Rothbard Vs The Philosophers
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: LAW AND NATURE IN THE WORK OF MURRAY N. ROTHBARD
And this is another strong argument in law, nihil quod est contra rationem est licitum, for reason is the life of the law nay the common law itself its nothing else but reason; which is to be understood of an artificiall perfection of reason, gotten by long study, observation, and experience. ...This legal reason est summa ratio. And therefore if all the reason, that is dispersed into so many several heads, were united into one, yet could he not make such a law as the law of England is; because by many successions of ages it hath been fined and refined by an infinite number of grave and learned men, ...and by long experience growne to a such perfection.
In the nineteenth century I find it represented most perfectly in the work of two of its greatest historians and political philosophers, Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton. These two men seem to me to have more successfully developed what was best in the political philosophy of the Scottish philosophers, Burke, and the English Whigs than any other writers I know.
See F.A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 4.
Absolute values for whom? Absolute on the basis of which arguments? Absolute because they are experienced as such or because they are based on absolute reasons? ...And is it not true that nothing is more cultural than the idea of nature and, therefore, also of human nature? And then, is it not precisely the awareness of the fallibility of human knowledge and of an inevitable pluralism of different values that provides the safest garrison for liberty and the constitutional state?
See Antiseri, “Ius quia iustum. Sed quid iustum? Considerazioni in margine a ‘La dottrina del diritto naturale’,” in Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves pensatore europeo, p. 111.
REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY NEWTON ROTHBARD
Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) was one of the most important proponents of laissez-faire and liberalism in France. Against protectionism, statism, militarism, colonialism, and socialism, he continued to fight for liberal ideals right up until the eve of the First World War, when he was in his nineties. In 1840, he moved from his native Belgium to Paris to start work as a journalist and economist. His liberalism was based on the theory of natural rights. He supported laissez-faire in economics and minimum state intervention in politics. In 1849, in the Journal des économistes, he published “De la production de la sécurité,” in which he maintained that private companies working under a regime of competition, along with insurance companies, could supply policing and national security services more efficiently, more economically, and in a more moral way than the state. He contributed a series of articles to the Dictionnaire de l’économie politique (1852–1853). During the reign of Napoleon III, he returned to Belgium where he became a professor of political economy. See also his works L’Évolution économique du dix-neuvième siècle: théorie du progrès (1880) and L’Évolution politique et la révolution (1884).
In 1960, Pierre Goodrich founded the Liberty Fund, a private organization for the dissemination of classical-liberal ideas.
John Campbell (1653–1728) was a Scot who immigrated to Boston, where he published the Boston Newsletter, helping to disseminate English liberal ideas in the colonies.
Between 1774 and 1775, James Burgh (1714–1775) published Political Disquisitions, one of the political tracts that significantly influenced radical thought in the 1780s. See Burgh, Political Disquisitions; or, An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, 3 vols. (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1774–75). Looking at the first part of the eighteenth century, Burgh regretted the degeneration of the country and with the “spirit of a true independent whig,” he hoped for the restoration of the constitution to control the authoritarian tendencies of the government (General Preface, p. xvi). He wrote,
All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. Power in the people is like light in the sun, native, original, inherent, and unlimited by anything human. In governors, it may be compared to the reflected light of the moon, for it is only borrowed, delegated, and limited by the intention of the people, whose it is, and to whom governors are to consider themselves responsible, while the people are answerable only to God.
Central to Burgh’s thought was his criticism of the electoral system, which he considered to be corrupt and unrepresentative. Burgh wanted the right to vote to be extended to all those who paid taxes, because only in this way could the balance in favor of the great landowners be redressed and trade and manufacturing interests be represented. It is worth noting that Burgh advocated extending the right to vote to anyone who paid taxes—he was not talking about universal male suffrage. While maintaining the need for wider representation, Burgh did not question the link between property and political representation.
John Jackson (1686–1763) wrote The Grounds of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government, in which he maintained that the state should be limited by natural law and the resulting civil laws. Jackson criticized the theory of the divine right of kings and maintained that the citizens were bound to the sovereign as long as the sovereign acted justly; otherwise the power was dissolved.
John Lee (1733–1793) was part of the circle of Rational Dissenters and a member of the Club of Honest Whigs together with Price and Burgh. A friend of Joseph Priestley, he was solicitor general in the Rockingham administration.
John Cartwright (1740–1824) was part of the movement of radicals and dissenters in favor of parliamentary reform. The aims of the movement were the abolition of the Test Act and the Corporation Act, which, by requiring religious conformism for those in public office, were in practice discriminatory laws against religious dissenters. At the center of the debate on the reforms were the extension of suffrage, an increase in the frequency of elections, and the abolition of the so-called “rotten boroughs.” The reform campaign was led by Charles James Fox from inside Parliament, and by Christopher Wyvill and Cartwright from the outside. Cartwright, in 1776, published the famous Take Your Choice! His main ideas were the introduction of universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, annual elections, and equality among electoral districts. He influenced radical thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. Cartwright’s influence was evident in the six points of the Chartists, a sociopolitical movement that developed in England between 1838 and 1850 that aimed to improve the terrible conditions of the working class and to introduce, at the political level, such fundamental rights as universal suffrage.
John Jebb (1736–1786) was a Unitarian who studied at Trinity College. He taught mathematics, but various colleges prohibited their students from attending his lectures because of his nonconformist religious ideas. He was in favor of independence for the American colonies and he condemned English policy towards America.
Capel Lofft (1751–1824) joined the radical movement for parliamentary reform in the second half of the eighteenth century. He was the author of An Argument on the Nature of Party and Faction: In Which Is Considered the Duty of a Good and Peaceable Citizen at the Present Crisis (1780).
Thomas Gordon (c. 1692–1750) was a lawyer in Scotland who later moved to London, where he began his work as a political writer and polemicist. Among Gordon’s works, see The Conspirators, The Case of Catiline (1721); A Learned Dissertation Upon Old Women (1720); Three Political Letters to a Noble Lord, Concerning Liberty and Constitution (1721).
Trenchard and Gordon helped to disseminate the thought of Locke, applying his ideas to the concrete problems of the government of the day. Their most important writings, in this regard, were Cato’s Letters, which came out in various editions in the American colonies where they were widely distributed. It seems that they were very important in forging the theoretical basis for the American Revolution. Gordon and Trenchard gave a particularly radical turn to Locke’s thought. While Locke justified rebelling against the government when the latter violated the natural rights of individuals, the two authors maintained that the government always tended to destroy individual rights rather than protect them. According to Cato’s Letters, the history of mankind was none other than the history of conflict between power and freedom. Power, i.e., the state, was always ready to violate the rights of its citizens and take away their freedom; therefore the state should be reduced to the minimum and be constantly controlled. See John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, in The English Libertarian Heritage: From the Writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters, ed. David L. Jacobson (San Francisco, Calif.: Fox and Wilkes, 1994). Gordon and Trenchard also published The Character of an Independent Whig (London: J. Roberts, 1719–1720).
Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was an English novelist and playwright who wrote Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749).
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was an English writer of Unitarian origins and a friend of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and John Keats. Author of An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), he worked for the Morning Chronicle, and his articles appeared in the collection A View of the English Stage (1818). See, among others, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817) and The Spirit of the Age (1825).
James Boswell (1749–1795), a Scottish lawyer, attended Adam Smith’s lectures at Glasgow University. During a trip to Europe in 1764, he interviewed Rousseau and Voltaire. He is most well known as the biographer of the famous man of letters Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).
Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), a Scottish philosopher and historian, taught moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1764 to 1785. He was one of the most important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Author of An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), he was one of the exponents of the spontaneous order tradition. According to Ferguson,
Like the winds that come we know not whence, and blow whithersoever they list, the forms of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise, long before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the speculations of men. ...This is the simplest form under which we can consider the establishment of nations: and we ascribe to a previous design, what came to be known only by experience, what no human wisdom could foresee, and what, without the concurring humour and disposition of his age, no authority could enable an individual to execute. (An Essay on the History of Civil Society [Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004], pp. 75–76)
One of the characteristic aspects of his thought was a profound criticism of commercial society, which, he claimed, through the division of labor, alienated man, depriving him of his humanity. For Ferguson, the development of the mechanical arts and the growth of production and trade did not automatically lead to moral and political progress. The division of labor in the sphere of the state, furthermore, had led to the establishment of a standing army that, in Ferguson’s opinion, was yet another instrument of oppression in the hands of government. Ferguson therefore proposed the republican ideal of the citizen soldier. This explicitly recalled the values and ideas of the modern republican tradition. He thought that freedom could be kept alive not so much by constitutions and laws but rather by the active participation of citizens in civil life.
Thomas Pownall (1722–1805) was the author of Administration of the Colonies (1764), in which he supported the idea of a union of all the British dominions on the basis of common commercial interests.
Margaret Mead (1901–1978), an American anthropologist, studied with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. Author of the famous Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), her numerous works also include Growing up in New Guinea (1930) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). She worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Franz Boas (1858–1942), a German anthropologist, was founder of a school of anthropology based on the concept of cultural relativism. He spent a large part of his career at Columbia University in New York. He specialized in the culture of the Indians of North America and had numerous students who continued to develop cultural anthropology. Author of The Mind of the Primitive Man (1911), Primitive Art (1927), and Language and Culture (1940).
Still, it is trade, and large expeditions are undertaken periodically by natives of this approximately ring-shaped archipelago in order to carry one kind of valuable object to peoples living on distant islands situated clockwise, while other expeditions are arranged carrying another kind of valuable object to the islands of the archipelago lying counterclockwise. In the long run, both sets of objects... will move round the archipelago, a traject which may take them up to ten years to complete. (p. 66)
