More than any other contemporary intellectual, Murray Rothbard stood in the Misesian tradition of economics.
Yet he knew that an intellectual enterprise is an ongoing affair.
Scholars must build new insights upon the foundations of the masters of the past without rending them asunder.
From the best traditions in economics and political philosophy, Rothbard erected a theory of liberty.
Each year we commemorate his achievements with the Murray Rothbard Memorial Lecture.
We are honored to have Joseph Stromberg deliver this year's Rothbard Memorial Lecture.
Mr Stromberg earned his BA and MA in history from Florida Atlantic University
and did further graduate studies in history at the University of Florida.
He has been a Summer Fellow at IHS and a Richard Weaver Fellow.
In addition to countless articles on www.antiwar.com, www.lewrockwell.com and www.mesis.org,
Mr. Stromberg has published in Individualist, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and Libertarian Forum, among other journals, and has contributed to many books including The Costs of War, The Myth of National Defense, and Secession, State and Liberty.
He is the author of the introduction to Clyde Wilson's book, From Union to Empire, and the author of the introduction and editor of the Scholar's Edition of Murray Rothbard's book, Man, Economy and State, with Power and Market.
Mr. Stromberg has held the Joanne B. Rothbard Chair in History at the Ludwig von Mises Institute since 2000,
and is currently working with David Gordon
on an intellectual biography of Murray and Rothbard.
His topic tonight is Rothbard's systematic defense of liberty.
Thank you, Dr. Herbiner.
I don't think I'm calling this a warrior for liberty,
Liberty, but I suppose systematic defense is equally good.
No one's mentioned this yet, but this is the 20th of March,
so it's either the exact day or it's
very close to the one year mark of the excellent adventure
in Iraq.
This is the sort of circumstance that makes one wish Murray
were still alive.
Murray would not have liked this,
but he would have written a major article every day
or so about it, would have reached a very large audience with the internet these days.
Not to mention, of course, the kind of film reviews he might be doing today.
And in fact, the circumstance that this is an anniversary of that sort reminds me of an article
An article Murray wrote in the form of hyperbole in the September 1994 Rothbard-Rockwell report, which was called Invade the World.
Some of you have read this. This, by the way, is the trend out of the Rothbard archives at lewrockwell.com.
We're gradually getting a very large number of these classic Rothbard articles online.
So this was sort of hyperbole that given the way the neocons were writing about foreign policy, they might as well call for invading the world.
Well the problem is you can't, it's not safe to satirize these people.
It's as dangerous to make this sort of suggestion.
Somehow they will actually think of this and then they'll want to invade the entire world.
So perhaps it was unwise, but still it bears reading now because this seems to be the formal basis of the present foreign policy.
Now, there's no saying that we stand on the shoulders of giants and see farther, and not having Bartlett's handy, I asked David Gordon, the source of this statement, he says it's very old.
It goes well back into the middle ages possibly, so I can't attribute to anyone, but Rothbard certainly did this.
is he knew who his predecessors were and he also found areas in which he thought he could
extend their work, he could improve upon it, do something original, but without any kind
of vanity that he was doing it all and this is his relationship to Mises, he realized
how fundamental Mises' work had been to his but he did see areas where you could take
things a bit further.
What do we say about Rothbard, leaving aside all the certain snide comments people have made because they don't understand that there are such things as polymaths?
Well, Rothbard was an economist, he was an economic historian, he was a general historian, he was a historian of ideas, he was a political theorist, and he's a philosopher,
I'm particularly interested of course in being able to apply ethics. He's the founder of a number of publications, editor, goes on, original thinker, and someone able to synthesize from a wide range of related fields in a systematic way, it's not eclectic. Rothbard's system was not like you go to the junkyard and you find old mufflers and exhaust pipes and you weld them into some thing you call art.
He had a certain idea when he started what a synthesis would look like, what sorts of parts would be compatible, and proceeded along these lines.
Well, what are the elements of the system? Well, to be fairly brief, there are, among other things, Aristotelian epistemology, some notion of natural law and the not unrelated notion of some kind of natural rights.
and Rational Ethic, which he found lacking in both Mises and writers like Russell Kirk, Austrian Economic Theory and the foundation that comes out of classical liberalism but in his view went beyond it in important areas.
Individualist anarchism, largely an American phenomenon but of course also including the contribution of Gustav de Molinari
and related to this, a sort of critical sociology of states, and again for obvious reasons, revisionist history.
And I was talking to David about this, trying to think of one element.
If you pulled it out with the whole edifice collapse, and we can't think of one,
if one element turned out to be wrong, you would say, well, that's not a big problem,
because it isn't the kind of synthesis that depends on something like a labor theory of value,
and if that could be refuted, you'd have a huge problem.
So nonetheless, of course, some of us tend to think
that these elements are pretty good as they are.
I mean, I suppose it turned out there's some fine point
of revisionist history that could be refuted
that doesn't do much to the overall sort of thing
Rothbard was about.
So he took from a wide range of related fields,
you know, what we might call the human studies
and integrated them into a new critical system.
Well, what's his motivation?
Well, his motivation comes partly from his personality,
the influence of his father's political values,
his immersion in the old right movement,
as soon as you found out there was such a thing, about 1946.
And then, of course, his inherent drive and ability
to synthesize what, with the old right,
was kind of implicit, not fully worked out.
Let me see if I can just add a few more things along these lines.
Of course you know that there's at least the 20-some books to his credit, many hundreds of articles.
If we had all the little ephemeral articles of a thousand words each,
and any kind of publication that would print him at different times, I would probably get into the thousands.
I think I had the bibliography.
This is the official bibliography that you print up from the Mises.org website, and this runs to about 70 pages, and I find ever so often something that isn't in here, just in going through the archives, Murray didn't throw much away, so we're always finding little brief articles that aren't listed or just in the course of things running across, there may be 10 or 20 now
we need to add to this bibliography.
So he did a lot of work and he had this energy,
there's this old saying that people thought
there may be five guys running into the same name
to be as productive as he was.
But as Gary North and many people have observed,
he was also fun to be around.
He had this lively personality, a sense of humor.
He actually enjoyed what he did.
This, I guess, is sort of the thrill of the chase, but also the sense that a cause was being served.
And even when he was angry, there was a point to it.
So it's very hard to convey Rothbard's personality. In fact, those of us who knew him to one degree or another
tend to fall into doing imitations, which I won't do that, but there are many people you probably have run into
from time to time who will do a Rothbard imitation.
And they might as well quit, because no one can talk to the late Roy Childs,
There are many adults who would do an imitation of Donald Duck doing Murray Rothbard.
This has never been surpassed as an art form.
Nonetheless, there are people who...
Certainly there's a sort of Rothbard phrasology that is still in use because,
well, we're used to it and it's sometimes funny.
Murray would often refer to someone he didn't like as the beloved...
The beloved Dr. Flexner, founder of medical intervention and regulation, you know, this sort of thing.
He had a number of key phrases that would, I'll think of some probably as I go,
but a number of key phrases that are peculiarly his, particularly in the combinations.
Now, he sometimes couldn't find his way into the mainstream journals.
So he just found a journal, and did a good job of that. So he founded Left and Right in the mid-60s, he founds a journal of libertarian studies at the end of the 1970s, and so on.
And particularly when he needed an outlet for his writing, in 1969 he started a libertarian forum somewhat in the tradition of one of his mentors, Frank Chodorov's analysis, which was kind of a broadsheet on oversized paper, four pages,
but a lot of room for articles in those big four pages.
So he had certainly a lot of energy and a lot
that he thought needed to be accomplished.
Now, in, I think, 1977, Jerome Shillay,
who had been an associate of Rothbard's a few years earlier,
Wrote an article in National Review in which he said, well, libertarianism on further examination had turned out to be a sort of utopian form of taft republicanism.
Well, it's not entirely untrue. Not entirely. Not a bad observation, except that what Ticilli missed at that time was that Rothbard was making a systematic form of taft republicanism and transcending its origins, it seems to me.
seems to me that was the point, where the old right was going the right direction, Rothbard wanted to see what flaws were in their arguments, what where it could be improved, whether it was economic issues, foreign policy, whatever it might be.
Now, just because the dreaded A-word started coming up,
employing a stateless market society, some people got the idea
that maybe Rothbard was some sort of nihilist wild man.
But again, culturally, Rothbard was always a bourgeois.
And you can see this in the articles where he announces his dissatisfaction with the New Left and the counterculture,
sets in only a few years after trying to deal with them, didn't take long, and so on.
Now he had this sense of long run optimism. Now we can say, well it's just
strategically we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't think we could accomplish
something, but Murray I think actually had a deeper basis for his optimism and
belief in rationality and the right would prevail. I'll mention a few more
More Things, Gregory North, of course, has lately said that Murray was fun to be around.
Clifford Tease introducing, of all things, a book of essays on Rothbard's contributions
to monetary economics says Rothbard had a sweet personality.
True enough.
And people would begin to sort of do whatever Rothbard was doing.
I mean, Wendy McIlroy tells me that she was at some conference or another and Murray would
He would be lounging back in the couch and he would just kind of go like this and so
all the other men present would just unconsciously start doing that because Rothbard was doing
that.
I need her to put this in writing but I tend to believe that, you know, he just had this
kind of, this is very odd, it's sort of like a low-key charisma, but it worked.
He also, in terms of his use of language, he got into reduplication, reduplication because
his insight was or his feeling was that many words had been debased
so if you want to talk about a movie you had to say movie movie
meaning a real movie
not some recent schlock
and then he started having to talk about cut cuts
which would be a real tax cut not
a lowering of an estimated increase of the budget so he had to reduplicate from time to
time to get his point across and there were others of these
may come to mind
And Murray was famous for quips.
I mean, I think of Murray as wielding the sword of truth,
but sometimes it was just the penknife of truth.
Just a little, you know.
One of these, for instance, at a conference
he's supposed to have said that he didn't think people
would really go to the Revolutionary Barricades
for a reduction in transaction costs.
And another one, which John Blundell has on the web,
There was some discussion of consumers, and Rothbard apparently said, well, what's so great about consumers? Any schmuck can consume.
And another thing, Murray, characteristically, if he was dealing with some standard issues, status, bromide, he would say, so what?
He had this attitude, but he would also then go on and unleash a bit of a devastating argument after he said, so what? It wasn't just a pose.
And more of this kind of thing you can find in the tribute book that Mises Institute published not long after Rothbard's death.
Quite a number of essays by people that knew him and his thought.
Now Murray had hobbies. It wasn't all revolution or public policy advocacy and so on.
Though he liked chess, he liked films, he liked to do movie reviews.
His first movie review goes back to, it was the original Devil in the Flesh.
It wasn't published but he did submit this review of the original Devil in the Flesh
and then a whole series of movie reviews, particularly the Libertarian Forum,
and you quickly find out what kind of films Murray thought were movie, movies.
In the, I guess it's 1986, Rothbard Festschrift, Justice Deneke discusses at some length, Rothbard's film criticism.
And he liked German baroque churches, he liked to study ethnic conflict.
In fact, Dr. Guthrie and I were just talking about this, not everyone likes to study ethnic conflict.
in detail and find out why the, you know, the Ruthenians don't like the guys next door, whoever it is, but he found this interesting and thought it might be of some importance in political theory to be aware of these issues existed.
He was interested, particularly, always interested, had some interest in theology and its implications for other kinds of thought.
He's done a lot, I think in the last 15 years of his work he particularly became interested in the types of Protestant theology and the political results of what happens with certain kinds of Protestant thinking in English speaking countries under certain conditions.
And he's interested in a sort of a range of cultural questions.
For instance, he has a number of books of essays
by Dwight MacDonald, which he's extensively marked up.
And he's interested in, of course,
he had a longstanding interest in poetry.
You can go back and find it in high school papers.
He wrote on some poets.
And there were certain poets he characteristically quoted.
And as a stylist, he loved writers like GK Chesterton
and so on.
He also invented a number of laws, which he said were not apodictically certain, but had a high predictive value.
And one of these laws was, no one resigns, referring to government bureaucrats.
And I have a working hypothesis that this came from his knowing Arthur Burns.
Because Burns had been his neighbor when he was growing up, and then as a Columbia professor, he was on Rothbard's dissertation committee.
And there's an incident when Rothbard is,
one of his jobs is working for the Volcker Fund
as an analyst, reviewing books, and they say,
Rothbard, go listen to these lectures by Burns,
and you're not supposed to speak.
Your role is just take notes and be quiet.
Well, of course, Murray, he's not going to be quiet.
So apparently, this was about 1957,
and it's the first instance of the phenomenon
of noticed case of stagflation.
Okay, so you're violating the Phillips curve or something.
And so Murray, of course, irrepressibly,
finally says, you know, Dr. Burns,
what happens if this condition continues?
And he says, well, we don't have to resign.
As far as I know, he didn't.
So this may be, although Murray did notice,
observed much later, that after Janet Reno
took full responsibility for Waco,
she didn't resign either.
So there may be other examples.
Murray also famously said that he liked gossip and he thought that gossip really was just the concrete details of history.
So there's something to that too.
So, he certainly, I was thinking it's a bit like Murray was sort of like what Walt Whitman thought Walt Whitman was, but wasn't rather made of multitudes possibly.
But let me go through in somewhat chronological order, go through a few more things.
There might be an interest in following, kind of implicitly, the book outline that David, Gordon and I are, there's a lot to say about Rothbard, it has to be a book.
Okay, Murray of course, some of you, many of you will know, had a lot of commies in the family.
Pretty much most of his aunts and uncles were fellow travelers or communists in the garment district.
District, and an outstanding exception being Murray's father, who was apparently a bit of a hard head and hated, didn't really enjoy trade unions and strikes and pickets and having things thrown at him.
Murray's father worked as a chemical analyst at the Tidewater Oil Refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey.
And there's an interesting incident when one of Murray's friends, this is I suppose about 1940, let me think, seven or eight, writes to Murray saying some sloppily sentimental liberal thing about trade unions and Murray writes back, he's in a high dungeon and he says,
to see here, these people have had my father trapped and imprisoned in the oil refinery for two or three weeks.
He had to throw food over the fence because the trade union thugs were out there picketing and causing trouble and menacing everyone.
And apparently the story was interesting enough that Frank Chodorov asked Rothbard to get his dad to give Chodorov a full account.
and Chodorov writes this up in his newsletter analysis in April of 1949. It's the front page story of the Bayonne strike.
So Murray came by some of his attitudes directly from his father.
But again, in this medium, it's kind of a bit exceptional in the school.
Now first, of course, his first school experience was public school which he hated.
I can't imagine Murray Rothbard actually blending well in an American public school anyway.
So once his parents realized that he was completely miserable and picked on and so forth,
they found him a good private school where he was much happier.
But even there he was basically surrounded by left liberals to communists.
This was the political spectrum.
There weren't that many likely a lot of right-wing soulmates in the private school.
So Murray was sort of on his own, but on the other hand, he could certainly make the arguments as needed.
So let's see, I may have, do I have anything on his, I don't have that up here,
but there's some interesting inscriptions in his yearbooks.
His fellow students saying, well, Rothbard, you won't get to punch me in Latin class anymore.
This guy's graduating, I guess, or the female student that says she expects in a few years to see Murray standing up in the Senate yelling about states' rights or some such thing.
People have thought maybe he'd become a famous historian and that they weren't far off.
That's all interesting.
Of course, he's got the capacity and the grades and he enrolls in Columbia University.
University. Now remember, this is all happening during this great high point of the state we call World War II.
There was actually a manpower form. They sent Rothbard a manpower form, you know, in case he'd be of some use in the war effort.
So he was supposed to list his special skills that would make him an asset to the state in the war effort if it came to that, but I don't think they really needed him, desperately.
So this is the atmosphere, this is the high point of statism, as Rothbard himself wrote later, this is a great peak experience for the left, this World War II, because they got all their social programs they wanted, they got state control of everything, they got price controls, almost anything that a progressive could possibly want was possible during the war, and they were very happy and the political spectrum was being pushed to the left and so on. So at Columbia University,
It takes a standard set of courses. One of the things I found out, I thought I had to investigate, was what sort of things were they doing at Columbia when Rothbard was there.
So I went on this search to find out what the intellectual traditions were in the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia University, and there was a very useful book written by R. Gordon Hoxie, edited by him in 1955, just after Rothbard had done all the coursework.
And the chapters are written by Joseph Dorfman, Rothbard's major professor, Seymour Martin Lipset, all sorts of people who knew the history of the particular departments within the faculty of political science, which includes economics, statistics, I guess history, law, just all of that.
And so I found out the genealogy of the sorts of things being taught at Columbia at that time was not good.
Rothbard got an excellent education, but he had to reject pretty much all of their assumptions.
Everything they systematically believed, he had to reject all of this.
Because here's the department that's essentially founded by Francis Lieber,
some of you know who that is, wrote Lincoln's General Orders 100,
sort of a quasi-Hegelian immigrant who was Lincoln's legal advisor on suppressing the South
and the laws of war and a kind of posthumous framework.
And he's succeeded by John W. Burgess, who is interesting, but is another interesting
character, an East Tennessee Unionist who became a Compton while being a pious Protestant,
studied in Germany, became a Hegelian and came back to bring these happy ideas about
the state to American university life and then helped design the curriculum and so on.
And over time, the whole approach of Columbia in department after department becomes more
more statistical, mathematical, positivist, everything Rothbard was skeptical about and in the end had to reject, but nonetheless he got a lot of useful information and knew what the currents were and what the debates were at the time.
He says in the famous Two Walters interview, this is called the Two Walters interview because Walter Grinder and Walter Block taped this interview in December of 1972,
So he says that when he was in Columbia, there was a sort of a methodological war going on
between the fading institutionalists and the new sort of logical positivists and this was
the kind of fight that was going on and of course he didn't find either position exactly
appealing and so on.
So some of you know the story that one of the courses Rothbard takes is with the young
George Stigler, free market economist who has written a pamphlet I guess with Friedman
called Roofs Without Ceilings, or was it ceilings without roofs, anyways, an attack on price
control.
Well this is a radical idea, nobody disbelieves in price controls in this university and this
place, I mean how could you disbelieve in price control as a mystic fascist.
So Rothbard finds this interesting, and he notices the pamphlet is put out by the Foundation for Economic Education, so he immediately writes a letter, and then they write back, and he's made a member for a dollar, whatever it costs in those days.
Well, of course, Rothbard immediately writes back and says, well, you know, here's a bunch of things you could do, about a seven-page memorandum on strategy.
But he's not shy, he's not pushy, he just has ideas and he wants to get them out, he's not being obnoxious, he just thinks he's got some ideas they might want to take into account.
There's a number of interesting things in the forties, because remember World War II is just over, the state is pushed, the price controls are still on, so these things are controversial.
and then the Republican Party sweeps the congressional elections and Rothbard thinks this is it, the New Deal will be repealed
and he writes the famous letter to one of the New York papers hailing the impending repeal of the New Deal
now that the country is obviously strategically premature
but nonetheless he's discovered the old right by way of fee and he's in touch with fee and then he begins to learn that there are people who are more radical than, let's say, Stegler
by Maurice Degler, so he finds out about Hayek
and he's invited to come to hear some lectures
and then he learns that Ludwig von Mises,
of whom he's heard by now, is actually alive
and living in New York and about to start a seminar,
or has started the seminar, so immediately he signs up.
And by then he's learned that there's a huge treatise
coming out by Mises, so he devours that
and he says, well, it's answered all the gaps
that when he had studied all the schools
of economic theory at Columbia University,
gotten through the entire graduate program,
Murray thought that the arguments all counseled one another out. The institutionalists had good criticisms of other schools, those schools had good criticisms, but there's no good positive theory.
And he reads Human Action and says, well, this is obviously the theory he's been waiting for.
And again, Murray, several years before this, he's already proposed a critique of the Keynesian model to Frank Chodorow to run Chodorow's analysis.
So this is like 47 and then we have like seven pages, it's not the whole essay, and there's letters where he's pleading with Chodorov, he says well I need more space, I need more room, you can't just shut up the Keynesian model and knock it down in a short article trying to explain this to Chodorov who's not an interesting guy and a great political essayist but not exactly an economic theorist. And so he's got a real grasp of the theoretical issues but he still hasn't at that point found the Austrian School.
Well, as soon as he does read Human Action, he immediately writes two reviews, one in Faith and Freedom, one in Frank Trotterer's Analysis, and then, of course, known as a Misesian.
Now, he's also working on his dissertation with Dorfman, and this is a study of the New York Press reaction, or the Press reaction to the Panic of 1819.
But now he's found a theory that helps explain this all better, and so he's working on a dissertation.
And I'm not going to go through the whole Man Economy and State thing because there's a web article and there's I think it's by now I suppose the whole introduction is to the new edition is online too, certainly the book is available so I won't go through all that but suffice it to say Rothbard's not afraid to take on a handful of major projects at one time. He's got a dissertation to finish, he starts in economic treaties, he's already got an idea for a book in the Great Depression, he's got all sorts of projects
on his mind at one time and then can work on them simultaneously and he points this out in the course of writing Man Economy and State that very often he's got three chapters, several chapters going at one time and as he develops them he'll see that while something can be moved and there's some interrelationship that's now more clear as he works on more than one topic more or less in the same period of time. So he starts writing popular articles for the old right political public
and other applications like faith and freedom.
And he has to have a pseudonym.
He feels he has to have a pseudonym
because these views are not really the sort of thing
they want Colombian economists associated with.
So he comes up with Jonathan Randolph as one pseudonym,
which I think he used at least once.
And then of course, Aubrey Herbert,
loosely based on Oberon Herbert,
the individualist writer in Britain,
late 19th, early 20th century,
and somehow related to, I think, Évelyn Waugh.
Anyway, and he writes a radio script, he writes a radio script called Not Worth a Continental, so it's a parable about inflation, and this actually was played on the right-wing radio program.
An interesting thing in the early 50s also is that Faith and Freedom has to reject an article they did on Lincoln because it's too shocking.
So heretical views about a number of things begin early, and then he meets all sorts of people.
He meets Ralph Reiko, George Reisman, a little bit later, Leonard Ligio, and so on, so he's got a group of simpatico people.
Now, I said he had a number of things going on at the same time. He's also got a number of jobs going on at once, because the job market apparently isn't that favorable, and then he also has views that might be a slight handicap.
So he does, at this time, he's doing consulting work for FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education,
and he's landed the consulting position with the Volcker Fund.
And the Volcker Fund is a whole other story. It's sort of like possibly the most important organization of the period
in terms of attempting to support libertarian and quasi-libertarian scholarship.
And they'll send Rothbard a stack of 20 books and they want his opinion.
And he's very industrious, and he'll go through that and say, oh, I wrote the memo, I spent 10 hours on this book.
and he's kind of being paid piecework, but he's not a trade unionist so he doesn't care, he does a good job.
That's why we have this huge stack of memos from the early 50s down into 1962.
You can see a lot more about how Rothbard's views on historical, political, philosophical, economic and other questions are developing
and you begin to see the scope of the reading he's doing.
David, of course, has memorably dealt with the memos that pertain to Leo Strauss, but he's dealt with everyone.
They sent him any book they thought might be of interest and they wanted an opinion, so they would know whether to subsidize giving this book to libraries or whether it was a bad book they didn't want to encourage and so on.
And so, at any given time, he's got enough part-time jobs going to make a living.
And then he has the grant, also from the Volcker Fund, to do the economic treaties.
Well, actually, it begins with a textbook, becomes the treaties, but that's all explained in the introduction.
And knowing that's going to run out, because he's going to be done, he begins making an application for a grant,
and I think the Earhart Foundation to do something on America's Great Depression and in due course.
So he has a number of publications come out right in a row because Man Economy and State's been underway,
essentially done by 57, but then there's the problem of finding the publisher,
then there's the infamous cutting power market out business.
So that's published in, let's see, 62.
Then the dissertation comes out as the Panic of 1819 and 63, but also the Great Depression book the same year.
the same year so suddenly he's got three books on why did he take off why is he
suddenly the host of the town one reason I suppose is that the Friedman and
Schwartz book came out I was supposed to explain things like depressions this
might have had a sinking effect also I suppose Rothbard's views weren't really
going to take off in that climate but what I find sort of coming up towards
The present is that, in attempting to assess Rothbard's impact, you find that a number of specialists know Rothbard's work.
So people that work on monetary history of the early 19th century, they know The Panning of 1819.
This book is cited by all sorts of historians, so they know the book on The Panning of 1819.
And then there are the other scholars who work on Herbert Hoover, and they cite Rothbard's work on Herbert Hoover,
whether it's Herbert Hoover and the food program in Europe
or Herbert Hoover as a sort of corporatist, all of this.
So the Hoover scholars know Rothbard.
I don't know if they know that Rothbard also did
depending on 1819.
They don't really seem to know that Rothbard
did more than one thing.
They just kind of know him in these areas.
I mean, if I had one reference,
someone knows that Rothbard wrote a pamphlet
on the Panama Canal Treaty.
Doesn't seem to, but this is just,
might have been an artifact of the search.
Maybe people do realize Rothbard had this breadth,
but I tend to think they often don't, okay.
So he's doing all this work, he's got a huge amount of
different kinds of knowledge to cross-reference and so on.
Well, he's beginning to see
how this fits together systematically.
And he's troubled, of course, by the fact that in Mises' system, it seems in the end of a utilitarian, there's no rational ethics, he believes it's possible to have a rational system of ethics, and this apparently is one reason he had some discussions for a time with the Ayn Rand circle, that this didn't work out, they weren't quite looking for the same rational, ethical system, and so on. But I'll leave that to you.
and other places where I've written on this for now.
And at the same time, as we come into the mid-50s,
the old right is on the wind.
The old right movement that Rothbard joined
and to which he started contributing
is being phased out in favor of the new right.
Now this is to use Rothbard's terminology.
And in my view, Rothbard, by coming up with the concept
of the old right and making this distinction
was performing an act of piety
and an important piece of historical reconstruction.
I mean, it's not exactly unknown.
You see this in George Nash's book
on the conservative intellectual movement.
He says, well, yeah, there was some changes
in foreign policy views, but he treats it
like it's sort of trivial and important.
Those may matter a great deal.
He's very complacent about it.
Well, that's better than the guys that say
it was wonderful that this happened.
But Rothbard's very troubled by the passing
of the non-interventionist position.
had characterized, in a general sort of way, the old right movement.
Now Rothbard also admits that he's done a kind of ideal typification of the old right.
When he talks about the old right, he's got in mind a group of people who are sort of the best sample,
whose ideas he now wishes to systematically improve, and so on.
So he's rather frustrated with the direction of the right wing,
and he obviously believes, among other things, that a foreign policy grounded on intervention
and constant semi-mobilization and so-called peacetime is not going to be good for liberty.
And true enough, I mean, now we finally have the political scientists like, oh, Mesers,
Eikenberry and Dudeney write an article right after the Soviet Union falls about 1992 and
and they say, gosh, the artificial phony consensus, social contract of the Cold War is over.
What a terrible thing and now the presidency might decline.
Washington might be less important. What a terrible thing we've been having the luxury of this progressive consensus made possible by the Cold War
because everything can be justified as necessary to defeat the Communists.
I mean, better dental care, we can't defeat the Communists without better dental care provided by the Federal Government.
Everything could be, you know, highways, anything you want, cold war, you have to do it, defeat the Russians, go to the moon, I don't know.
So these guys noticed this, now of course, there were those who weren't going to go into that dark night quietly, they wanted to substitute cold war.
They're doing pretty well on that front. I'll leave that aside for the moment.
So this is his motivation. Now he does a number of interesting jobs now and of course by January of 53 he is married to Joey.
There's a lot of letters when they're not married. These are very sweet letters. I won't go into that, but touching.
So, he's balancing these jobs. He does a series of abortive encyclopedia articles and then gets written back.
Well, this isn't really what we wanted and this doesn't really seem to be a very good article in Rothbard, basically.
He writes some letters saying, you dummies, do you understand this is a good article, you idiots?
So they sent him like a $50 kill fee for these encyclopedia articles where he's working on a level
and all that they don't apparently appreciate.
It also does some speech running for Congressman Gwynn,
who's the kind of old right fixture in New York.
And he has a placer jobs in the area, and in New York City essentially,
he doesn't want to leave New York, so it's a funny story.
Again, in roughly the mid-50s, Mr. Hoyles of the Freedom Newspapers
is impressed with Rothbard's writing, and he writes Rothbard and says,
you know, dear Murray, I'd like you to edit a newspaper for me in Odessa, Texas.
So Rothbard writes back and says, well, thank you very much, but I really can't see myself living in Odessa, Texas.
So that didn't happen.
So I suppose I need to fast forward. I don't know where...
Well, what he's doing at the same time he's doing all this huge amount of reading and writing of memos and critiques for the Volcker Fund and the other projects I've mentioned,
He's also digging out a huge amount of information about obscure, forgotten,
passed over classical liberals, radical liberals, people like Molinari, Spence, Spooner and Tucker.
He's always got a list. He's got his little sloppy type lists and books that I need to get.
He's got this long list of obscure 19th century radical classical liberal anarchist stuff that he's found out exists.
I think part of what happened is that Dorfman already knew about this stuff, because there's a very thorough history of,
historian of American academic thought, Dorfman knew who people like Josiah Warren were, or maybe even Tucker, so I think this might have been a shortcut.
But so he has these long lists and he begins acquiring these books and he wants something like,
Oh, the French translation of Jevons, because there's a preface by Penlevé or something he needs to say for the critique of mathematical.
He's got all these want lists and he gradually acquires these things and begins to integrate these ideas.
Anyway, what's problematic is where did liberalism go wrong?
He thinks that clearly the classic liberal is on the right track, but something hasn't worked out and there's been some kind of default or failure to level of theory.
and he begins to see that maybe Molinari and some of these writers are pointing in the right direction
and this of course intensifies and over the next few years he systematically begins to address these things.
By the way, there's a late 19th century book, the exact title escapes me,
but I'm sorry, early, I guess early 20th century, about 1910 or a little bit earlier,
Lone Last Books by Molinari where Molinari speculates on what this next century will be like and Molinari says well it'll probably be a horrible century because the militarists and the socialists will compete for power and tear everything up.
Pretty much what happened.
But what Rothbard is doing on the other end of the telescope, you know, fifty-seven years later is basically stating what Molinari predicted but seeing as it's already happened and trying to figure out why.
There's kind of an interesting relationship between these two bodies of writing, I think.
Okay, let's see.
Well, I could go on a great length about the sorts of things he's reviewing.
He's looking at Thomistic philosophers.
He's looking at Whig history.
He doesn't like Whig history.
And a number of important essays come out of this period,
the Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,
The Mantle of Science, which has created some controversy
with the Randians at one point.
A number of things as part of his systematic work
and many of these essays of course are now reprinted
in the Logic of Action volumes and then so on.
Now he's got a kind of tenuous relationship
with National Review because the old right publications
And as of all sort of seats, the Freeman basically sort of implodes partly for lack of money and also because the editors can't agree on the Cold War, there's a few holdouts like Chodorov and so on and attempts to, so it ends up in the hands of Fee and is devoted entirely to economics and not anything controversial like foreign policy, National Review fills the gap and embraces the Cold War wholeheartedly. So Rothbard, there being no other magazine around really, Rothbard does
There's a nice article from time to time for National Review, a nice article on Westerns, Murray liked the real Westerns, but economic issues, a range of questions, even a couple of ethical questions where he and Frank Meyer would get into some kind of argument, but they never really write about foreign policy because this was their key area of disagreement and it takes until about 62 for Rothbard and the National Review crowd to decide not to have anything at all to do with one another.
And, it seems like I haven't covered his life, but there's a lot, he's doing a lot, I don't know, is he even timing me, or?
I'm trying to throw out a few more things of interest, but anyway, he's got these books, we're now in the, let's say we're getting towards the mid-1960s,
and he is in despair about the right wing, actually there's letters as far back as 1954, he's sick to death of these right wing Cold War types,
He's ready for new allies, he just can't find any.
And as we get into the mid-sixties,
there begin to be some interesting people
riding on the left, which is William F. and Williams,
there's a few people, and he begins to try
to make contact with them.
Or John Lukash, who's sort of got
an eccentric style of conservatism.
Rothbard writes to him, and then certain ones
that didn't work out, like Ronald Radosh, and so on.
And meanwhile, Rothbard struck up a very big correspondence
with Harry Elmer Barnes, a revisionist historian
and other wild character.
They first wrote it in 48,
but there's no record of any real correspondence again
until 1959, and then there's the large correspondence
down to Barnes' death, and Rothbard ends up kind of
as the de facto editor of the Festschrift
written about Barnes and so on.
And then there's something comes along
called the Dean Russell fracas,
but I don't know if they have time,
sort of enter this view within the small libertarian circles about anarchism.
Okay, let me at least come into the New Left period, Rothbard begins to think maybe there's somebody out there that's not a complete idiot that you can talk to and maybe there's some common ground.
I found a rather touching article in this little newsletter called The Innovator, which was being published in Southern California by people, among others, Guy Dorios, who I think turns out to be the vitamin guy, Dirk Pearson, but it was a kind of classic liberal newsletter founded in 62.
Well, some well-meaning fellow was writing in 1966 that, well, maybe we can work with these SDS people, they're right about the war and they seem to be okay on civil liberties.
We just have to get these SDS guys to read Man Economy and State.
Well, of course, true, but not likely to happen.
Entirely true, the impulse is probably good, but didn't happen, probably wasn't likely to in the real world.
So we'll just have to get someone to read it.
Okay, now this is when Rothbard begins his sustained critique of the conservative movement,
I'll just refer you to the fact that most of these articles in Continuum, Modern AIDS, there's a whole number of these articles, starting with his, I suppose with his reply to Huntington, when Huntington in effect predicts neoconservatism in 1957, Jonah Goldberg's research assistant went out and found out about this for him, but Jonah took this to mean that Huntington was right, and nothing else happened, he said, miss this part of the debate. Rothbard said that there had to be some content
to conservatism, it couldn't just be situational,
there wouldn't be any point.
We'd just be always conserving whatever garbage
is going on right now.
Seems like that's a good point.
There are a number of other articles in Modern Age
and elsewhere over the next several years,
kind of running critique of the conservative movement.
These are all, I think all these are online now.
Lew Rockwell and the Rothbard Archive.
1967, Rothbard takes the New York Driving Test.
He doesn't pass.
He writes this great letter to, I forget who it's to, but this great letter about how the
the status-likey, vicious people have failed him and it's, you know, cruel example of status and
I suppose partly tongue-in-cheek, I don't know, but it's a great letter.
Now, he didn't have a Nevada driver's license, so apparently at that late date he didn't pass the driving test.
But anyway, that's a funny letter.
But I think I'm probably running a bit long, unless I can...
Well, I just mentioned in passing, of course, you know,
he goes on to continue his turn into history
and begins writing the Conceived to Liberty volumes.
And I have two points on that, and I'll close.
One is that there was this funny program associated
This historian, Jesse Lemish, in the New Left period, and he was going to write history from the bottom up.
And I think it was, who was it that made the famous critique?
Another historian said, well the problem with itinerants and sailors and layabouts is they don't usually leave many documents for the historian.
So it's smart to write history from the bottom up.
A good point.
But one of the things Rothbard in a way tries to do in Conceived in Liberty is to come as close to that as you can.
He's actually concerned about the taxpayers and the frontiers of many actual people in colonial America.
He's actually concerned with the concrete guys who aren't famous and weren't George Washington.
He's actually done as close as we can get to a kind of real history from the bottom up without a socialist agenda attached to it.
I'll give you one quip. This is in volume two of Conceived in Liberty.
He's just talking about Governor Dinwiddie and one of his wars, and he just says in passing,
like all hardliners everywhere, he was resolved to fight to the last life and bit of property of everyone else.
Page 232, and I read that now and I think, oh yeah, sort of like Pearl.
Or Frum. There's a number of people that come to mind when I...
And then there's a very similar line in Ammon Hennessy's autobiography, which Murray had read and extensively underlined.
I think this, not the wording, but the notion is, it's a similar kind of wording, I think this stuck with Murray and he used this later without using Hennessy's exact wording, but it's a similar notion which would not be of course out of place in someone who didn't like this kind of thing, but it's rather striking, so, well I suppose I should just leave it at that, if you have any hard questions just ask David Gordon.