Man, Economy, and Liberty

24

Commentator on our Times:
A Quest for the Historical Rothbard

Sheldon L. Richman

Murray Rothbard was once asked for his opinion of a book titled Shirtsleeve Economics: A Commonsense Survey by William A. Paton.1 He wrote that while a good high-school-level economics text was needed, Shirtsleeve Economics alas was not it. He found it badly written, too dependent on quotations, and poor in content. He asked some penetrating questions about Paton’s case for government: “Why should those citizens who prefer to defend themselves by private bodyguards be forced to subscribe to another defense agency against their will? Isn’t this extortion on a large scale?”

He also complained that Paton’s sole concern was economic efficiency. For example, Paton wrote that “we might all support such a program” to fund government by soaking the rich if it would not “impair our productive powers.” Rothbard, paraphrasing the sage Sam Goldwyn, commented, “Kindly include this observer ‘out’ in this ‘we might all’ category.”

Finally, Rothbard flashed that famous wit. Paton wrote that the business cycle was inherent in the market, but embraced it nonetheless on grounds that man “wouldn’t know what to do with himself if thrust into an environment where everything was sweetness and light, and there was no anxiety, no struggle.”

Quipped Rothbard, “Somehow, I would be willing to take my chances.”

What is noteworthy about this is that the review was written June 26, 1952, when Rothbard was a 26-year-old doctoral student at Columbia University.2 The review, written for the internal use of the William Volker Fund, was apparently the first of a few hundred book reviews commissioned of him by the Volker Fund between 1952 and about 1962.3 Rothbard was one of several people regularly asked to comment on books. His colleagues in this activity were Rose Wilder Lane, Frank S. Meyer, Leonard P. Liggio, Henry Hazlitt, Roscoe Pound, and a few others. Rothbard, Lane, and Meyer reviewed the most books, with Rothbard leading the league. His reviews, ranging from less than one page to 15 single-spaced pages and consuming 3 to 15 hours of work, were thorough and written as though they were to be published.

Rothbard later used some of them in the National Review and his old journal Left and Right. Part of the material turned up in other forms, for example, in his book the Ethics of Liberty. But most of the material has never been published.

The Volker Fund originally asked for the reviews to keep tabs on who was doing worthy scholarship within the broad classical liberal tradition. According to Kenneth Templeton, a Volker principal, the National Book Foundation (NBF) was later established because as long as the information was being gathered it might as well be put to better use.4 The NFB was established initially to place books sympathetic to individual liberty into libraries around the country. Templeton said that a common right-wing complaint in the late 1950s was that libraries were not stocking non-leftist books. Volker surveyed libraries and found the charge untrue. Nevertheless, it wanted to help them get the books and also help the publishers. So it went ahead with the NBF. Later, NBF focused on professors, enabling them to get 10 copies of a book without charge.5

The task of the NFB reviewers was to advise whether a book was suitable for distribution. The Volker Fund was interested in many disciplines. This gave Rothbard the chance to review books on a broad spectrum of subjects, including economics, history, philosophy, political theory, psychology, psychiatry, public policy, agriculture, water, ecology, and more. What is interesting about these reviews is not so much whether Rothbard liked a given book or not, but what his reviews reveal of his own beliefs, values, and ideals. Those who know the present Rothbard either personally or through his writing will find the Rothbard of 1952-1962 thoroughly familiar. Looking back through the telescope of 34 years, one is impressed at how steady he is in so many ways, a Rock of Gibraltar—intellectually, philosophically, even stylistically.

This is not to say that his views have not changed at all. In some cases they have, as we shall see. But on matters of bedrock principle, methodology, scholarly commitment, and above all human liberty, he is admirably—refreshingly—steady and uncompromising.

Another thing revealed in these reviews is the breadth and depth of Rothbard’s knowledge. In commenting on books, he routinely showed how authors ignored or neglected important research. He often contrasted a book with others on the same subject. As one would expect, he could do this in economics, but, remarkably, he did it with nearly any subject he wrote about.

It is worth pausing on this point. Here is a man who at an early age had both a broad overview as well as a detailed knowledge of the “humane sciences.” (He had written Man, Economy, and State before he was 34.) Some might have worried back then that he would spread himself too thin and suffer burn-out. By now I presume it is safe to say that this isn’t likely to happen. Undoubtedly, Rothbard pursued such a large scholarly agenda because he loved (and loves) knowledge and liberty, in the service of which his knowledge has always been put.6 But he may have had other reasons. After all, in the 1950s there were not enough libertarians and classical liberals to support a finely drawn division of scholarly labor. Someone as dedicated to liberty as Rothbard would almost inevitably be tempted to do everything. Today, of course, things are different, due in no small part to Murray Rothbard. The freedom movement is fortunate that he had the energy and talent along with the dedication.

Mercifully, he didn’t expect the same versatility of other scholars. When commenting on an economist’s essay about Cordell Hull and the Trade Agreements Program, Rothbard wrote that it omitted “any discussion of the political issues in the Reciprocal Trade program, i.e. the strengthening of arbitrary Federal Executive power as against Congress, which abdicates responsibility, but it is probably too much to expect an economist to discuss such matters.”7 The irony, of course, is that Rothbard, an economist, was discussing such matters.

The values he reveals in these reviews would come as no surprise to any Rothbard watcher. His standards include logic, theoretical soundness, historical accuracy, methodological integrity, forthrightness, solid scholarship, clarity, good writing, and love of liberty. Each of these is important for Rothbard. He often threw roses to an author who scores high in one, despite shortcomings in others. But his final evaluation took all these factors into consideration.

Another noteworthy trait of Rothbard is his ability to stand outside the fashions of the day. Positivism, psychoanalysis, and other shiny theoretical costume jewelry could never lure Rothbard from the straight path he strode.

He was impatient with bad writers. He bemoaned the prevailing “style” forced on Ph.D. dissertation writers and rejoiced when he found one that broke the rules. He was unmerciful when it came to dullness. In his review of Economics and Social Reform by Abram L. Harris,8 Rothbard wrote, “There is one word, I think, that best describes [this book] and that is: pedestrian. Professor Harris performs the quite remarkable feat of writing about some of the most exciting, influential, and mischievous social theorists of the last hundred years, and making the whole thing seem dull as dishwater…. This book is, I am afraid, a sheer waste of print.”

He likewise despised vagueness. “… [T]he book is almost incomprehensible,” he wrote of John R. Commons’s The Legal Foundations of Capitalism.9

The style is abominable, often almost pure gibberish, and what is worse, it becomes apparent that the style is not sui generis but is a reflection of the inherent garble of the idea-content. Take, for example, Page 1 of the book; I defy anyone to make sense out of a single sentence of the page, much less the page as a whole.

He confronted “middle of the roadism,” or wishy-washiness, in a similar way. On O. H. Taylor and his Economics and Liberalism, Rothbard wrote, “If a man is a vacillating lightweight, that is his privilege, but why oh why does such a man become a political economist and political philosopher, and why is he selected to be a full professor at one of our most eminent universities [Harvard], and why are his writings collected in one embarrassing volume?”10

In this connection, Rothbard had a theory that could be called the Rule of Extremism. As he wrote in 1960, “The clear and logical thinker will always be an ‘extremist,’ and will therefore always be interesting; his pitfall is to go wildly into error. But, on the other hand, while the orthodox ‘middle-of-the-road’ thinker will never get that far wrong, neither will he ever contribute anything either, aside from being generally deadly dull.”11 In one book he found “another illustration of the rule that, often, only ‘extremists’ make sense, while eclectics and moderates are entangled in contradictions.”12

Rothbard had a strong sense of what we can call scholarly manners. Not that he avoided bluntness—on the contrary. Rather, he objected to personal criticism and ridicule. Writing on Alexander Gray’s The Socialist Tradition, he chided Gray

for his use of personal ridicule against the socialist and anarchist thinkers discussed. Ridicule against a nonsensical argument is one thing; ridicule against the person, and then intertwined with criticism of the argument, is much different, and most unfortunate. The personal sneers, to which Gray, a man of obvious wit, is addicted, detract, in a scholarly audience, more from the author than the recipient, and properly so.13

These are his “procedural” values. They are the hallmarks of a disciplined and inquiring mind, striving for reason and clarity and expecting it in others. His substantive beliefs also come to light in the course of his comments on the books. These can be grouped into several themes.

The State

Rothbard, it should go without saying, was a solid libertarian in those days, having come to this philosophy much earlier in life. His opposition to the state is often eloquently expressed in the book reviews. He never missed an opportunity to expose an author as a state worshipper and he was most impatient when an author camouflaged his state-worship. In his review of Yves Simon’s Philosophy of Democratic Government, Rothbard debunks the claim that the individual should submerge himself in collective, that is, state, activities. He takes a scalpel to the activities Simon exalts:

Military parades, where music—one of man’s highest cultural achievements—is put to use to glorify butchery and the deliberate degradation of the dignity of the individual; inaugurations, where everyone is asked to solemnly revere the new Supreme Tyrant upon his accession to state rule; national funerals, where we are all asked to pay tearful homage to the Supreme Tyrant (or one of his top lackeys) who has just passed away at last; and the raising of the flag, where innocent children, dragooned by bayonet into government’s “educational” barracks, are forced to stand in awe while the bloody battle flag and standard of their captors is being raised on high.14

Economics

Most of the books on economics were assigned to Rothbard, unsurprisingly. In reviewing these books, Rothbard rigorously applied the analytical tools of Austrian economics. He exposed the fallacies of statist economists while holding high the ideals of laissez faire, sound money, free banking, free trade, free bargaining between employee and employer, free competition unburdened by antitrust laws, and so on.

As he is today, Rothbard was a passionate advocate of Misesian praxeology, leading him to criticize trenchantly Milton Friedman’s methodological writings. In reviewing Friedman’s famous Essays in Positive Economics, Rothbard wrote that “it can be flatly stated that his position is the most important, and most pernicious (in light of current trends), methodological fallacy in economic thought today.”15 When he read Melvin Greenhut’s Full Employment, Inflation & Common Stock, he commented, “The Greenhut volume has only one conceivable merit: Greenhut being a member of the ‘Chicago school,’ this book is the quickest way of convincing many ‘conservatives’ of just how thoroughly Keynesian the Chicago School position is.”16

Despite disagreement with Friedman (“an apostle of totally managed, fiat money”), Rothbard expressed his respect for him as a thinker. He called A Program for Monetary Stability “the product of a brilliant, clear, and logical mind, and it is, therefore, always provocative and stimulating, even though fundamentally and basically mistaken and wrongheaded.”17

On the other hand, Rothbard was overjoyed with Lionel Robbins’s book The Great Depression.18 Robbins was an early follower of Ludwig von Mises, and his book set forth Mises’s theory of the business cycle. Calling the book “one of the great economic works of our time,” Rothbard, who would soon write his own history of the depression,19 applauded Robbins’s “application of the best economic thought to the explanation of the cataclysmic phenomena of the Great Depression.” Robbins was one of several prominent Misesians who renounced Austrian economics in the wake of the Keynesian revolution. He repudiated The Great Depression.

Rothbard wrote of both praxeology and entrepreneurship when he reviewed W. Paul Strassmann’s Risk and Technological Innovation.20 In this passage, he faults Strassmann for bad methodology, which leads him to misunderstand the risk of the marketplace. Strassmann begins, as so many scholars do, with an epistemological error: “he tries to use history to test empirically what is really a problem of praxeology. In short, he tries to measure risk, and concludes by saying that it was negligible, largely by recording the fact that most innovations were successful, and that the rate of failure among innovating firms … was low. It is of course not surprising that when one ‘reads the tape backward,’ past innovations look remarkably easy; since most innovations succeeded, and it seems to us evident that they would succeed, the risks incurred at the time are conveniently forgotten. Furthermore, on the market those who are best at innovating, and at entrepreneurship in general, will be those who will gravitate to business and stay with it, so it is not surprising that the rate of business success is high among those who remain. But Strassmann illegitimately uses his rate of success to try to prove that risk didn’t really exist.”

Rothbard was always eager to learn something new from his reading and when this happened he did the written equivalent of jumping for joy. An example is his review of Lawrence Abbott’s “masterpiece,” Quality and Competition,21 He found Abbott’s definition of quality competition “completely original.” “Before this, economists, including myself, have thought that theory need not account specially for quality because a different quality good for the same price is equivalent to a different price for the same good. A different quality would, further, be simply treated as a different good for most purposes, as the same good for others. Up till now, no one has been able to distinguish theoretically between a different quality and a different good. Abbott furnishes an excellent distinction based upon the thesis that the same good satisfies the same want, so that there can be quality variations within the same want. This is consonant with the Austrian tradition and is an innovation within it.”

He seems to temper his enthusiasm later in the review when he adds, “I am not prepared to say how fruitful Abbott’s distinction will turn out to be, particularly in the development of economic theory, where my hunch is that current Austrianism will do well enough without tacking on Abbott’s ‘quality models’ to the price models of current theory.”

Rothbard has been a spirited participant in recent epistemological debates within the Austrian school. But this is not new for him. He addressed the same issues in a review of G. L. S. Shackle’s Time in Economics.22 He applauded Shackle’s criticism of economic orthodoxy, but added, “[u]nfortunately, these good points are counterbalanced by the obvious fact that Shackle has never familiarized himself with praxeology and the praxeologic tradition.”

As a result, Shackle’s proffered positive theories are almost uniformly erroneous. So far does he go in the direction of subjectivism that he unfortunately splits up people’s actions into non-comparable single moments, with all things taking place within the individual actor’s mind for each moment—as a result, he fallaciously denies even the individual himself the right to sum up after the event and say that his actions were erroneous.

Rothbard noted that Shackle mistakenly rejected Böhm-Bawerk’s time-preference theory of interest in favor of an uncertainty theory. He also wrote that Shackle, though critical of the “quasi-mathematical Walrasian approach,” felt it was necessary to maintain it to reveal the interconnectedness of all economic phenomena. Characteristically, Rothbard responded that Shackle should have known that Austrian theory “supplies the view of general interconnectedness which is badly needed in economics, without distorting reality.”

Finally, Rothbard expressed hard-hitting critical opinions about the newly developed Public Choice school when he reviewed The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.23 Public Choice has grown in influence tremendously in the 27 years since, and Buchanan, of course, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986.

It is not that Rothbard found nothing of value in the book. On the contrary, he appreciated its searching for methodological individualism in political science, emphasis on unanimity rather than majority rule, and “a harking back to the constitutional system of 1900 as better than the situation today.” But this was not enough to satisfy him: “But these merits are, I believe, more ad hoc than integral to the main body of the work. In considering the work as a whole, they are far overshadowed by the numerous flaws and fallacies.”

First, he argued that Buchanan and Tullock’s use of the “unanimity” rule works more to “put a stamp of approval” on existing government actions rather than as an ideal at which we should aim. How?

The basic way is to set up a dichotomy between “constitutional decisions” and concrete decisions of government policy. B and T [Buchanan and Tullock] admit that concrete decisions might represent a conflict: A and B winning out over and even at the expense of C. But “constitutionally,” which is a term that they use quite vaguely but which apparently mean [sic] the rules for government decision-making, they assume that these rules are somehow “unanimously” agreed to, and therefore that, in a sense, the concrete political decisions are also unanimous. Thus, the unanimity rule, seemingly libertarian, actually turns out to be more of a fallacious support for the status quo—whatever the status quo happens to be—than a plea for libertarian principle.

Rothbard faulted Buchanan and Tullock for attempting to find unanimous consent for constitutional decisions, and particularly for their “veil of ignorance” reasoning, according to which no one knows what his interests are when he consents to constitutional rules, so everyone consents to rules that are genuinely in the public interest. He also took them to task for watering down “unanimity” to mean” relative unanimity” or “80% unanimity.” “In short, when the chips are down, they are willing to waive unanimity in order that the ‘costs of decision’ for the group or society can be minimized,” Rothbard wrote.

He criticized Buchanan and Tullock’s defense of income insurance as a rationalization of the status quo. According to Rothbard, Buchanan and Tullock assert that the wealthy consent to their being taxed to provide income insurance because it will be available to them if they become poor. “And in another place,” wrote Rothbard, “they [Buchanan and Tullock] say that people really want to be coerced so long as they are all coerced, so that everybody is really not being coerced.”

Not only do I consider all this nonsense, but it is dangerous nonsense as well, because it provides new support for the idea that anything that the State does, no matter how blatantly coercive, is “really” backed by everyone.

A fundamental objection of Rothbard to Buchanan and Tullock’s approach to political economy was their treating the state as more or less just another service agency in society. He wrote:

The State is assimilated into the rubric of just another voluntary agency (albeit with complications), and each individual therefore decides on his value scale how much to allocate to private agencies and how much to government. This, I say, is the nub of the entire analysis of the book and I think it is utterly and absolutely wrong…. Buchanan and Tullock would obliterate the most vital distinction between State and market activity.

Rothbard also scored Buchanan and Tullock for their notion of social costs with regard to government activity. “[B]ut how can ‘social costs’ be even discussed when some people are gaining at the expense of others? … The upshot is, that despite much talk by B and T of their staunch individualism, especially methodological individualism, that they are not consistent individualists at all,” he wrote. “They smuggle in, through the back door, societarian and organicist conceptions, viz. in their discussions of social costs.”

History

One of Rothbard’s great loves is history. In these reviews, he expounded on historiography, as well as his interpretations of the American Revolution, the Constitution, Jacksonian period, World War II, and the Cold War. He was, as he is today, a devotee of revisionism, but this is not to say that he embraced everything to which that misunderstood label was attached.

He wrote of the method of writing history in his review of James C. Malin’s On the Nature of History.24 Rothbard approves of Malin’s methodology, commenting, “Probably most important is his vigorous rejection of determinism, his belief in free will,” which leads to a rejection of laws of history and inevitability.

Rothbard on the objectivist/subjectivist debate among historians:

… [An] historian must select his material, and if he does, then immediately there arises the question: on what basis, on what principles, do I make the selection? This does not mean that all truth is “subjective”; but it does mean that selection of facts must be based on some sort of rational and valid principles. Furthermore, I fail to see anything wrong with “presentism” and “functional history,” provided that this means not that history is deliberately distorted to fit propaganda myths of the moment, but that present interests determine what aspects of history the historian will write about…. The historian fails in a major part of his task if he just photographs or chronicles, and fails to interpret and explain events on the basis of knowledge established in other sciences, such as economics.

Elsewhere, Rothbard declared, “[T]he historian’s science is an art, it is one where the historian’s judgment must, in the final analysis, be brought to bear. History is not an exact science, for history deals with individual persons exercising their free will. The historian never knows, with exact proof, the motives of his subjects; but he can use his best judgment from the evidence. This is his methodology.”25 Rothbard often attributed his views on writing history to Mises.

His review of Donald L. Kemmerer and C. Clyde Jones’s American Economic History gave him a chance to write on another methodological issue.26 “It is increasingly clear that an historian, unless he is completely possessed of ultra-Marxist bias (and few are these days), is apt to fall prey to one besetting bias: of assuming that ‘whatever was, was right.’ Whatever happens, whatever transpired, was somehow the mark of destiny and deserves the rubber-stamp of historiographical approval.”

He then elaborated:

In American economic history, a ‘whatever was, was right’ attitude means that whatever branch of economic history one is treating, the ‘onward and upward’ theme must be ever dominant. And so it is with K and J [Kemmerer and Jones]. If K and J are in a chapter on manufacturing, then we find a fairly sound treatment, dealing with the progress of manufacturing development, the carving out of new economic frontiers by businessmen, etc. But let K and J shift to a chapter on labor, then, curiously enough, we find the heroic and forward struggles of the ‘labor movement’… against the exploiting bosses….

… Not only is each act of government regulation welcomed in turn, but K and J, true to their implicit code as celebrants of all aspects of the American past, welcome them only as they come in the temporal order. In short, if a certain regulation was imposed on business in 1892, then 1892 was, providentially, just about the time when this regulation was ‘needed,’ when the legislature ‘came to realize,’ etc.

“How blissful a country,” Rothbard gushed, “where statesmen were almost never too early or too late!”

Rothbard’s overview of history focuses on the struggle between Liberty and Power. It comes up again and again. He invoked it when he challenged what he regarded as spurious class-analysis. Though an advocate of a particular class (caste) analysis, he wrote tirelessly in opposition to “garbled and twisted variants.” In reviewing The Antifederalists by Jackson Turner Main27 Rothbard rejected the Beard-Jensen quasi-Marxist class-struggle interpretation of the Constitution that he saw Main trying to salvage. This analysis held that the contending sides in the fight over the Constitution were the rich, land-holding urban elitists against the poor agrarian, egalitarian democrats. Here Rothbard set out his view of classes and the salient historical struggle.

Naturally, in every country and every age, there are well-born, poor, and people in between. And if one wants to separate them into “classes,” one can spend one’s time doing so, though fruitlessly. But so are there an infinite number of other “classes” in society: occupational groups, religious groups, chess players and non-chess players, etc.

Rothbard faults Main for insisting that classes are inherently in conflict, that farmers are invariably against merchants, creditors against debtors, small property owners against large property owners. Rothbard, though, finds a “small nub of truth” in this class-struggle thesis. But the nub had been twisted beyond recognition by the Marxists and neo-Marxist historians, “indeed by Marx himself.”

Marx acquired his class theory from Saint-Simon, who, in turn, garbled and twisted it from its original thesis, which was, in contrast, highly libertarian. This thesis—which Mises would call as caste conflict theory—and which anticipated its modern formulation by Albert Jay Nock, was developed by Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte in the Restoration period in France. This postulated two essential “classes” or castes: the State, and its subsidized favorites; and the public, who are exploited by the state. This was the original “class” analysis and exploitation analysis; the State, and its subsidies, exploited the producing public. The producers included everyone on the free market, from manufacturers to laborers. Saint-Simon, Marx, etc. twisted this around to add the “capitalists” to the list of exploiters, and to dub the “producers” as only the proletariat.

Rothbard took up the inadequacy of standard class analysis again when he commented on the article “The Massachusetts Land Bankers of 1740” by George äthan Billias.28 He praises Billias for showing that “the leading advocates [of an inflationary land bank scheme], as well as the opponents, were wealthy Boston merchants, real estate men, etc.” (Emphasis added.) He then generalized,

The essence of modern revisionism … is to have learned … that, lo and behold!, the inflationists were not poor agrarians at all, but wealthy urban merchants and real estate speculators, who, while they may well have been debtors, were hardly “poor” in the sense generally used. Inflation and sound money were led by the respectable, sophisticated, urban merchants and intellectuals.

Clearly, Rothbard’s position in this controversy is rich and complex. He is not against the economic method in history, that is, tracing people’s economic interests in everything from a tariff bill to the Constitution. But he is against economic determinism, Marxist or Beardian. In a devastating review of Lee Benson’s Turner and Beard,29 he defends Forrest McDonald against Benson’s charges of economic determinism. Not true, wrote Rothbard, because McDonald’s very act of “atomizing” Beard’s class categories—the nub of McDonald’s great contribution to historiography—was to shift the emphasis from Marxist class struggle to “the actual realistic categories of individual economic interest. This is, indeed, a shift from fallacious Marxian historiography to realistic, individualistic, even ‘libertarian,’ historiography.”

I should mention that Rothbard’s opinion of Jackson Turner Main changed several years later. Where he earlier said Main’s book was a desperate attempt to save the Beard analysis, in 1974 he called Main’s “neo-Beardian The Antifederalists … a brilliant work that provides … by far the best explanation of the forces battling for and against the Constitution. …” He said Main shows that the Constitution was a conspiracy by the ruling elite, wealthy public creditors, protectionists, and others who wanted a strong central government.30

As noted, Rothbard believed that tracing economic interests was a valid and important part of the historian’s task. J. Fred Rippy’s Globe and Hemisphere excited Rothbard by its courage to do this. He commented:

For some reason, almost all other “right-wing” historians, economists, or observers of the current scene have considered it somehow “Marxist” or anti-capitalist or perhaps just plain impolite and bad-mannered, to point out the probably true motivations for government actions and for pressures for those actions. Now, this, I have maintained for a long time, abdicates the responsibility of the historian to weigh and estimate, as best he can, the motivations for different actions. But because of this abdication, the field for this realistic investigation has been left to the distortions of the Marxists. As a result, the common charge against sound, free-enterprise economists that they are “apologists for business interests” is invested with a good deal of truth…. The great thing about J. Fred Rippy … is that he is not afraid to dig for the camouflaged economic motive.31

Rothbard combined his interest in class analysis with his interest in the Jacksonian period and launched a virtual one-man crusade to promote what he saw as the correct interpretation of that era. Rothbard had written his thesis on The Panic of 1819 and so was well versed in the monetary and political events that led up to the rise of the Jacksonians. Nothing disturbed him more than an author’s recitation of the standard view that the Jacksonians were early welfare-statists trying to tame aggressive capitalists. So he was delighted when he read The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy by Lee Benson almost a year after his salvo against Benson’s book on Turner and Beard.32 Benson, Rothbard wrote,

squarely and candidly refutes the “Jacksonian Democracy” thesis…. Benson squarely recognizes that the Democrats were the Libertarian party, and the Whigs the Statist party, and therefore, properly, concludes that the “precursors of the New Deal” in this period were not the Jacksonians but the Whigs.

But though he praised Benson for this realization, he faults him for discounting the importance of the Liberty vs. Power dichotomy.

In a related issue, Rothbard welcomed a biography of one of his heroes, Martin Van Buren. In his review of Robert V. Remini’s Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party,33 he writes in a postscript, “I have perhaps written too long a review of this work, but it deals with a subject in which I am particularly interested.” He notes that Remini’s book “sets out to right the historiographie balance for a critical period in Van’s life, and does a good job of it…. Remini also shows, in excellent fashion, that Van Buren’s main aim, at which he succeeded brilliantly, was ideological.”

Rothbard’s interest in the revisionist history of America’s wars is also prominent in the Volker reviews. He thrilled to A. J. P. Taylor’s classic and controversial Origins of The Second World War, which showed that the war did not result from any grand plan of conquest by Hitler, but rather from ubiquitous diplomatic bungling and intrigue.34 A “scintillating book,” he called it in his 14-page-plus, single-spaced letter.

In reviewing Taylor, Rothbard set out his own view of foreign affairs. He discussed what he calls the “Fu Manchu myth”: the view that a foreign leader or country is not just bad but irredeemably evil and malicious, and will conquer the world unless faced down by the Good Guys. This assumption, invariably used by national leaders for propaganda, leads to warmongering. Writes Rothbard, “This is the almost idiotic Morality Play in which Americans and Britons have cast international relations for half a century now, and this is why we are in the mess we are today.”

The fallacy that Rothbard identifies is that the Bad Guy himself may fear that he will be attacked or that, evil as he is, his particular complaint may be legitimate (as with the Treaty of Versailles), or that he can’t afford to back down from a show of force by the Good Guys. “And so to war,” writes Rothbard.

Like Taylor, Rothbard favors the Munich settlement because it was a belated, if aborted, attempt to revise the Versailles Treaty.35 He blasts the allies for setting up artificial states in Eastern Europe after World War I and preparing the stage for World War II. Historians and diplomats have long wondered what to do about Eastern Europe. Rothbard added his own view, a combination of realism and libertarian idealism.

The reality of Eastern Europe is that it is always fated to be dominated by either Germany or Russia or both…. [I]f there is to be peace in Eastern Europe, both Germany and Russia must be friends.

Now don’t misunderstand me; I have not abandoned moral principle for cynicism. My heart yearns for ethnic justice, for national self-determination for all peoples…. But, to paraphrase Sydney Smith’s famous letter to Lady Grey, please let them work this out for themselves! Let us abandon the criminal immorality and folly of continual coercive meddling by non-Eastern European powers (e.g. Britain, France, and now the U.S.) in the affairs of East Europe. Let us hope that one day Germany and Russia, at peace, will willingly grant justice to the peoples of East Europe, but let us not bring about perpetual wars to try to achieve this artificially.

Rothbard, of course, meant his words on the Fu Manchu myth and Eastern Europe to be applicable to the Soviet Union and the Cold War. In this connection, he praised the revisionist Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes, as an “excellent work.36

The Cold War was the major issue (though not the only one) that divided libertarians and conservatives after World War II. Rothbard was a major figure insisting that the issue of war and peace was central and that free-market advocates who favored an American global anti-communist crusade were tragically—dangerously—inconsistent. The central flaw he found in the anticommunists was their belief that the communists were uniquely evil and “Luciferian.” He discusses this matter in his review of Frank S. Meyer’s The Molding of Communists.37 Meyer was a former top-level American communist, who later renounced communism and became part of the National Review “new right.” He was more libertarian than most of that crowd and he was a close friend of Rothbard’s.38 Nevertheless, Meyer proposed an aggressive foreign policy designed to defeat the Soviet Union.

In his 18-page, single-spaced letter, Rothbard distinguishes between anticommunists and antisocialists. Antisocialists are concerned with ends, ideas, and ideology; they oppose, ideologically, all movements that aim to subject individuals to state power. Anticommunists, in contrast, concentrate on means and people. To them the communists are unique because their methods are unique. “… it must be clear that there is no hope of ‘reconciling’ the anti-Communist and the anti-Socialist positions as I have described them,” Rothbard wrote. “The emphasis, the outlook, the conclusions, are totally incompatible.”

Meyer held two fallacies, according to Rothbard. The first was his belief that only communists engage in the bad practices cited; the second was his condemnation of practices that are actually admirable. Meyer wrote, for instance, that the communist parties totally control their members and expect loyalty. Rothbard responded that so do many other organizations and movements, including mainstream ones.

My own observation of the Randian movement (followers of Ayn Rand) is that an absolute dictation is imposed on the total life of each member that makes the life of the cadre Communist seem like a bed of roses. For while the Communist party, sensibly, does not interfere with any activities of the members which are not “anti-Party,” the Randians insist on total control—in the name of reason and even individualism—of all aspects of a member’s life.

He found curious Meyer’s belief that only communists choose their friends from among their ideological comrades or spend a good part of their time talking and thinking about ideology. Further, he criticized Meyer for attacking the Marxists’ interest in building a grand interdisciplinary system.

To carve out an architectonic, a system which enables one to hold a consistent and integrated view of all the disciplines of man is a great and noble aim, and I believe that a rationalist individualist philosophy can accomplish this goal…. This aim of the Marxists is simply the old Greek rationalist aim to make philosophy once more the queen of the sciences and the intellectual disciplines.39

Rothbard’s ultimate explanation for Meyer’s and other anticommunists’ attitude is that they are Converts; they invested years advocating a ridiculous doctrine, and now they ameliorate their guilt by positing a diabolical, hard-to-resist force. Rothbard closes his review with a sober comment about Meyer’s identifying the American people with the government. “It is disquieting, but perhaps not astonishing,” he wrote,

that Frank Meyer should reveal a deep-rooted and fundamental Statism in his political philosophy; it is almost impossible to agitate for the State to kill Communists throughout the world without adopting statism at the root of one’s social philosophy.

The break between the libertarians and the Buckley right is a fascinating episode. Even more than today the libertarians were regarded as part of conservatism. In a passing comment,40 Rothbard referred to a book on conservatism by historian Clinton Rossiter, presumably Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion. He was amused to see that “all our friends are listed.” He then adds this tidbit:

The whole theme is vicious, of course, but I was interested to see that Rossiter caught the fact that there is a distinction between the general right-wing intellectuals and the more ‘anarchistic’ Chodorov-Rand-Nock group. Good thing in one particular sense: when they talk about intellectual Rightists of today, since there are very few around, the very fact of discussing them weights the importance of us purists very heavily. In other words, the very writing of such a book gives an undue weight to the influence of the purists, precisely because the proportion of purists to general Rightists may be very small, but it is quite large in proportion to the total of intellectual Rightists. This tends to give purist views more publicity than they would otherwise receive, induces college and graduate students to read purists, etc. Good for the cause.

To close this history section, it is interesting to note that Rothbard rejected vogue revisionism when it clashed with his knowledge of history. He did this emphatically in his view of the history of American foreign and domestic policy. In his review of Richard W. Van Alstyne’s The Rising American Empire,41 he rebutted the school of thought that denied America’s isolationist past and held that it was imperialist even before the Spanish-American War in 1898. “Now this guiding thesis I believe to be nonsense,” he wrote.

… While it is true that America and American agents did many aggressive and imperialist things throughout the 19th century, they can hardly be comparable in extent with the brazen acquisitions of the Spanish-American War. American expansion throughout the world since 1898 can also hardly be called mere consolidation of previously-won Empire;42 it is the real shift from Republic to Empire.

Similarly, Rothbard disputed the school of thought that argued that America had no age of laissez faire. In his review of Carter Goodrich’s Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800-189043 he identified Goodrich as the “eminence grise” of the movement dedicated to the proposition that “the existence of laissez faire in 19th century America was largely a myth” and that there was no “revulsion” against government’s internal “improvements.”

Now this general picture, with qualifications only hastily admitted, is, I believe, a distorted one; from Goodrich’s pages alone, it becomes clear that there was a “revulsion” movement of very considerable proportions. …

True, there was not complete laissez faire, especially in transportation, “where, historically, the State has always, along with other such ‘command posts’ of the economy as money, postal service, the army and police, etc., reached out to take over first. However, it is still true that America approached laissez faire more closely then, and more than other countries. It developed as well as it did, because of its freemarket elements, and in spite of the governmental elements, the latter disrupting matters as such as it [sic] could.”

Philosophy

Next to history, Rothbard’s reviews dealt most with philosophical issues. In general, his concern was to uphold reason and its ability to discover the truth about all matters, including ethics. He was a foe of positivism, relativism, and skepticism. He was an unabashed champion of natural law and natural rights.

He was also a champion of John Locke, whom in the course of these reviews he defended from malignment and misinterpretation. In his review of Willmoor Kendall’s ]ohn Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Ruie,44 Rothbard wrote, “The usual interpretation of John Locke is that he was the father of individualist, natural rights theory. From my own reading of Locke, I believe that this ‘orthodox’ interpretation is the correct one. Willmore Kendall … challenges this view to assert that Locke was, fundamentally, the father of all-out majority rule theory…. [T]his book propounds what I consider to be a totally wrong interpretation of Locke, and is an unjustified attempt to deprive the history of libertarian thought of one of its most important figures.”

Later he returned to Locke in a review of Richard H. Cox’s Locke on War and Peace:45

[Cox] continues in the current tradition, spearheaded by Leo Strauss, of regarding John Locke as not a libertarian at all, but rather a statist follower of Hobbes. In my opinion, this is a serious misinterpretation of Locke, who should rather be regarded as a confused, inconsistent libertarian rather than as a convinced statist. … It is certainly equally, if not more, plausible to think of Locke as a secret pure libertarian than as a secret Hobbesian.

Rothbard pinned the misinterpretation of Locke on Leo Strauss. He had more to say about Strauss—good and bad—in three reviews of his books. In his review of Strauss’s Natural Right and History46 Rothbard praises him for his brilliant rehabilitation of the concept of natural rights, showing that “it is the answer of reason as opposed to the nihilists and the conventionists, who take their morality from convention alone.” Rothbard goes on,

Strauss makes a very interesting distinction between the “classic” natural right theories of the classical Greek philosophers and Aquinas, and the modern natural right theories of Hobbes and Locke. Strauss prefers the former group, while I prefer the latter which contains the essential elements of a libertarian political philosophy, although with overlardings of other material, and omission of the economic argument. However, his book is useful in making the distinctions. A judicious combination of Hobbes and Locke would make an excellent libertarian framework; it is unfortunate that Strauss’s rejection of the “modern” natural rights school leads him away from a staunchly liberal position, in the direction of vagueness.

Rothbard continued this line of criticism when he reviewed Strauss’s On Tyranny47 “Strauss is at his best,” wrote Rothbard, “on only one fundamental point: when he is criticizing ethical relativism and advocating a grounding of ethics on natural law…. Any more specific topic, however, either in detailed content of the natural law, or in historical discussions of political philosophers, shows Strauss to be a fallacious political philosopher, and a worse historian.”

He goes in for the kill in his review of Strauss’s What is Political Philosophy?48 “The great defect,” Rothbard wrote, “is that Strauss, while favoring what he considers to be the classical and Christian concepts of natural law, is bitterly opposed to the seventeenth and eighteenth century conceptions of Locke and the rationalists, particularly their ‘abstract,’ ‘deductive’ championing of the natural rights of the individual: liberty, property, etc. Strauss, in fact,” Rothbard continued,

has been the leading champion, along with Russell Kirk and the Catholic scholars in America, of a recent trend in Locke, etc. historiography to sunder completely the “bad”, individualistic natural-rights type of natural law of the 17th and 18th Centuries, from the “good” classical-Christian type—good, presumably because it was so vague and so “prudential” that it offered very little chance to defend individual liberty against the state. In this reading, Hobbes and Locke are the great villains in the alleged perversion of natural law. To my mind, this “perversion” was a healthy sharpening and development of the concept. My quarrel with Strauss, Kirk, et al., therefore, is not only valuational: that they are anti-natural rights and liberty and I am for them; but also factual and historical: for they think that the Lockians had an entirely different concept of natural law, whereas I think that the difference—while clearly there—was a sharpening development, rather than a perversion or a diametric opposite. The Strauss-Kirkians overlook for example, that while true that Aristotle and Plato were statists in their approach to natural law, the Stoics were fine individualists.49

What are these natural rights that Rothbard defends so vigorously against those who would deny or ignore them? Rothbard sums them up in a single phrase: property rights. He elaborated on the centrality of property rights in two reviews. In William Zelermyer’s Invasion of Privacy50 Rothbard finds “an instructive object lesson of the Pandora’s box of evils that will unfold when one establishes or advocates any ‘right’ which is not subsumable under natural-law, property right.” Zelermyer wants to establish a right to privacy without grounding it in this type of property right. For Rothbard the attempt fails. “Even a seemingly plausible ‘enlargement’ of such rights of the individual results in invasion of property right…. Such is the case with the so-called ‘right of privacy,’ which was invented by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren in a famous legal article in 1890. The perniciousness of the seemingly plausible ‘right of privacy’ is that it goes beyond the right of property (or the right of contract, explicit and implicit, subsumable under the right of property).”

Then Rothbard launches into his fundamental views on the nature of rights.

The more I study the fascinating discipline of jurisprudence, the more I am convinced that the key to the whole problem is the absolute inviolability of property right; … all legitimate ‘human’ rights are subsumable under property right. On the other hand, any ‘human right’ not subsumable under property right is itself an invasion of the right of property, and hence should be outlawed.

Rothbard found a way to resolve the so-called privacy problem in which someone’s picture is used in an endorsement of a product without permission. To him such use is a “fraudulent invasion of the buyer of the product” who is misled about who endorses the product, and it is “virtual forgery, and therefore a theft-misappropriation of the name of someone else.”

His rejection of a right to privacy per se leads him to an interesting position on government wiretapping, which Zelermyer and other (welfare state) liberals usually opposed. He thought the issue was complex, despite “one’s first libertarian instinct” to oppose it. Rothbard wrote, “[gjranted that wiretapping is an invasion of property right, a criminal deserves to be invaded in such a way, because a criminal has lost his property right to a large extent.” Evidence of real crime that is gathered by wiretap should be admissible. But government agents should be stiffly punished, even jailed for wiretapping innocent people. “In short,” he wrote, “I would neither outlaw wiretap entirely, nor would I permit wiretap on the basis of … ‘reasonable expectation’ by the official that the man might be a criminal.”

Rothbard returned to the basis of rights when he reviewed Milton R. Konvitz’s Fundamental Liberties of a Free People.51 The book, he said, “presents an instructive example of what happens when a political theorist tries to uphold the absoluteness of various ‘human rights’ of liberty, without considering, or caring about, property rights.” He continued:

Property rights are not only essential, they are also the true basis, and provide the only intelligible criterion, for all other “human rights” and their demarcation. … All the problems which Konvitz wrestles with unsuccessfully: the limits of religious freedom, speech, etc. would have been precisely solved if he had rigorously applied property right throughout.

Just as he defended Locke from his misinterpreters, so he defended natural rights from those who misunderstand or distorted them. He took exception with Joseph Dorfman52 and Rexford Guy Tugwell who objected to natural property rights in a discussion of Francis Leiber in their book Early American Policy: Six Columbia Contributors.53 In this review Rothbard stated “the essence of natural property right theory”:

[T]he theory, while couched in historical form, is a logical, universal-form theory (akin to praxeology) and is not really history. In short, the insight that property right of an individual precedes society and the State is a logical insight to the nature of man; it is not an historical assertion at all. And this insight establishes the natural law ethic that property should be defended. But modern positivists, empiricists, etc. can never understand what they consider an illegitimate fusion of fact and value, and mistake a logical inquiry into man’s nature, or the nature of the State, as solely historical.

Rothbard made a similar point earlier when he reviewed Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery.54 “Popper,” he wrote, “can best be described as a moderate positivist, and he attacks the extreme positivists who wished to bury all of philosophy as being ‘metaphysical.’ In essence, however, Popper is a positivist; his famous criterion of ‘falsifiability’ is certainly not very different from the orthodox positivist criterion of ‘verifiability,’ and his ‘degree of corroboration’ about the same as the positivists’ substitution of ‘probability’ for absolute truth. At bottom, neither Popper nor the other varieties of positivists understand the doctrine of natural law, which concept resolves the famous ‘problem of induction,’ and resolves it in a rational, scientific manner not dependent—as most everyone believes nowadays—on Catholic theology.”

Rothbard could not understand the modern claim that the seeking, not finding, of truth is the important thing. His charming retort is, Why bother to look for something if you know you can’t find it anyway? He repeatedly chides authors for being anti-absolutist. When he reviewed Frank H. Knight’s Intelligence and Democratic Action,55 he noted, “The absolute is Knight’s bugbear, and he combats it at every turn…. Knight champions the modern, secular, humanist, relativist, ‘spirit of free inquiry,’ which he associates with the last few centuries.”

For Knight, freedom is almost indissolubly tied to change, open-mindedness, relativity of truth, etc…. Knight’s aversion to the absolute permeates all of this thought, weakening its rigor and sharpness, rendering his overall adherence to liberty and the free market more a mood or a tendency than a sharply consistent architectonic.

He made similar points in his review of Leon Bramson’s The Political Context of Sociology.56 Rothbard liked Bramson’s attack on sociology and his linking of the modern left with nineteenth century conservatism. But he criticized Bramson’s ethical and epistemological relativism. “It is not true,” Rothbard wrote, that social science and its conclusions rest on value-judgments; much of it does not.”

Only political or ethical conclusions, and judgments, rest on value-judgments. The demonstration that price control causes shortages, for example, rests on no value-premises whatever; but the conclusion that price control should not be imposed is a policy judgment which rests on ethical theories as well as on the economic law just mentioned. (E.g. the ethical principle: that it is bad to cause shortages in this way.) And it is not true, as Bramson believes, that all value-judgments and ultimate ideological positions are as good as any other, and that the choice is purely an arbitrary one. Some ethical doctrines or ideological positions are objectively and rationally good and some are bad.

Rothbard was an ever-ready defender of the mind, of thought, of free will. He found much to defend them from in psychiatry. Reviewing Nathan Masor’s The New Psychiatry,57 he praised the attack on Freudianism and expressed approval of thyroid-vitamin injections as a treatment. But he challenged Masor’s rejection of mind and values. “I am afraid that Masor,” Rothbard wrote, “is basically a biochemical determinist, who leaves out the essential primacy and importance of the mind, of free will, of the ideas—the value-systems that the mind adopts, as a cause of neuroses, psychoses, etc.”

Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness came under similar criticism:58 “Szasz’s fundamental philosophic error, perhaps, is his deliberate overthrowing of thinking in terms of ‘entities’ and ‘substances,’ i.e. eighteenth century, natural-law, Aristotelian thinking, and his replacement of them by the modern fashions, especially ‘thinking in terms of processes,’ and therefore games, roles, etc.”

Miscellaneous

In reviewing such a broad variety of subjects Rothbard had the opportunity to comment briefly on many issues. For example, his review of Charles L. Black’s The People and the Court,59 which favors judicial review as a means of expanding government power, stated, “The book emphasizes for me … that the Constitution, regarded as an attempt to limit government, was one of the most noble attempts at limiting government, at curbing the State, in human history but that it has failed, and failed almost ignominiously. One reason for such a failure, as [John C.] Calhoun predicted, is the monopoly Supreme Court. At any rate, this failure points up the necessity of other new, more stringent means of limiting and curbing government power.”60

On secession: “Not only am I pro-secession on strict-constructionist grounds, but also because some bright fellow will eventually get the idea: well, if the South can secede from the Union, and Georgia can secede from the South, and X County from the State of Georgia, and Y village from the county, etc., etc. why can’t I secede?”61

On ecology: “I am not an expert in this field, but I am inclined to believe that the organic farming people, basing their case on ecological laws of nature, make a pretty eloquent case, and one that is too often represented as being ‘crack-pot’ by our official organs of opinion and the mass media.”62 Also, “[Walter] Firey63 is typical of conservationists, then, in admiring a coerced, fixed, stagnant, static system, unblemished by free men instituting changes in the patterns of nature.”

On modern literature’s portrayal of man: “When a modern novelist writes of criminals or rapists, they are considered guiltless, tragic victims of society or their environment, or ‘happy bums’; when Dostoevsky wrote of them he took sides; he showed that criminals had tragically chosen, of free will and error, their own guilty path.”64

On Marx: “Let it be said here and now: Marxism is, to be sure, a monumental system, but a monumental system which was totally fallacious at every single step of the way…. Indeed, of all of Marx’s economic, social, and philosophic system, only his theory of classes has interest, not because of Marx’s ‘contribution,’ which we have seen was total confusion, but because it was derived from the Saint-Simonians and Thierry, who, in turn, had created a tragically garbled and distorted version of what Saint-Simon had originally picked up from his former mentors Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte.”65 And: “Marx made almost no blueprints for the operation of the socialist society, and the Soviet system is Marxism applied in action.”66

On TV teaching: “It is true that, at least per se, teaching by TV would permit an enormous drop in the number of teachers needed per pupil… . And yet … yet, quality is as important as economy, and here is one case where I must agree with the educationists, albeit for very different reasons. Perhaps I am prejudiced by my antipathy to all TV, but I cannot favor subjecting children to more TV-pap than they are already getting. Simply watching TV induces an enormous passivity among children, a mindless emphasis on ‘fun’ and being entertained, that would probably rob them of what little education they are now getting. And what a tragedy to deprive children of that highly inspiring—and highly educational—personal and active contact with teachers: including the opportunity to ask questions and discuss, that would not be present in canned TV-education.”67

On Gandhi: “… it became increasingly evident that Gandhi’s stature as a systematic political thinker is extremely low. … it develops that the concept of non-violence in politics is not the essence of Gandhian satyagraha. For satyagraha encompasses not only non-violence, but also an extreme variant of ‘love thine enemy,’ as well as an extreme doctrine of ‘self-suffering.’…Along with his anarchistic strain there is a theme of belief in a kind of communalistic syndicalism, as well as State welfare measures. … It is obvious, then, that Gandhi’s numerous confusions have little to offer us in political philosophy. …”68

On nonviolence: “… the concept of non-violence, of mass action against governmental tyranny through civil disobedience rather than violent revolt, has a great deal to recommend it. It is far less likely to lead to undesirable consequences, and is far more effective in keeping revolutionaries to their original anti-tyrannical views. Power corrupts, and non-violent revolutionaries would not be in a position to be corrupted. But, apart from that, non-violence might be the only practical way to revolt against a totalitarian government.”69

Rothbard truly is a commentator on our times. But more than that, he is a dedicated philosopher, historian, and teacher of liberty.

___________________

I would like to thank the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, custodian of the Volker Fund files, for permitting me to use those files to write this paper. Leonard P. Liggio, Walter E. Grinder, John Blundell, and Emilio Pacheco offered helpful suggestions. Of course, any errors of fact or interpretation are mine.

Notes

1. William A. Paton, Shirtsleeve Economics: A Commonsense Survey (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1952).

2. He got his Ph.D. in economics in 1956.

3. The Volker Fund was an early source of support for libertarian and classical liberal scholars. A Volker grant supported Rothbard’s writing of Man, Economy, and State. As David Gordon put it, “Few groups have done so much as that foundation did in a few short years to advance the cause of classical liberalism” (Murray N. Rothbard: A Scholar in Defense of Freedom [Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1986], p. 9).

For the record, Rothbard was already a published author. His review of H. L. Mencken’s A Mencken Chrestomathy appeared in the August 1949 issue of Analysis, edited by Frank Chodorov.

4. Personal interview.

5. When the Volker Fund’s endowment expired in 1961 it effectively went out of existence, but its cause was pursued by the new Institute for Humane Studies, founded by F. A. “Baldy” Harper, who had worked for the Volker Fund. One can see in the Volker activities the beginning of the academic networking that became a major activity of IHS.

6. For a discussion of how a passionate libertarian can also be a cool, objective scholar, see David Gordon’s essay cited above.

7. Emphasis added. From review of Isolation and Security, edited by Alexander DeConde. Date of review unknown.

8. Abram L. Harris, Economics and Social Reform (New York: Harper &. Bros., 1958); reviewed February 1, 1959.

9. John R. Commons, The Legal Foundations of Capitalism (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957); reviewed June 16, 1959.

10. O. H. Taylor, Economics and Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955); review dated June 11, 1959.

11. Milton Friedman, A Program for Monetary Stability (New York: Fordham University Press, 1959); review October 31, 1960.

12. William Zelermyer’s Invasion of Privacy (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1959 ); reviewed October 6, 1960.

13. Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition (New York: Longmans, Green, 1947); reviewed August 24, 1961.

14. Yves Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); reviewed February 24, 1960.

15. From Rothbard’s review of Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); reviewed October 4, 1961.

16. Melvin Greenhut, Full Employment, Inflation & Common Stock (Public Affairs Press, 1961); reviewed November 26, 1961.

17. See note 11, Friedman, A Program for Monetary Stability.

18. Lionel Robbins, The Great Depression (New York: Macmillan, 1934); reviewed November 14, 1959. The book was written in 1934.

19. Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Kansas City, Kans.: Sheed and Ward, 1963).

20. W. Paul Strassmann, Risk and Technological Innovation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1959); reviewed July 19, 1960.

21. Lawrence Abbott, Quality and Competition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955); reviewed July 21, 1958.

22. G. L. S. Shackle, Time in Economics (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1958); reviewed August 16, 1961.

23. James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1962); reviewed August 17, 1962.

24. James C. Malin, On the Nature of History (Lawrence, Kans.: James C. Malin, 1954); reviewed April 1, 1955.

25. Lee Benson Turner and Beard (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1960); reviewed September 27, 1960.

26. Donald L. Kemmerer, American Economic History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959); reviewed May 30, 1961.

27. Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); reviewed April 23, 1962.

28. George Athan Billias, “The Massachusetts Land Bankers of 1740,” University of Maine Bulletin (April 1959); reviewed January 25, 1962.

29. Lee Benson, Turner and Beard.

30. “The American Revolutionary Heritage,” Laissez Eaire Review (May/June, 1979): 1.

31. J. Fred Rippy, Globe and Hemisphere (Chicago: Regnery, 1958); reviewed February 21, 1959.

32. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); reviewed November 11, 1961.

33. Robert V. Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); reviewed March 8, 1961.

34. J. P. Taylor, Origins of the Second World War (New York: Athenaeum, 1962); reviewed April 18, 1962.

35. For a criticism of Munich from a noninterventionist perspective, see Earl C. Ravenal, Never Again (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).

36. Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Id.: Caxton Press, 1953); reviewed March 26, 1962.

37. Frank S. Meyer, The Molding of Communists, reviewed October 29, 1961. It was later published as “The Communist Bogey-Man” in Left and Right, 3, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1967): 22-42; also Supra (General, N. 61) 1967.

38. Meyer called his mixture of libertarianism and conservativism “fusionism.” Critical as Rothbard was of Meyer’s foreign policy, Rothbard denied the fusionist category and put Meyer’s fundamental beliefs squarely in the libertarian camp. See “Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian,” in George W. Carey, ed., Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative /Libertarian Debate (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 91-111.

39. “Incidentally,” writes David Gordon, “it is, in the Trotskyist phrase, ‘no accident’ that one of Rothbard’s favorite words is ‘architectonic’ He is one of the great classifiers and systematizers.” Scholar in Defense of Freedom, p. 8.

40. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1955); contained in his April 1, 1955, letter.

41. Richard W. Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960); reviewed March 18, 1962.

42. As Van Alstyne maintained.

43. Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800-1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); reviewed June 25, 1961.

44. Willmoor Kendall, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule (Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, [1941], 1959); reviewed May 16, 1961.

45. Richard H. Cox, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960); reviewed July 22, 1962.

46. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1953); reviewed May 4, 1954.

47. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Political Science Classics, 1948); reviewed July 4, 1960.

48. Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1959); reviewed January 23, 1960.

49. Rothbard was not finished with Strauss. His review of Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1958); February 9, 1960) brims with insights and scores Strauss for his “crackpot” scholarship. “The more I read Strauss’s attack,”Rothbard wrote, “The more I concluded that Machiavelli had more good points in his philosophy than I had imagined.”

50. William Zelermyer, invasion of Privacy.

51. Milton R. Konvitz’s, Fundamental Liberties of a Free People (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957); reviewed March 22, 1961.

52. Rothbard’s mentor at Columbia under whom he wrote his dissertation on the Panic of 1819 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).

53. Francis Leiber, Early American Policy: Six Columbia Contributors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); reviewed April 19, 1962.

54. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959); reviewed December 22, 1959.

55. Frank H. Knight, Intelligence and Democratic Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); reviewed October 1, 1960.

56. Leon Bramson The Political Context of Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961): reviewed June 20, 1962.

57. Nathan Masor, The New Psychiatry (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959); reviewed October 14, 1960.

58. Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961); reviewed May 25, 1962.

59. Charles L. Black, The People and the Courts (New York: Macmillan, 1960); reviewed March 24, 1961.

60. Contrast with his later review stated above.

61. James C. Malin, On the Nature of History.

62. Geoffrey Dobbs, On Planning the Earth (Liverpool: KRP Publications, 1951); reviewed January 28, 1961.

63. Walter Firey, Man, Mind and Land (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1960); reviewed July 2, 1962.

64. Edmund Fuller, Man in Modern Fiction (Vintage Books, 1958); June 22, 1962.

65. Fred M. Gottheil, The Economic Predictions of Karl Marx (Ph.D. Dissertation; Duke University, 1959); reviewed October 10, 1961.

66. Harry Heckman, The Economics of American Living (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1959); reviewed April 12, 1962.

67. Roger A. Freeman, School Needs in the Decade Ahead (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Social Science Research, 1958); reviewed December 29, 1958.

68. Joan Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958); March 17, 1961.

69. Ibid.