[Rothbard Memorial Lecture, Austrian Scholars Conference 2006]

What an honor and a privilege it is for me to be delivering the Rothbard Memorial Lecture, here in the Mises Institute, the world center of Rothbardian thought. When I was first reading Murray Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty back in my college days, and arguing the merits of Rothbard's title-transfer theory of contract with my roommates (yeah, we were pretty geeky), I certainly didn't foresee that I would one day have the opportunity to pay tribute to him in such a venue.

But I'm also struck, and a bit saddened, at the thought that, as far as I know, I'm the first Rothbard Memorial Lecturer never to have met Rothbard personally. That's not only a personal regret, but also a somber reminder that the era when everyone in the libertarian movement knew Murray Rothbard is passing.

Yet "somber" hardly seems an appropriate word to use in any connection with Rothbard. Looking through the Rothbard archives I came across his fourth-grade teacher's report from 1936. His teacher wrote: "Murray seems to be so exceedingly happy that it is sometimes difficult to control his activities in the class. He must develop a more controlled behavior in the group." By all accounts, he never changed.

Tonight I want to talk about an essay that Rothbard wrote just over forty years ago, an essay that had an enormous impact on my own intellectual development. In 1965 Rothbard published "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," the keynote editorial in the first issue of a magazine he'd just founded, also called Left & Right — the forerunner of his later Libertarian Forum.[1] (By the way, the complete runs of both Left & Right and Libertarian Forum are available in all their fascinating glory on Mises.org.)[2] Written during the early years of the Vietnam War, as the New Left was emerging and the old coalition between libertarians and conservatives was beginning to fray, Rothbard's article placed the libertarian movement in a historical context, tracing its past and possible future, and called on libertarians to gain a better self-understanding, and consequently to rethink their political affiliations and alliances.

Let me begin by placing Rothbard's "Left and Right" in conversation with a piece published by the great classical liberal Herbert Spencer over eighty years earlier, titled "The New Toryism."[3] The two articles might initially seem antithetical: Spencer was warning libertarians against the Left, and opening the door to an alliance with elements on the Right, while Rothbard was warning libertarians against the Right and recommending an alliance with elements on the Left. Moreover, Rothbard explicitly names Spencer as having contributed to the ideological confusion he is complaining about. But in a wider sense one can see Rothbard's concerns in "Left and Right" as a logical development of Spencer's in "The New Toryism."

Writing in 1884, Spencer maintained that "[m]ost of those who now pass as Liberals, are Tories of a new type." To defend this claim, he undertakes to remind us "what the two political parties originally were."

Dating back to an earlier period than their names, the two political parties at first stood respectively for two opposed types of social organization, broadly distinguishable as the militant and the industrial — types which are characterized, the one by the régime of status … and the other by the régime of contract…. [T]hese two are definable as the system of compulsory cooperation and the system of voluntary cooperation. The typical structure of the one we see in an army formed of conscripts, in which the units in their several grades have to fulfil commands under pain of death, and receive food and clothing and pay, arbitrarily apportioned; while the typical structure of the other we see in a body of producers or distributors, who severally agree to specified payments in return for specified services, and may at will, after due notice, leave the organization if they do not like it.

The Tories, then, had traditionally been the advocates of hierarchy and compulsion, while the Liberals had traditionally championed voluntary association and free exchange.

In "Left and Right," Rothbard makes the same identification:

[T]here developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies … one was liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the Old Order…. Political ideologies were polarized, with liberalism on the extreme "left," and conservatism on the extreme "right," of the ideological spectrum.

And Rothbard is surely right in thinking that what we now call free-market libertarianism was originally a left-wing position. The great liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat sat on the left side of the French national assembly, with the anarcho-socialist Proudhon. Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing — feminism, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers and consumers against big business — were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free-market radicals.

So what happened to the political spectrum? This is the question that Spencer and Rothbard, from their different historical vantage-points, are each trying to answer. The version of the question that Spencer is addressing is: how did the Left become associated with statism? Rothbard addresses that question as well, but his primary focus is on the question: how did free-market libertarianism become associated with the Right?

Let's begin with Spencer's diagnosis:

How is it that Liberalism, getting more and more into power, has grown more and more coercive in its legislation? … How are we to explain this spreading confusion of thought which has led it, in pursuit of what appears to be public good, to invert the method by which in earlier days it achieved public good? … [W]e may understand the kind of confusion in which Liberalism has lost itself: and the origin of those mistaken classings of political measures which have misled it — classings, as we shall see, by conspicuous external traits instead of by internal natures. For what, in the popular apprehension and in the apprehension of those who effected them, were the changes made by Liberals in the past? They were abolitions of grievances suffered by the people…. [T]his was the common trait they had which most impressed itself on men's minds…. [T]he welfare of the many came to be conceived alike by Liberal statesmen and Liberal voters as the aim of Liberalism. Hence the confusion. The gaining of a popular good, being the external conspicuous trait common to Liberal measures in earlier days (then in each case gained by a relaxation of restraints), it has happened that popular good has come to be sought by Liberals, not as an end to be indirectly gained by relaxations of restraints, but as the end to be directly gained. And seeking to gain it directly, they have used methods intrinsically opposed to those originally used.

In short, Spencer's analysis is that liberals came to conceptualize liberalism in terms of its easily identifiable effects (benefits for the masses) rather than in terms of its essential nature (laissez-faire), and so began to think that any measure aimed at the end of benefits for the masses must count as liberal, whether pursued by the traditional liberal means of laissez-faire or by its opposite, the traditional Tory means of governmental compulsion. In short, liberalism became the pursuit of liberal ends by Tory means.

In "Left and Right," Rothbard offers a similar analysis of state socialism:

Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the "left" of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the-road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the-road because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means…. Socialism, like liberalism and against conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc.

This idea that libertarians and state socialists disagree about means rather than ends is also advanced by Spencer's contemporary Gustave de Molinari, the founder of free-market anarchism. In an 1848 "Letter to Socialists" Molinari wrote:

We are adversaries, and yet the goal which we both pursue is the same. What is the common goal of economists [i.e., classical liberals] and socialists? Is it not a society where the production of all the goods necessary to the maintenance and embellishment of life shall be as abundant as possible, and where the distribution of these same goods among those who have created them through their labor shall be as just as possible? … Only we approach this goal by different paths…. Why do you refuse to follow the path of liberty alongside us? … If you became certain that you had been mistaken as to the true cause of the evils which afflict society and the means of remedying them … you would come over to us.[4]

But what brought about, among those who sought liberal ends, this tendency to substitute conservative for liberal means? Is it merely, as Spencer supposes, the natural human tendency of "[u]ndeveloped intellectual vision" to classify phenomena according to "external resemblances" instead of "intrinsic structures"? Rothbard suggests an additional factor: "the abandonment of natural rights and 'higher law' theory for utilitarianism"; Rothbard maintains that only a theory that condemns aggression as inherently unjust, as opposed to merely inexpedient, can serve as "a radical base outside the existing system from which to challenge the status quo," and provide "a sense of necessary immediacy to the libertarian struggle." To this we might add that only a non-utilitarian theory can make a principled distinction between negative and positive rights, since for the utilitarian all that matters is the final result, and not whether it came about through removing constraints or adding them. Since Spencer was himself a utilitarian of sorts, it's no surprise that he did not identify this factor.

A further fatal tendency within liberalism, Rothbard adds, was the conversion of Spencer and other like-minded liberals to a doctrine of evolutionary gradualism, whereby "thousands of years of infinitely gradual evolution" would ultimately lead to "the next supposedly inevitable stage of individualism," a process which no agitation could accelerate. This led to the abandonment of liberalism as "a fighting, radical creed" in favor of "a weary, rear-guard action against the growing collectivism of the late nineteenth century."

Hence those with an orientation toward activism were led to abandon the old libertarian form of liberalism for the more energetic and proactive state-socialist version, while those liberals who resisted the slide toward state-socialism found themselves drifting toward the pessimistic and reactionary outlook of traditionalist conservatism. A new political spectrum, or a new way of thinking about the political spectrum, was beginning to form: one with state-socialism on the left and conservatism on the right, with former libertarians gravitating toward one side or the other according to temperament.

For Rothbard, the things-won't-get-better-for-a-long-while-yet gradualism of the evolutionary liberals matched all too well the things-keep-getting-worse pessimism of the conservatives; part of the motivation for the liberals' "weary, rear-guard action" was the conviction that the trend of history, at least for the foreseeable future, lay with state socialism. But Rothbard thinks such pessimism is based on a misunderstanding of economics and of history. State socialism is doomed, because

everywhere the masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise of freedom and everywhere the various regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals…. [O]nly 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. Laissez-faire and the free market become more and more evidently necessary as an industrial system develops; radical deviations cause breakdowns and economic crises. This crisis of statism becomes particularly dramatic and acute in a fully socialist society; and hence the inevitable breakdown of statism has first become strikingly apparent in the countries of the socialist (that is, communist) camp. For socialism confronts its inner contradiction most starkly. Desperately, it tries to fulfill its proclaimed goals of industrial growth, higher standards of living for the masses, and eventual withering away of the State and is increasingly unable to do so with its collectivist means. Hence the inevitable breakdown of socialism…. Communist countries, therefore, are increasingly and ineradicably forced to desocialize and will, therefore, eventually reach the free market.

Yes, that's Rothbard in 1965, predicting the fall of communism 25 years later.

Spencer ends his essay on "The New Toryism" by expressing some uncertainty about the prospects for a libertarian-conservative alliance:

A new species of Tory may arise without disappearance of the original species…. [W]hile Liberals have taken to coercive legislation, Conservatives have not abandoned it. Nevertheless, it is true that the laws made by Liberals are so greatly increasing the compulsions and restraints exercised over citizens, that among Conservatives who suffer from this aggressiveness there is growing up a tendency to resist it…. So that if the present drift of things continues, it may by and by really happen that the Tories will be defenders of liberties which the Liberals, in pursuit of what they think popular welfare, trample under foot.

Spencer himself was evidently willing to give the conservatives a try, for he joined in the activities of the Liberty and Property Defense League, a coalition of laissez-faire liberals and traditionalist conservatives. This sort of fusionism foreshadowed the way "pro-market" thinkers would view themselves throughout much of the 20th century.

But for Rothbard, "Spencer's tired shift 'rightward' in strategy soon became a shift rightward in theory as well." And many of Spencer's libertarian contemporaries agreed. The individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, for example, wrote:

Liberty welcomes and criticises in the same breath the series of papers by Herbert Spencer on "The New Toryism"…. They are very true, very important, and very misleading…. I begin to be a little suspicious of him. It seems as if he had forgotten the teachings of his earlier writings, and had become a champion of the capitalistic class. It will be noticed that in these later articles, amid his multitudinous illustrations … of the evils of legislation, he in every instance cites some law passed, ostensibly at least, to protect labor, alleviate suffering, or promote the people's welfare. He demonstrates beyond dispute the lamentable failure in this direction. But never once does he call attention to the far more deadly and deep-seated evils growing out of the innumerable laws creating privilege and sustaining monopoly. You must not protect the weak against the strong, he seems to say, but freely supply all the weapons needed by the strong to oppress the weak. He is greatly shocked that the rich should be directly taxed to support the poor, but that the poor should be indirectly taxed and bled to make the rich richer does not outrage his delicate sensibilities in the least. Poverty is increased by the poor laws, says Mr. Spencer. Granted; but what about the rich laws that caused and still cause the poverty to which the poor laws add?[5]

Here Tucker is perhaps too harsh on Spencer, who opposed pro-business legislation to the end of his days. All the same, it is undeniably true that in his later life Spencer focused much more of his critical ire on governmental subsidies and