From David Perazzoni:
As with libertarians throughout the world, the Italian movement draws inspiration from the thought of Murray N. Rothbard. A stirring gathering was held in Rome on January 27th to honor this champion of liberty ten years after his death.
Istituto Bruno Leoni, a young and bold think tank with a strong libertarian agenda, and Fondazione Ideazione, a long-established foundation which has devoted much attention to Rothbard and libertarianism, organized a conference titled “Total Freedom.” Luigi Marco Bassani, professor at the University of Milan and Fellow of the Mises Institute, and Raimondo Cubeddu, professor at the University of Pisa and a well-known Austrian scholar, were the speakers.
The conference was an unprecedented success: for more than three hours, an audience of about sixty people (politicians, journalists, scholars, students, freedom lovers) listened to the speakers and asked several questions in a thought-provoking discussion. Nicola Iannello, translator of Rothbard’s Nations by Consent, and Anatomy of the State, introduced the panel emphasizing the role played by Rothbard in the struggle for liberty and his influence on the Italian intellectual debate.
His presentation went over the stages of the circulation in this country of Rothbard’s works, an undertaking in which all the lecturers had an important role. Iannello anticipated the forthcoming translation of What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Leonardo Facco Editore, and of America’s Great Depression, by Rubbettino. The first speech was delivered by Luigi Marco Bassani, translator of Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty, and the author of the Introduction to the new Italian edition of For a New Liberty.
January 27th has been instituted as a Memorial Day to commemorate the victims of the Jewish holocaust (the death camp in Auschwitz was liberated on that very day in 1945). Remarking the coincidence of the date, Bassani stressed the fact that Rothbard, himself of Jewish origin, was the most consistent enemy of the ultimate root of the Shoah: the modern State.
In contrast with mainstream interpretations, Rothbard pointed out that mass murder – like the annihilation of millions of Jews – was only made possible by the accumulation of power typical of the political construct that we call the State. Bassani focused on Rothbard’s critique of the State, starting from the philosophical enquiring on whether the recourse to violence against other individuals can ever be allowed. Rothbard’s answer – only in self-defense – underpins his notion of the fundamental illegitimacy of any monopoly of violence, including the one traditionally deemed not only legal, but even moral, efficient, and desirable.
From this premise proceeds the clean and merciless dissection of the character of the State, sweeping away all the preconceived notions about the State and proudly daring to say that, indeed, the Emperor has no clothes. Rothbard boldly asserted that the State not only fails to uphold its promise to protect his citizens, make them more affluent and improve their lives, but is in itself the root cause of every economic failure, inefficiency and inequality.
The closing address was delivered by Raimondo Cubeddu. After a presentation of Rothbard’s thought, Cubeddu explained his relationship with the Austrian School of Economics and the natural law tradition: Rothbard’s querelle with F.A. Hayek, and his quest for a foundation of necessity of liberty that goes beyond the problem of knowledge, tracing its origin in the deeper nature of human being. Above and beyond the relativism of the market process, Rothbard identified natural law and natural rights – life, liberty and property – as the foundation of a free human society. It is from this standpoint that Rothbard challenged the oft-quoted “Hume’s law” (about the impossibility of logically drawing values from facts), overcame the Hayekian theory of diffused knowledge, and grounded the notion of individual liberty on human nature itself. According to Rothbard, the refusal of a market-based free order for human society is a logical fallacy. This point seems to be the same time the most controversial from an epistemological perspective and the most fascinating in Rothbard’s philosophy, and it started off a thought-provoking and passionate debate between the lecturers and the members of the audience.
At the closing of the meeting the establishment of the libertarian “Circolo Bastiat” was announced. The name was chosen for two reasons: it was the same the young Rothbard gave to his own libertarian circle in New York, and the French economist himself is buried in Rome where he died in 1850. The success of the conference was also made possible courtesy of the Italian publishers of some of the works of Rothbard: Liberilibri , Leonardo Facco Editore (), Rubbettino
