How Rothbard, a Leading Voice of the Austrian School, Defended Human Freedom

Even if you have never heard of Rothbard, his life, his ideas, and his spirit will pull you in... This neglected book recreates the intellectual history of the postwar years while telling the story of what Rothbard contributed. The author watched Rothbard's thinking evolve at first hand from the 1970s onward, and to read the book is to stand in the middle of those exhilarating arguments. —Llewellyn Rockwell

About the Author:

Justin Raimondo (b. 1951), American writer and journalist, senior fellow at the Center for Libertarian Studies and the Randolph Bourne Institute, contributing editor at The American Conservative, and editorial director of Antiwar.com. Early on he studied Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. He joined the Libertarian Party of the United States in 1973 and worked alongside Rothbard for years, deeply influenced by him.

His main books include Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, Colin Powell and the Power Elite, Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans, and The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection.

Excerpt from the Book:

Introduction

It is not easy to sum up an ordinary person's life and work in one sentence, or in one book; even a fairly thorough biography cannot capture the full complexity of an unremarkable man. So how do we sum up the life and work of Rothbard, who wrote 28 books and more than a thousand papers? And that leaves aside his theory as a whole, which built a vast intellectual system covering not only economics and political economy but philosophy, ethics, history, and social thought in its broadest sense.

Human beings are tangled, mysterious, various; their personalities and motives come wrapped in so many layers that it is hard to see what they are made of. This is the problem every biographer faces. But a very few people hold to one style all their lives — an inner consistency, an apparently inborn quality of spirit that sets them apart from the start and gives them a clear sense of purpose. That style is the mark of the inventive mind, the mark of thinkers, artists, theorists, and reformers in every field: they do not merely rebel against the existing order, they put forward at the same time their own picture of an ideal one. In short, they embody the living spirit of Lord Acton's classical liberal: to "look to what should be, and disregard what is."

If one had to find a single motto for Rothbard's state of mind, Lord Acton's line would be it. That youthful spirit is the key to how his character and his ideas developed. It is the main theme of his life and work, buried in his style and in his method of thought, and he spelled it out at the end of his most influential political essay, "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty." He closes with a long quotation from Randolph Bourne, the great journalist of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and the conscience of American liberalism:

The young endlessly question everything old and settled — why? What good does it do? When they hear the vague, evasive answers of the defenders, they test these institutions and ideas against their own flesh and blood and their own reasoning spirit, find them foolish, hollow, and harmful, and then overturn them by instinct.

That fresh, clean spirit of rational inquiry — testing old ideas against new evidence, over and over, challenging the most basic assumptions — was Rothbard's own method, and it was a method that always produced results people argued about. He dared to ask the unaskable question: the state — what is it good for? His answer: nothing at all.

"Youth is the yeast that ferments every questioning and testing attitude in the world," Bourne wrote. "Ferment" describes exactly what Rothbard did to the new generation of the freedom movement, a movement that stayed below the surface for years, running on an underground heat he generated almost single-handed. "If the young stop making trouble," Bourne went on, "if they no longer feel disgust at tedious sophistry and footnotes, if they stop insisting that things be seen as they are, society will walk straight into decay and death."

The course of Rothbard's intellectual odyssey — from the Old Right to the New Left and back to the Old Right — was exactly this business of "making trouble." No word fits his activity better: he made trouble not only for statists of every kind but for his closest allies. Setting aside the personal grievances that came with those swings, he did it because he was forever testing against experience the theories he had derived by logic, forever sharpening and refining the theory of liberty, changing tactics as the situation moved. Rothbard was that rare figure who combined the theorist and the intellectual entrepreneur in one man. In the mid-1970s he wrote a book-length memorandum for the inner circle of the libertarian Cato Institute (which is why it was never published), and in it he set out the importance of "entrepreneurial tactical flexibility" and identified the pivotal role of what he called the "ideological entrepreneur." "Because entrepreneurship is in the last analysis an art rather than a science that can be learned by rote, ideological tactics — finding the right line at the right moment — is likewise an entrepreneurial art. And in this field some people are simply better at it than others," Rothbard wrote in his manuscript "Toward a Theory of Libertarian Social Change." "Ludwig von Mises saw that timing is the essence of entrepreneurship" — a spirit that applies not only to the economic realm but to the ideological one.

Rothbard's biographers have rich material to work with: he wrote treatises on a wide range of subjects and left a huge correspondence behind. Anyone tracing the arc of his intellectual development, especially his political thought, has a further treasury to draw on — his writing in periodicals such as Left and Right, Libertarian Forum, and The Rothbard-Rockwell Report. One look at how prolific he was in the press is enough to convince you how successfully he put the principles of the ideological entrepreneur into practice. At every critical moment — every moment when the intellectual enforcers of state power found the public hard to handle and cracks opened in the system — Rothbard's analysis is there, and we can watch him planning how to widen the reach of libertarian ideas. As the conservative movement came under mounting attack from the "New Right" (including its promoters William F. Buckley Jr. and the former Trotskyist theorist James Burnham, both perfectly open about their imperialist creed), Rothbard defended the legacy of the conservative movement, a legacy that had once been the pride of Old Right "isolationists" such as John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, and Colonel Robert McCormick, who opposed Roosevelt's New Deal and America's entry into the war. Rothbard founded Left and Right, a quarterly of libertarian opinion and analysis, just as America was sinking into the Vietnam War, unable to win it and stripped of its moral standing, and just as the first wave of 1960s student revolt was sweeping the country's campuses. Faced with a rising tide of angry young people, he did not pander to their prejudices; he explained, carefully and vividly, where the anger came from — from the tyranny of the centralized national-security machine, which had seeped into the universities and was slowly gathering them into its arms. Well before the New Left went out of fashion, Rothbard had already turned to consolidating the gains of the 1960s, turning them into a movement with a common goal, a body of theory of its own, and its own organizations and institutions. When the Cold War ended and the prophecy of Mises and the Austrian School — that a planned economy must collapse — came true, Rothbard made another turn, returning in a sense to the Old Right of his youth.

Carrying the impatience of Bourne's young person, that drive to get to the bottom of things, Rothbard never stopped challenging conventional thinking, whoever's ground it stood on. What he loved best was hauling the skeletons out of the deepest, darkest closets, correcting the official version of history with new facts and a new way of looking at power. What galled him most was discovering how thickly the two world wars of the 20th century had been wrapped in lies. War is the god that state coercion worships, and opposition to war sat at the center of Rothbard's philosophy, always at the top of his ideological and political agenda. As a supporter of Harry Elmer Barnes, the master of revisionist history on the world wars, he contributed to the festschrift marking Professor Barnes's retirement, and wrote there that "broadly speaking, intellectuals can play, and have always played in history, two mutually exclusive roles: either the independent seeker of truth, or the court favorite." "Court historian" was Barnes's coinage, and Rothbard widened it into "court intellectual" — those who whitewash the plunder, oppression, and killing done by the state and its agents "in exchange for wealth, power, and prestige," that is, to please "the state and its ruling allies."

If anyone was the opposite of the court intellectual, it was Murray Newton Rothbard. His authoritative two-volume An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought makes you wonder how one man could know so much. After all, he spent 35 years teaching at an engineering school that took no particular interest in economics. But that unremarkable post did nothing to stop him from becoming a genuine polymath and a prolific writer of unusual gifts. Even so, what he earned from teaching and writing left him living, at times, close to the bone.

Bourne makes another point that brings Rothbard's psychology sharply to mind: "our elders are always optimistic about the present and pessimistic about the future; the young are pessimistic about the present and full of hope for the future. It is that hope which levers progress forward — perhaps the only lever progress has." The second of these sentiments states Rothbard's view exactly, though Bourne noted that such optimism "may cover a great deal of ground." Rothbard clearly believed the liberal revolutions of the 18th century could not be reversed, yet in "Left and Right" he warned readers that, since human beings are born with free will, it is not enough to stand on the side of truth and right, or to wait for a statist crisis to fall on our heads. We must also expose the state completely for what it is, a lethal parasite, and that takes the right leadership — ideological entrepreneurs with a sharp sense of timing. He was loyal in his thinking to libertarian principle, and, more important, he had a rarer quality, what he himself called "a passion for justice."

In an unpublished strategy memorandum for the leadership of the Cato Institute, Rothbard spoke his mind and vented his frustration with the libertarian movement. In it he insisted that making the victory of liberty the goal mattered above everything else. "This seems self-evident," he wrote, then sighed out his angry bafflement: "but if victory is not the ultimate goal, why bother joining a movement whose goal can never be reached?" He also noticed that some people "treat the libertarian ideal more as an intellectual game," while others catch "a deep pessimism" and assume from the start that the movement cannot win. "Only those who came to libertarianism because they were moved and shaped by [a passion for justice] are capable of making the victory of liberty their primary goal. They see that statism is unjust, and they long to be rid of that glaring injustice as fast as possible."

It was this passion that drove Rothbard. It was not an abstraction for him but a personal creed he felt in his bones. His passion moved many other people too, young people above all. At seminars and conferences they would crowd around him, eager to draw on the endless supply of knowledge he offered. One lanky twenty-year-old student was lucky enough to hear one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century explain Austrian business-cycle theory at 4:30 in the morning, and more than once people had to pull Rothbard bodily out of an intense one-on-one conversation. At academic conferences and political conventions he was always the last to leave, carrying the discussion on afterward in hotel rooms and bars, then heading out late at night to find some diner still open and keep going until dawn.

The young were drawn to Rothbard, and Rothbard was glad to have them; he played the generous host and still kept up a high-quality output of writing. The first reason for his pull was simply how much enthusiasm he had — not only a passion for justice, but a passion for talk, good food, and a good time. His distinctive, full-throated laugh carried right across a room, and a large part of why the young loved him was that he was one of them. Like Lord Acton, Rothbard grew more radical as he aged, and, combined with his stubbornly middle-class tastes and habits, this old-fashioned figure had an extraordinary charm for young people. All of youth's best qualities found an echo in him: its idealism, its fearlessness, its sense that life holds unlimited possibility. Rothbard understood the "secret of life" Bourne was selling, namely —

This fine spirit of youth never fades. The wild years of youth pass, and what should be left is this fine sediment — a rational, powerful, forward-pressing spirit, ready to act. It must be a flexible spirit that keeps growing, open to new ideas and sharply observant of experience. Whoever responds to the world with keen and honest feeling has found the secret of staying young forever, and to stay young forever is to be saved.

That Rothbard chose to quote this passage plainly means it was his ideal picture of the libertarian. Looking back, he even surpassed his own ideal.

Rothbard's spirit did not dim as he aged; it burned harder. In the last decade of his life the Soviet Union — the giant beast that had cast its shadow over American politics for so long — fell at a stroke, to the astonishment of every expert. What followed in America was the wave of what we now call "anti-government" populism, cresting in the Republican Revolution of 1994. That wave reshuffled the right, Buckley-style global interventionism fell from favor, and Rothbard got his chance to do what I believe he had wanted to do all along: go back to the Old Right. Past sixty by then, he broke with many of his supporters, changed his strategic line, and moved into a new social and political setting. Rothbard was loyal to principle without being penned in by dogma, and to his last day he responded eagerly to whatever was going on around him.

In an age when every mediocrity complains about the shortage of "role models," the phrase itself has become rather repellent. But in its original sense it still has value. For a rising new generation of individualists, Rothbard fully deserves the title "role model" in the old-fashioned sense. His life story is not only stirring but instructive — which is the plainest reason I wrote this book.

I should own up here to my own bias: I worked with Rothbard in various capacities for years, committed alongside him to the libertarian movement. We met in 1978, and apart from one break when we were barely in touch, we were friends and political allies for most of the time since. We disagreed often enough, but we worked closely and in step, so I am thoroughly a Rothbardian, and remain one. Still, like Bourne's typical young person, and like Rothbard himself, I dislike "footnotes," so I will not footnote my subject. What follows shows both Rothbard's brilliance and his oddity: optimistic, but despairing now and then; heroic, but often with a touch of Quixote about him. I have no intention of writing an exhaustive biography, though the subject would certainly justify one; my aim is neither to assess Rothbard's ideas (a task beyond me) nor to weave together the events of his life and, at the end of some third volume, extract a pattern from them. What I hope instead is to catch the essence of Rothbard in a book somewhat fuller than a character sketch — not only his ideas but his personality and his historical significance. Readers who do not know the man or his work can treat this book as a way in to one of the most important and most interesting developments in modern intellectual history: Rothbard's system, or paradigm, of pure liberty.

Even the most ordinary life is extremely complicated, which is why biography is such an unwieldy art. Reconstructing a subject and his circumstances, the writer faces an overabundance of material. Building a narrative, the writer runs into the hard problem of what to keep and what to cut. Lean toward keeping and the biography sprawls without a point and bores the reader; cut too hard and you risk sacrificing important facts to a good story, leaving the account skating on the surface.

The complication is especially acute in Rothbard's case. He has so many dimensions that no conventional biography can cover them all without losing depth. A writer's basic job is to tell a story; the problem for Rothbard's biographer is which story to tell.

There is the story of Rothbard the Austrian School theorist. He not only organized and refined the pure free-market economics of Mises and his school, he worked — almost single-handed — to build a beachhead for the Misesian school in the United States.

There is the story of Rothbard the political philosopher. Others had defended private property in the name of justice and prosperity, but Rothbard was the first to see how central private property is to the very concept of human society. He showed not only that a free and prosperous country cannot do without private property, but that the principle of private property must be applied consistently to every field of human activity. The state is the greatest plunderer, and is in essence the chief violator of private property — and therefore, Rothbard concluded, the chief enemy of liberty.

He did not reach that conclusion by armchair speculation alone; it rested on solid historical research, which is another story: Rothbard the historian. His An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought stands on its own, and his several books on the origins of the American Revolution would by themselves establish him as a first-rate historian. Whether writing the history of the Federal Reserve System or arguing that Hoover's interventionist economic policies were the real source of the New Deal, he could always see through official propaganda and fearlessly take apart the modern idea of history as a chronicle written to glorify our leaders.

But there is still another story: Rothbard the observer of politics and culture. He was a scholar of freedom on a level with Mises and Hayek, and he also fought the daily battle of ideas. From the early 1950s to his last days he left behind a mass of political commentary that maps for us the forty-year rising line of a libertarian movement challenging the traditional authorities of both left and right.

His roles as political reporter and political commentator came together naturally, and lead to another important story: Rothbard as the intellectual source of an ideological movement. From the fully armed Old Right to the New Left, through his involvement with the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party, to his renewed closeness to the right after the Cold War, the course of his career shows the pattern of his political conduct clearly: wherever the enemies of war and collectivism stood, so long as they were united and ready to fight, Rothbard stood with them. Rothbard was an idealist, but no worshipper of utopia. He thought the liberty he imagined was entirely achievable and acted accordingly, supporting any popular movement of the moment that opposed state power. He would shift his strategic angle as conditions changed, but from first to last he kept to his principles and practiced them.

Stitching all these stories together seamlessly, into one portrait of the man and his thought, is a job left to Rothbard's biographer, and even the most ambitious writer would find it hard going. Two things make it worth attempting anyway: vanity, and an enormous interest in the subject. I have both.

Scholars will argue for a long time about his contributions to economic thought and political philosophy. Where exactly does Rothbard stand in the history of ideas? I leave the verdict to them. Space being limited, this book is mostly an overall retrospective of his life, told according to my own inclinations. To me he was a scholar and a prolific writer, but more than that a living, breathing man. I hope the book is both illuminating and informative.

Some people wander through books looking for something they do not yet know, perhaps some small clue to the secret and the meaning of human freedom. Very likely they do not understand why freedom is so scarce, especially when everyone claims to love it. If such a reader comes across this book, then in one sense the search has ended; in another it has only begun. A new generation of libertarians has a great deal to gain from Rothbard. If this not-very-thick volume brings more people to understand his social and political thought, it will have done its job.

Cover image: Rothbard. Source: Wikipedia.