World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals

Against historians who treated the war as the death of progressive reform, Rothbard argues it was the culmination progressives had wanted all along. He traces the movement’s postmillennial pietist roots—a Protestantism bent on stamping out sin through the State—into wartime prohibition and the anti-vice crusades around the army camps, then through the New Republic collectivists who welcomed the war as the chance to remake society, and finally to the economists and statisticians, Richard Ely and Edwin Gay among them, who built the apparatus of government fact-gathering and their own careers along with it. First published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1989.