhere that war is the single most destructive Statist activity – both to individualism and to morality – he aimed at the essential task of constructing a countervailing “libertarian theory of war and peace.” Rothbard applied the “axiom of non-aggression to an area where most Libertarians have been weakest: war and foreign policy.” (xi) With a policy of “no compromise,” Rothbard consistently applied the principle “it is completely impermissible to violate the rights of other innocent people,” and concluded that libertarians should condemn “all wars, regardless of motive.” (78)

The remainder of the essay collection is more haphazard, mostly reflecting Rothbard’s specific application of the broad principles he sketched in the first half of the book. For example, the initial and defining essay “Egalitarianism” had stated “since egalitarians begin with the priori axiom that all people, and hence all groups of peoples, are uniform and equal, it then follows for them that any and all group differences in status, prestige or authority in society must be the result of unjust ‘oppression’ and irrational ‘discrimination.’” (7) This observation springboards into the latter essays “Kid Lib” and “The Great Women’s Liberation Issue: Setting It Straight,” in which Rothbard analyzes two groups who are popularly believed to be oppressed because they are ‘different.’

In terms of Rothbard’s heritage as a system-builder, two remaining essays within Egalitarianism are of particular interest: “The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: An Economist’s View” and “Ludwig von Mises and the Paradigm for Our Age.” In “The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine,” Rothbard praised the two great 19th century American anarchists not only for realizing that government and individual liberty were incompatible, but also for exploring the ways in which individuals could cooperate together without the State to achieve what Tucker called a ‘society by contract.’ They were, in essence, social utopians as much as they were political theorists.

Despite his deep respect for the 19th century American tradition, Rothbard was painfully aware of his predecessors flaws. He critiqued a point of economic error that they both shared, “…it was their [Tucker's, Spooner's] adoption of the labor theory of value that convinced them that, rent, interest and profit were payments exploitatively extracted from the worker.” (129)

Rothbard’s remedy for this weakness, his attempt to correct the errors of the past century so that they did not cripple the 20th century world view, is embodied in the last essay of Egalitarianism. It is entitled “Ludwig von Mises and the Paradigm for Our Age.” He explained, “There is, in the body of thought known as ‘Austrian economics,’ a scientific explanation of the workings of the free market (and of the consequences of government intervention in that market) which individualist anarchists could easily incorporate into their political and social Weltanschauung.” (133) This was the point at which radical civil liberties embraced the free market and became virtually indistinguishable: that is, economic and civil liberties became points on the same continuum of freedom.

The Scholarly Moral Case for Liberty – The Ethics of Liberty

Egalitarianism was a popular work. In the Preface to The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard continues the theme that dominated his life in a more scholarly fashion. He wrote, “All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty. For it has been my conviction that, while each discipline has its own autonomy and integrity,in the final analysis all sciences and disciplines of human action are interrelated, and can be integrated into a ‘science’ or discipline of individual liberty.”11

Through The Ethics of Liberty – a scholarly work in political philosophy – Rothbard laid the theoretical underpinning of liberty. He believed, “The key to the theory of liberty is the establishment of the rights of private property, for each individual’s justified sphere of free action can only be set forth if his rights of property are analyzed and established.” (vi)

Thus, Part I of Ethics comprehensively deals with the importance of Natural Law, which has long been considered the moral underpinning of private property. It includes Natural Law’s relationship to reason and science; its irreconcilability with positive law; and, its role as the foundation for natural rights.

Part II continues in a logical flow from Natural Law into “A Theory of Liberty.” Here, Rothbard began by using what he called “one of the most commonly derided constructions of classical economic theory” – the Robinson Crusoe model. This approach of considering man in isolation has been widely criticized, most prominently by Karl Marx and his followers who believe that man cannot exist as human being qua human without socialization. But Rothbard insisted that it was necessary “to isolate man as against nature, thus gaining clarity by abstracting at the beginning frontier-personal relations.” Moreover, Rothbard did not believe Crusoe lost his essential humanity by being in isolation. For example, Crusoe still judged the goods he had – e.g. coconuts – according to marginal utility. He also had to produce before he could consume and used human judgment (reason) to survive.

The Crusoe example facilitated clear, unambiguous analysis. In isolation, Rothbard contended that Crusoe “owns his body; his mind is free to adopt whatever ends it wishes, and to exercise his reason in order to discover what ends he should choose, and to learn the recipes for employing the means at hand to attain them….” (p.31) Then, Friday is introduced “to show how the addition of other persons affects the discussion.” (29) The discussion being ‘man in society,’ man in relation to other human beings. Friday is introduced in order to go beyond the economic principle of production to the principle of exchange, both economic and psychological. Yet the opportunity for exchange introduces the possibility of Friday exerting force on Crusoe, or vice versa.

In other words, a desert island offers absolutely unbridled individual freedom to Crusoe. In society, he always confronts the threat of possible violence. Why would he run such a risk? To Rothbard, the answer is clear. “The process of exchange enables man to ascend from primitive isolation to civilization: it enormously widens his opportunities…” (p.36) Moreover, society maximizes Crusoe’s choices if only because many of his decisions, and some of the most important ones he could make, require the presence of other people, e.g. the decision to have a child.

The primary concern of man, therefore, should not lie in how to remain in isolation, but in how to interrelate in a manner that maximizes opportunity: that is, in a manner that minimizes the possibility of violence. To Rothbard, the key lies in two concepts that are at war with each other – property and crime. Indeed, Rothbard attempts to define property in large part as a means by which to define crime. Crime is viewed as the violation of property rights and, thus, the usurpation of another person’s opportunities. In Chapter 9 of Part II, entitled “Property and Criminality,” Rothbard concludes, “We thus have a theory of the rights of property: That every man has an absolute right to the control and ownership of his own body, and to unused land resources that he finds and transforms….We also have a theory of criminality: A criminal is someone who aggresses against such property.” [Emphasis in original] (p.59)

Property v. Crime as the defining themes of civil society were a refinement on and a subcategory of Rothbard’s overriding theme of Liberty v. Power. Having defined these concepts as the essentials of society, Rothbard built upon them as a foundation to address property and criminality as it affects such issues as land, children, animal rights, self-defense, and the theory of contracts. Then, Rothbard proceeded – as he inevitably did – to an analysis of the State as the penultimate foe of Liberty.

Part III of Ethics is entitled “The State Versus Liberty.” Chapter 22, located within this section, is entitled “The Nature of the State.” The chapter begins, “So far in this book we have developed a theory of liberty and property rights, and have outlined the legal code that would be necessary to defend those rights. What of government, the State?” Rothbard pointed to the many essential functions performed by the State, such as fire fighting and postal delivery, then asked, “But this in no way demonstrates that only the State can perform such functions, or, indeed, that it performs them even passably well.” (p.161)

The stage was set to present the concluding two sections, the first of which is entitled, “Modern Alternative Theories of Liberty.” He wrote, “Having presented our theory of liberty and property rights, and discussed the inherent role of the State vis a vis liberty, we turn in this part of the work to a discussion and critique of several leading alternative theories of liberty brought forth in the modern world, by those who are very roughly in the free-market, or classical liberal, tradition. Whatever the other merits of these theories, they will be seen to provide a flawed and inadequate foundation for a systematic theory of liberty and the rights of the individual.” (199)

The last section of Ethics proclaims itself to be moving “Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty.” This is different than moving toward a strategy – a blueprint – for liberty. Instead, it is a discussion of the methodology which should be used in order to create a blueprint appropriate to liberty. To Rothbard, “Libertarianism…is a philosophy seeking a policy,” and it was “the responsibility of philosophy to deal with strategy.” It is precisely the goal of moving “from the present…state of affairs to…consistent liberty” that impelled Rothbard to lay such a meticulous foundation of theory. (p.253)

Having laid the necessary groundwork, however, Rothbard does not plunge into a specific vision of liberty. He pauses to carefully establish the boundaries of such a vision. Liberty, he declared, is not necessarily the highest value of libertarians: it is merely the highest political value….politics being the form of ethical philosophy that deals with the role of violence in human society.

Always building on a former insight or argument, Rothbard then asked, “If liberty is to be the highest political end, then this implies that liberty is to be pursued in the most effacious means,….” He sets up the parameters by which a sincere libertarian must abide to achieve Liberty. He writes, “This means that the libertarian must be an abolitionist, i.e., he must wish to achieve the goal of liberty as rapidly as possible.” Abolitionism, then, was a key to the policy of libertarianism. Absolute consistency was another. “[A] strategy for liberty must not include any means which undercut or contradict the end itself…” (p.255-256) The rejection of utilitarian arguments in favor of the moral grounding provided by natural law was also part of the policy of liberty.

Rothbard’s implementation of the “policy” of libertarianism to specific issues was scattered, in large measure, throughout hundreds of articles. It was also expressed in the powerful For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, which is probably the work best known to libertarians. It also is to be found in the subtext of his sweeping four volume analysis of the American colonies and revolution from 1620-1780, entitled Conceived in Liberty (1975-1979). There, institutions evolve and one sees both the ennobling and the corruption of principles through human endeavor.

I have undoubtedly slighted many aspects of Rothbard’s contribution to the literature of liberty. The fault lies in Rothbard himself for having achieved so much in so many areas. For a more encompassing sense of his legacy, I recommend the chronology. For a focusing of his legacy, it is useful to quote Rothbard himself in a passage that could apply to virtually any of his writings. In doing so, I reiterate part of the first sentence of this essay:

“My own basic perspective on the history of man…is to place central importance on the great conflict which is eternally waged between Liberty and Power…. I see liberty of the individual…as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and science, economic prosperity…. I see history as centrally as race and conflict between ‘social power’ – the productive consequences of voluntary interactions among men – and state power.”12

A Personal Note

Before closing, I want to render a sense of something that history books will not capture and future generations may not understand: namely, the profound and benevolent impact of Murray Rothbard’s charisma on young scholars. Although reprints of his work will display the stunning breadth of his scholarship, they will give no clue as to the humor that made his listeners literally laugh for hours in after-conference sessions and gatherings at his home. When people finally walked away from Murray – reluctant to leave a world in which ideas were so much fun – they scattered to libraries and typewriters to research and write up the articles he had inspired. Murray Rothbard believed that ideas mattered. He infused you with that belief. I still hear his voice – admittedly a bit squawky – insisting that a certain insight was “key! it’s key to the issue!,” and admonishing me to write it up.

Murray had a habit of sitting with his right arm draped over his head, the elbow resting about five inches above ear level. I remember walking into a room where Murray was holding court for three young men who sat attentively before him, lined up on the couch. Each one had his right arm draped over his head. Not one realized they were mimicking him. A whole generation of libertarian theorists wanted to be Murray Rothbard. We adopted his slang terms, his gestures, his eccentricities… hopefully some of his intellectual magic has rubbed off as well.
1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, Volume Two (Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y., 1975), p.9.
2. Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Revised Editor (Fox & Wilkes, San Francisco, 1994), p.321.
3. By saying this, I do not demean the contributions of pioneering libertarians, such as Karl Hess or Leonard Reed, who infused their own unique radicalism into the movement. I mean only to say that modern libertarianism is an identifiable structure of interconnected beliefs, and Rothbard was the first theorist to make those connections complete.
4. Murray N. Rothbard, “Introduction,” Egalitarianism As a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays. (Washington, D.C.: Libertarian Review Press, 1974) p.ix-x.
5. Ibid, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty, p.33.
6. Ibid, Egalitarianism, p.4.
7. As quoted by Rockwell, Murray N. Rothbard: A Legacy of Liberty.
8. Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Murray N. Rothbard: A Legacy of Liberty.
9. Ibid.
10. “Introduction”, Egalitarianism, v.
11. Murray Rothbard. Ethics of Liberty. Atlantic Highland, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982, v.
12. Murray N. Rothbard. Conceived in Liberty, Volume II. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1975, pp.9-10

Once to every man and nation, comes a moment to decide;
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

Rothbard chose the good, and never wavered. While he lived, many students and followers rightly saw in his thought the culmination of everything magnificent about the liberal intellectual tradition. He improved the tradition by attaching it firmly to private property and systematically showing that society can thrive without ever compromising that principle. He further eliminated the last vestiges of “social contract” theory from the liberal idea—among a hundred other enduring contributions.

After his death, however, the question of his legacy was not only on the minds of his friends but also of his enemies. Rothbard’s position in favor of universal rights, free trade, private property, peace, and decentralized legal institutions is consistent (once you have thought about it and understood it) but it still cuts across the state-supported grain of American political life, in which you are permitted to reject one form of statism only insofar and as you are willing to embrace another.

And thus did his detractors on the left and right regard him as a dangerous corruptor of youth and a destabilizer of established political tradition. Even beyond his political influence, debates raged about his economic theories, his historiographic reconstructions, his philosophical innovations, and his political strategizing. Moderate classical liberals accused Rothbard of the same error of which Mises was accused: discrediting the principle of liberty by being so uncompromising and consistent in its application.

Rothbard’s enemies on all sides had hoped that his name and work would slip away into the darkness of the past, and the new generation would be spared what conservatives have long considered to be his anarchist poison, what left-liberals have considered his reactionary pro-capitalist fulminations, and what moderate liberals considered to be his baneful extremism.

A recent academic paper, for example, grants that most “leaders of the modern libertarian movement” were once Rothbardians, but then claims, without a shred of evidence, that ”Rothbard’s influence declined during his lifetime and after his death.”

As with painting, literature, and music, of course, it takes time to sort out the passing fads in intellectual life from the enduring classics. What would happen to Rothbard, also known in his lifetime as “The State’s Greatest Living Enemy” and “Mr. Libertarian”? Would his intellectual legacy be mainly in the area of politics, and his demonstration of the moral and practical merits of the stateless society? Or would it be his economic contributions—his elucidation and extension of the Misesian paradigm—that would survive?

Might he be mainly known as a historian of the Colonial period, an area in which specialists have long considered his four-volume history to be a masterful narrative treatment? Or was his reputation so closely connected to his famous personality—fiery and fierce as an intellectual yet warm and joyful as a man—that his name would fade after his death?

After ten years, we have enough of a picture to say that Rothbard’s influence lives and thrives not only as it did during his lifetime but ever more so. Those who hoped Rothbardianism would wane should be sorely disappointed, while those who have always appreciated his contributions should celebrate. What’s more, that legacy covers every field in which he worked: economic theory and policy, American history, philosophy, and even political strategy or organizing.

Everyone who has written about him ends up writing lists of research areas, book titles, subjects covered, contributions made. It is, as David Gordon once remarked, like writing about four or five of the greatest minds you have ever encountered except that they are all rolled into one person. And each of these scholars all wrapped up in one man has received vast discussion and notoriety since his death.

Right now, the New York Timesbestseller list features a book on American history by Thomas Woods, whose studies on the Colonial Period, the Progressive Era, and the Great Depression, are based almost entirely on Rothbard’s own. This book that has created such an intellectual storm is Rothbardian through and through. The same can be said of Thomas DiLorenzo’s bestselling works. Among books from the academic world, the ten years since Rothbard’s death has seen many new studies of his thought and works of history and economics based on his thought: Chris Sciabarra’s Total Freedom, Hans Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed, Hunt Tooley’s The Western Front, Robert Higgs’s Against Leviathan, William Watkins’ Reclaiming the American Revolution, among many others in print and in process.

His books have taken on new life. Ethics of Liberty has come out in a new English edition and been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, French, Czech, and Chinese. Man, Economy, and State has appeared in Spanish and Chinese. His History of Economic Thought has appeared in Spanish. Just last week a beautiful Polish edition of For A New Liberty appeared in our offices. His articles appear in collections in French, Italian, and Russian. His Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature has been reprinted and widely distributed, as has America’s Great Depression (with a new introduction by Paul Johnson). By our rough count, a dozen new dissertations dealing with his thought have been written, and six additional ones based on his historical investigations.

 The Mises Institute put together A History of Money and Banking in the United States, which was built from articles obscure and unpublished. It now serves as an Austrian alternative to the Friedman monetary history. The Irrepressible Rothbard (ed. Rockwell) has appeared. Justin Raimondo has written a biography (Enemy of the State) that dispenses with many myths surrounding his life and work.

The Scholars Edition of Man, Economy, and State is out, with its wonderful integration of Power and Market (which has been separately published in many languages) which had been excised from the original edition. The book has sold several times as many copies since his death as sold in the 30 years after its initial publication. It is now used in classrooms (graduate and undergraduate) around the world, including in China, where the translation (along with another of America’s Great Depression) are good sellers. We have commissioned Study Guides on Man, Economy, and State, and organized and maintained a huge archive of material. We have worked to make available his work online in two archives, one at Mises.org and another at LewRockwell.com. 

Our offices daily receive requests for reprint and translation rights to such works as “What Has Government Done to Our Money?” and such articles as “Anatomy of the State” and “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty.” Mises.org cannot keep up with the requests to put his work online, and every new piece that appears generates new citations, requests for reprints, and ever more discussions. His essays on methodology (such as “The Mantle of Science“) and his critiques of central planning (such as “The Fallacy of the Public Sector“) have achieved all new levels of attention.

Never-before published pieces, such as his critique of Karl Polanyi, have drawn the attention of Polanyi experts, who are amazed to discover such a penetrating analysis. His memo on Catholic social teaching, never before published, stunned experts within this field for its insight. Within some sectors of the left, he is known mainly as the expert on the political thought of Etienne de La Boetie, and among Burke scholars, Rothbard is known as the leading advocate of the literal interpretation of Burke’s “Vindication of the Natural Society” (a piece still in play, though written in 1958!).

Even short memos on particular topics are finding new publications outlets. Given how the blogosphere works, when Rothbard articles appear on this site, commentators treat them as if they were written yesterday, and react to them hotly and emotionally.

Rothbard died just as his huge History of Economic Thought appeared. As a major reconstruction of the history of ideas, many aspects of his ideas have been debated and cited, including his revision of Adam Smith’s contribution, his elucidation of Marxian theory, his revision of the British banking controversies, and his extended treatment of the preclassicals. The volumes were huge sellers even at the publisher’s outrageously high price of $125 per volume (the Mises Institute is working toward a low-priced reprint). Agree or disagree with his interpretation, not one reviewer has suggested that his treatment of this subject is anything less than magisterial.

Or consider scholarly citations. Given how such citations are used for academic logrolling and faculty placement, it is difficult to maintain a steady supply of such citations after a scholar has died. And there are certainly no academic points to be won by citing a radical thinker such as Rothbard in the mainstream journals. And yet, as measured by the Social Science Citation Index, Rothbard’s number has not only not fallen; it has actually risen in the ten years following his death to be higher than in the last ten years of his life. (Most recent journals include Public Administration and Development, Zeitschrift Fur Soziologie, Papers in Regional Science, Georgetown Law Review, Journal of the Early Republic, Canadian Journal of Economics, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Economic Inquiry, History of Political Economy, etc. )

The same is true within JSTOR, Google Scholar, or any other index you can name. And who can even begin to sort through the 83,500 references to Murray Rothbard generated by a plain Google web search? Even a quick Google News generates a citation from Bloomberg and a denunciation at FrontPageMag, which is fitting because Rothbard wrote for the newspapers from his earliest student years until his death (his last article was an attack on Newt Gingrich as a statist sellout).

This doesn’t include the daily commentary on Mises.org (the #1 institutional economics site in the world) or LewRockwell.com (the #1 libertarian site in the world), both of which deal with Rothbardian thought nearly every day, or the many spinoff sites around the web. Then there are the teaching programs, such as the Mises University, for which there are far more qualified applications than can be accepted. It is essentially a Misesian-Rothbardian program of intensive education in all aspects of economic science. And there is the Austrian Scholars Conference, which features more than 60 new papers in a program format based entirely on a model pioneered by Rothbard.

The Mises Institute has every incentive to work toward assuring Rothbard’s place in the history of ideas. The journals he founded continue to break new ground, and his many students are hard at work defending and extending the Rothbardian paradigm. Even his strategic insights assist us daily in navigating complicated political terrain in which the main enemy shifts from leftist egalitarianism to rightist militarism and back again. He showed how to support liberty without compromise, whether it means opposing welfare or warfare, or defending the right not to be taxed or drafted.  

But the task of forging a legacy cannot be accomplished through publishing, commissioning, and promoting alone. A body of ideas must engage the minds of students and teachers, and intellectually curious people of all sorts. Promotional efforts cannot substitute for the compelling power of truth itself, as discerned by individual readers. For that reason, we knew that our job should consist not in promotion as such but merely using every means we had to make his thought available. The rest would take care of itself. That’s how we looked at it, and we have not been disappointed.

So much of our work, ‘ours’ in the broadest sense of the global Austro-libertarian movement, presupposes the corpus of Rothbard’s work. And yet we have so much yet to do. Our Rothbard archive includes more letters than seem humanly possible to write in a lifetime. We have unpublished manuscripts. Many essays have fallen out of print and need to be brought back. As it is, we can barely keep up the publication schedule. We have put up many audio files, including short clips and long speeches, but there are many more that need to be uploaded.

Students in the Rothbardian tradition need support. We need funds for training and for establishing an endowment and for providing research chairs. We won’t accept government money, we won’t work on contract for any special interest, and we cannot count on large corporate backing. Whatever success the Rothbardian perspective enjoys in the future will not be due to subsidies but to the power of truth.

But what are the prospects for success? Let Rothbard speak:

In the broadest and longest-run sense, libertarianism will win eventually because it and only it is compatible with the nature of man and of the world. Only liberty can achieve man’s prosperity, fulfillment, and happiness. In short, libertarianism will win because it is true, because it is the correct policy for mankind, and truth will eventually out. . . . We now have that systematic theory; we come, fully armed with our knowledge, prepared to bring our message and to capture the imagination of all groups and strands in the population. All other theories and systems have clearly failed: socialism is in retreat everywhere . . . ; liberalism has bogged us down in a host of insoluble problems; conservatism has nothing to offer but sterile defense of the status quo. Liberty has never been fully tried in the modern world; libertarians now propose to fulfill the American dream and the world dream of liberty and prosperity for all mankind.

And so, to dear Murray, our friend and mentor, the vice president of the Mises Institute, the scholar who gave us guidance and the gentleman who showed us how to find joy in confronting the enemy and advancing truth, the staff and scholars of the Institute offer this tribute, alongside the millions who have been drawn to his ideas. May his works always be available to all who care to learn about liberty and do their part to fight for the cornerstone of civilization itself. May his legacy endure forever and may we all become happy warriors for the cause of liberty.