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Review by
Mark Webster
A few years ago at the Kentuckian Libertarian Party convention, a
speaker asked the audience to write down what two books had most
influenced their becoming Libertarians.
I wrote down two books by Murray Rothbard, which I had read in the
early 1980’s: For A New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty.
When I discovered the biography of Rothbard to be reviewed here at
the Louisville Free Public Library, I
jumped at the chance to
learn more about Rothbard.
Rothbard was born in the Bronx, New York in 1936.
His relatives were slightly left wing Jewish emigrants from Poland.
His father, to whom Murray was intensely loyal, was more of a right
wing secularist who was determined to become more American than native
Americans. He admired science
so much that he gave his son the middle name of Newton.
Rothbard did poorly in public school but after transferring to a
private grade school in Staten Island, he excelled in academics the rest
of his life. After attending
high school in Manhattan, he went on to Columbia University, where he
eventually received his Ph.D. in economics, after completing his
dissertation on the Panic of 1819.
As the result of his study of Frank Chodorov’s Taxation Is
Robbery and Ludwig Von Mises’ Human Action, Rothbard became a
libertarian. As an analyst at
the Volker Fund, he wrote his first major book, Man, Economy, and State.
For the rest of his life he taught, wrote, and argued about
Libertarianism.
Rothbard became a member of the Libertarian Party in 1973 while
attending the first state convention of the Free Libertarian Party of New
York. His affiliation to the
party was short lived and tumultuous.
He was opposed to Clark in 1980 and Bergland in 1984 but warmly
supported Paul in 1988.
Most of the latter part of his life was devoted to the Ludwig Von
Mises’ Institute, founded by his friend Llewellyn H.Rockwell, Jr.
Oddly enough, along with the billionaire Charles Koch and George
Pearce, he helped found the Cato Institute, which was named by Rothbard
for “Cato,” the psuedonymous author of the series of pre-Revolutionary
pamphlets actually written by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.
In addition, Koch gave Rothbard the finances to write For A New
Liberty.
Three encounters influenced Rothbard’s choice of his lonely path
to isolationism and anti-statism.. As
a young teacher, he attended seminars by Ludwig Von Mises and for the rest
of his life considered himself an “Austrian” economist.
He also was the contemporary of William F. Buckley, with whom he
spent a lifetime of disagreement. Both
Rothbard and Buckley supported Joseph McCarthy, but Rothbard felt
Buckley’s inordinate fear of Soviet Communism justified the rise of the
welfare-warfare state. Last,
he met Ayn Rand in 1954 but could not take her claim of originality
seriously. He came to believe
that Rand was a joyless cult leader who actually feared individualism.
However, Rothbard liked Atlas Shrugged very much.
Raimondo’s biography is not well written.
At time it appears disorganized and repetitive.
However, Raimondo knew Rothbard well and has studied his work
carefully. The highlight of
the book is the seventh chapter, entitled “Capstone.” Here, Raimondo
summarizes the arguments in Rothbard’s two volume
History of Economic Thought.
Rothbard is more of a humanistic economist who explores in detail
pre-Adam Smith economists beginning with the early Greeks.
Rothbard does something of a reverse Max Weber to argue the Catholic
origins of Capitalism. According
to Rothbard, pre-Smithian Continental Catholic economists “emphasized
consumption as the goal of production and consumer utility and enjoyment
as, at least in moderation, valuable activities and goals.”
According to this view, life is to be enjoyed; economic values are
subjective; and personal liberty is grounded in natural law.
Smithian Calvinist British economists, on the other hand,
“reflected Calvinist insistence on hard work and labor toil as not only
good but a great good in itself, whereas consumer enjoyment is at best a
necessary evil, a mere requisite to labor and production.” In this view,
economic choices are pre-destined; life is nothing but labor; forget
natural law and obey the king. For
Rothbard there is a close link between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, because
the statist agenda of Protestantism coincided with the goals of
“secularist apologists for a secular state.”
Rothbard’s legacy was his building of a cadre of libertarians at
the Cato Institute and the creation of an independent libertarian movement
beyond right and left wings even though he had no vision of any electoral
success. In the end,
Rothbard’s value is that of a scholar. As an
“intellectual entrepreneur he revived the lost “Austrian”(Von Mises)
School of economics. Like
Mencken, he mixed a sense of fun with high seriousness.
He saw himself as an enemy of the state, but in reality was no
threat to any state.
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