WEBVTT NOTE Rothbard's Systematic Defense of Liberty 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 More than any other contemporary intellectual, Murray Rothbard stood in the Misesian tradition of economics. 2 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:10.000 Yet he knew that an intellectual enterprise is an ongoing affair. 3 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:17.000 Scholars must build new insights upon the foundations of the masters of the past without rending them asunder. 4 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:24.000 From the best traditions in economics and political philosophy, Rothbard erected a theory of liberty. 5 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:29.000 Each year we commemorate his achievements with the Murray Rothbard Memorial Lecture. 6 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:35.000 We are honored to have Joseph Stromberg deliver this year's Rothbard Memorial Lecture. 7 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:41.000 Mr Stromberg earned his BA and MA in history from Florida Atlantic University 8 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:45.000 and did further graduate studies in history at the University of Florida. 9 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:52.000 He has been a Summer Fellow at IHS and a Richard Weaver Fellow. 10 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:59.000 In addition to countless articles on www.antiwar.com, www.lewrockwell.com and www.mesis.org, 11 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:17.000 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. 12 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:33.000 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. 13 00:01:33.000 --> 00:01:40.000 Mr. Stromberg has held the Joanne B. Rothbard Chair in History at the Ludwig von Mises Institute since 2000, 14 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:43.000 and is currently working with David Gordon 15 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:47.000 on an intellectual biography of Murray and Rothbard. 16 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:52.000 His topic tonight is Rothbard's systematic defense of liberty. 17 00:02:00.000 --> 00:02:03.000 Thank you, Dr. Herbiner. 18 00:02:03.000 --> 00:02:07.000 I don't think I'm calling this a warrior for liberty, 19 00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:11.040 Liberty, but I suppose systematic defense is equally good. 20 00:02:15.320 --> 00:02:19.880 No one's mentioned this yet, but this is the 20th of March, 21 00:02:19.880 --> 00:02:21.720 so it's either the exact day or it's 22 00:02:21.720 --> 00:02:26.160 very close to the one year mark of the excellent adventure 23 00:02:26.160 --> 00:02:28.320 in Iraq. 24 00:02:28.320 --> 00:02:30.600 This is the sort of circumstance that makes one wish Murray 25 00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:32.920 were still alive. 26 00:02:32.920 --> 00:02:34.200 Murray would not have liked this, 27 00:02:34.200 --> 00:02:36.800 but he would have written a major article every day 28 00:02:36.800 --> 00:02:45.800 or so about it, would have reached a very large audience with the internet these days. 29 00:02:45.800 --> 00:02:53.800 Not to mention, of course, the kind of film reviews he might be doing today. 30 00:02:53.800 --> 00:03:00.800 And in fact, the circumstance that this is an anniversary of that sort reminds me of an article 31 00:03:00.800 --> 00:03:11.800 An article Murray wrote in the form of hyperbole in the September 1994 Rothbard-Rockwell report, which was called Invade the World. 32 00:03:11.800 --> 00:03:20.800 Some of you have read this. This, by the way, is the trend out of the Rothbard archives at lewrockwell.com. 33 00:03:20.800 --> 00:03:27.800 We're gradually getting a very large number of these classic Rothbard articles online. 34 00:03:27.800 --> 00:03:35.800 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. 35 00:03:35.800 --> 00:03:38.800 Well the problem is you can't, it's not safe to satirize these people. 36 00:03:38.800 --> 00:03:42.800 It's as dangerous to make this sort of suggestion. 37 00:03:42.800 --> 00:03:47.800 Somehow they will actually think of this and then they'll want to invade the entire world. 38 00:03:47.800 --> 00:03:56.800 So perhaps it was unwise, but still it bears reading now because this seems to be the formal basis of the present foreign policy. 39 00:03:56.800 --> 00:04:11.800 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. 40 00:04:11.800 --> 00:04:21.800 It goes well back into the middle ages possibly, so I can't attribute to anyone, but Rothbard certainly did this. 41 00:04:21.800 --> 00:04:27.480 is he knew who his predecessors were and he also found areas in which he thought he could 42 00:04:27.480 --> 00:04:32.640 extend their work, he could improve upon it, do something original, but without any kind 43 00:04:32.640 --> 00:04:37.760 of vanity that he was doing it all and this is his relationship to Mises, he realized 44 00:04:37.760 --> 00:04:45.560 how fundamental Mises' work had been to his but he did see areas where you could take 45 00:04:45.560 --> 00:04:46.560 things a bit further. 46 00:04:46.560 --> 00:04:57.560 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? 47 00:04:57.560 --> 00:05:10.560 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, 48 00:05:10.560 --> 00:05:40.560 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. 49 00:05:40.560 --> 00:05:51.060 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. 50 00:05:51.060 --> 00:06:08.060 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. 51 00:06:08.060 --> 00:06:26.060 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. 52 00:06:26.060 --> 00:06:34.060 Individualist anarchism, largely an American phenomenon but of course also including the contribution of Gustav de Molinari 53 00:06:34.060 --> 00:06:44.060 and related to this, a sort of critical sociology of states, and again for obvious reasons, revisionist history. 54 00:06:44.060 --> 00:06:48.060 And I was talking to David about this, trying to think of one element. 55 00:06:48.060 --> 00:06:52.060 If you pulled it out with the whole edifice collapse, and we can't think of one, 56 00:06:52.060 --> 00:06:57.060 if one element turned out to be wrong, you would say, well, that's not a big problem, 57 00:06:57.060 --> 00:07:01.060 because it isn't the kind of synthesis that depends on something like a labor theory of value, 58 00:07:01.060 --> 00:07:03.620 and if that could be refuted, you'd have a huge problem. 59 00:07:04.580 --> 00:07:06.980 So nonetheless, of course, some of us tend to think 60 00:07:06.980 --> 00:07:10.660 that these elements are pretty good as they are. 61 00:07:10.660 --> 00:07:12.700 I mean, I suppose it turned out there's some fine point 62 00:07:12.700 --> 00:07:14.740 of revisionist history that could be refuted 63 00:07:14.740 --> 00:07:18.260 that doesn't do much to the overall sort of thing 64 00:07:18.260 --> 00:07:19.880 Rothbard was about. 65 00:07:19.880 --> 00:07:24.880 So he took from a wide range of related fields, 66 00:07:26.580 --> 00:07:28.980 you know, what we might call the human studies 67 00:07:28.980 --> 00:07:31.380 and integrated them into a new critical system. 68 00:07:31.380 --> 00:07:33.060 Well, what's his motivation? 69 00:07:33.060 --> 00:07:37.260 Well, his motivation comes partly from his personality, 70 00:07:37.260 --> 00:07:39.300 the influence of his father's political values, 71 00:07:39.300 --> 00:07:41.380 his immersion in the old right movement, 72 00:07:41.380 --> 00:07:46.860 as soon as you found out there was such a thing, about 1946. 73 00:07:46.860 --> 00:07:51.260 And then, of course, his inherent drive and ability 74 00:07:51.260 --> 00:07:53.620 to synthesize what, with the old right, 75 00:07:53.620 --> 00:07:56.340 was kind of implicit, not fully worked out. 76 00:07:58.980 --> 00:08:03.480 Let me see if I can just add a few more things along these lines. 77 00:08:03.480 --> 00:08:09.480 Of course you know that there's at least the 20-some books to his credit, many hundreds of articles. 78 00:08:09.480 --> 00:08:12.480 If we had all the little ephemeral articles of a thousand words each, 79 00:08:12.480 --> 00:08:19.980 and any kind of publication that would print him at different times, I would probably get into the thousands. 80 00:08:19.980 --> 00:08:22.480 I think I had the bibliography. 81 00:08:22.480 --> 00:08:52.480 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 82 00:08:52.480 --> 00:08:54.220 we need to add to this bibliography. 83 00:08:55.160 --> 00:08:57.800 So he did a lot of work and he had this energy, 84 00:08:57.800 --> 00:09:00.280 there's this old saying that people thought 85 00:09:00.280 --> 00:09:03.440 there may be five guys running into the same name 86 00:09:03.440 --> 00:09:05.840 to be as productive as he was. 87 00:09:08.300 --> 00:09:11.240 But as Gary North and many people have observed, 88 00:09:11.240 --> 00:09:12.640 he was also fun to be around. 89 00:09:12.640 --> 00:09:17.520 He had this lively personality, a sense of humor. 90 00:09:17.520 --> 00:09:21.140 He actually enjoyed what he did. 91 00:09:22.480 --> 00:09:27.480 This, I guess, is sort of the thrill of the chase, but also the sense that a cause was being served. 92 00:09:27.480 --> 00:09:31.480 And even when he was angry, there was a point to it. 93 00:09:31.480 --> 00:09:37.480 So it's very hard to convey Rothbard's personality. In fact, those of us who knew him to one degree or another 94 00:09:37.480 --> 00:09:43.480 tend to fall into doing imitations, which I won't do that, but there are many people you probably have run into 95 00:09:43.480 --> 00:09:46.480 from time to time who will do a Rothbard imitation. 96 00:09:46.480 --> 00:09:50.480 And they might as well quit, because no one can talk to the late Roy Childs, 97 00:09:50.480 --> 00:09:55.480 There are many adults who would do an imitation of Donald Duck doing Murray Rothbard. 98 00:09:55.480 --> 00:09:59.480 This has never been surpassed as an art form. 99 00:09:59.480 --> 00:10:02.480 Nonetheless, there are people who... 100 00:10:02.480 --> 00:10:08.480 Certainly there's a sort of Rothbard phrasology that is still in use because, 101 00:10:08.480 --> 00:10:12.480 well, we're used to it and it's sometimes funny. 102 00:10:12.480 --> 00:10:18.480 Murray would often refer to someone he didn't like as the beloved... 103 00:10:18.480 --> 00:10:26.480 The beloved Dr. Flexner, founder of medical intervention and regulation, you know, this sort of thing. 104 00:10:26.480 --> 00:10:32.480 He had a number of key phrases that would, I'll think of some probably as I go, 105 00:10:32.480 --> 00:10:39.480 but a number of key phrases that are peculiarly his, particularly in the combinations. 106 00:10:39.480 --> 00:10:47.480 Now, he sometimes couldn't find his way into the mainstream journals. 107 00:10:47.480 --> 00:11:00.480 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. 108 00:11:00.480 --> 00:11:16.480 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, 109 00:11:16.480 --> 00:11:21.040 but a lot of room for articles in those big four pages. 110 00:11:21.040 --> 00:11:28.120 So he had certainly a lot of energy and a lot 111 00:11:28.120 --> 00:11:33.120 that he thought needed to be accomplished. 112 00:11:33.120 --> 00:11:40.520 Now, in, I think, 1977, Jerome Shillay, 113 00:11:40.520 --> 00:11:44.640 who had been an associate of Rothbard's a few years earlier, 114 00:11:44.640 --> 00:11:58.640 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. 115 00:11:58.640 --> 00:12:13.640 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. 116 00:12:13.640 --> 00:12:29.040 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. 117 00:12:29.040 --> 00:12:34.780 Now, just because the dreaded A-word started coming up, 118 00:12:34.780 --> 00:12:42.040 employing a stateless market society, some people got the idea 119 00:12:42.040 --> 00:12:46.780 that maybe Rothbard was some sort of nihilist wild man. 120 00:12:46.780 --> 00:12:50.040 But again, culturally, Rothbard was always a bourgeois. 121 00:12:50.040 --> 00:12:57.040 And you can see this in the articles where he announces his dissatisfaction with the New Left and the counterculture, 122 00:12:57.040 --> 00:13:03.800 sets in only a few years after trying to deal with them, didn't take long, and so on. 123 00:13:03.800 --> 00:13:09.040 Now he had this sense of long run optimism. Now we can say, well it's just 124 00:13:09.040 --> 00:13:12.080 strategically we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't think we could accomplish 125 00:13:12.080 --> 00:13:17.840 something, but Murray I think actually had a deeper basis for his optimism and 126 00:13:17.840 --> 00:13:25.480 belief in rationality and the right would prevail. I'll mention a few more 127 00:13:25.480 --> 00:13:31.120 More Things, Gregory North, of course, has lately said that Murray was fun to be around. 128 00:13:31.120 --> 00:13:36.720 Clifford Tease introducing, of all things, a book of essays on Rothbard's contributions 129 00:13:36.720 --> 00:13:40.600 to monetary economics says Rothbard had a sweet personality. 130 00:13:40.600 --> 00:13:41.600 True enough. 131 00:13:41.600 --> 00:13:49.200 And people would begin to sort of do whatever Rothbard was doing. 132 00:13:49.200 --> 00:13:53.840 I mean, Wendy McIlroy tells me that she was at some conference or another and Murray would 133 00:13:53.840 --> 00:13:57.820 He would be lounging back in the couch and he would just kind of go like this and so 134 00:13:57.820 --> 00:14:01.520 all the other men present would just unconsciously start doing that because Rothbard was doing 135 00:14:01.520 --> 00:14:02.520 that. 136 00:14:02.520 --> 00:14:05.120 I need her to put this in writing but I tend to believe that, you know, he just had this 137 00:14:05.120 --> 00:14:13.680 kind of, this is very odd, it's sort of like a low-key charisma, but it worked. 138 00:14:13.680 --> 00:14:19.560 He also, in terms of his use of language, he got into reduplication, reduplication because 139 00:14:19.560 --> 00:14:24.220 his insight was or his feeling was that many words had been debased 140 00:14:24.220 --> 00:14:27.540 so if you want to talk about a movie you had to say movie movie 141 00:14:27.540 --> 00:14:29.300 meaning a real movie 142 00:14:29.300 --> 00:14:31.840 not some recent schlock 143 00:14:31.840 --> 00:14:34.380 and then he started having to talk about cut cuts 144 00:14:34.380 --> 00:14:36.280 which would be a real tax cut not 145 00:14:36.280 --> 00:14:40.420 a lowering of an estimated increase of the budget so he had to reduplicate from time to 146 00:14:40.420 --> 00:14:44.220 time to get his point across and there were others of these 147 00:14:44.220 --> 00:14:46.720 may come to mind 148 00:14:46.720 --> 00:14:48.360 And Murray was famous for quips. 149 00:14:48.360 --> 00:14:50.200 I mean, I think of Murray as wielding the sword of truth, 150 00:14:50.200 --> 00:14:53.400 but sometimes it was just the penknife of truth. 151 00:14:53.400 --> 00:14:55.540 Just a little, you know. 152 00:14:55.540 --> 00:14:57.200 One of these, for instance, at a conference 153 00:14:57.200 --> 00:14:58.840 he's supposed to have said that he didn't think people 154 00:14:58.840 --> 00:15:00.580 would really go to the Revolutionary Barricades 155 00:15:00.580 --> 00:15:02.880 for a reduction in transaction costs. 156 00:15:06.140 --> 00:15:10.580 And another one, which John Blundell has on the web, 157 00:15:10.580 --> 00:15:22.580 There was some discussion of consumers, and Rothbard apparently said, well, what's so great about consumers? Any schmuck can consume. 158 00:15:22.580 --> 00:15:33.580 And another thing, Murray, characteristically, if he was dealing with some standard issues, status, bromide, he would say, so what? 159 00:15:33.580 --> 00:15:41.580 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. 160 00:15:44.580 --> 00:15:51.580 And more of this kind of thing you can find in the tribute book that Mises Institute published not long after Rothbard's death. 161 00:15:51.580 --> 00:15:56.580 Quite a number of essays by people that knew him and his thought. 162 00:15:56.580 --> 00:16:03.580 Now Murray had hobbies. It wasn't all revolution or public policy advocacy and so on. 163 00:16:03.580 --> 00:16:08.580 Though he liked chess, he liked films, he liked to do movie reviews. 164 00:16:08.580 --> 00:16:12.580 His first movie review goes back to, it was the original Devil in the Flesh. 165 00:16:12.580 --> 00:16:18.580 It wasn't published but he did submit this review of the original Devil in the Flesh 166 00:16:18.580 --> 00:16:23.580 and then a whole series of movie reviews, particularly the Libertarian Forum, 167 00:16:23.580 --> 00:16:27.580 and you quickly find out what kind of films Murray thought were movie, movies. 168 00:16:27.580 --> 00:16:38.580 In the, I guess it's 1986, Rothbard Festschrift, Justice Deneke discusses at some length, Rothbard's film criticism. 169 00:16:38.580 --> 00:16:43.580 And he liked German baroque churches, he liked to study ethnic conflict. 170 00:16:43.580 --> 00:16:48.580 In fact, Dr. Guthrie and I were just talking about this, not everyone likes to study ethnic conflict. 171 00:16:48.580 --> 00:17:05.580 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. 172 00:17:05.580 --> 00:17:13.580 He was interested, particularly, always interested, had some interest in theology and its implications for other kinds of thought. 173 00:17:13.580 --> 00:17:34.580 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. 174 00:17:34.580 --> 00:17:38.340 And he's interested in a sort of a range of cultural questions. 175 00:17:38.340 --> 00:17:40.660 For instance, he has a number of books of essays 176 00:17:40.660 --> 00:17:43.340 by Dwight MacDonald, which he's extensively marked up. 177 00:17:43.340 --> 00:17:45.700 And he's interested in, of course, 178 00:17:45.700 --> 00:17:48.940 he had a longstanding interest in poetry. 179 00:17:48.940 --> 00:17:52.140 You can go back and find it in high school papers. 180 00:17:52.140 --> 00:17:53.400 He wrote on some poets. 181 00:17:53.400 --> 00:17:55.820 And there were certain poets he characteristically quoted. 182 00:17:55.820 --> 00:18:00.460 And as a stylist, he loved writers like GK Chesterton 183 00:18:00.460 --> 00:18:01.860 and so on. 184 00:18:01.860 --> 00:18:09.860 He also invented a number of laws, which he said were not apodictically certain, but had a high predictive value. 185 00:18:09.860 --> 00:18:15.860 And one of these laws was, no one resigns, referring to government bureaucrats. 186 00:18:15.860 --> 00:18:21.860 And I have a working hypothesis that this came from his knowing Arthur Burns. 187 00:18:21.860 --> 00:18:28.860 Because Burns had been his neighbor when he was growing up, and then as a Columbia professor, he was on Rothbard's dissertation committee. 188 00:18:28.860 --> 00:18:31.060 And there's an incident when Rothbard is, 189 00:18:31.060 --> 00:18:32.900 one of his jobs is working for the Volcker Fund 190 00:18:32.900 --> 00:18:34.860 as an analyst, reviewing books, and they say, 191 00:18:34.860 --> 00:18:38.020 Rothbard, go listen to these lectures by Burns, 192 00:18:38.020 --> 00:18:39.140 and you're not supposed to speak. 193 00:18:39.140 --> 00:18:41.820 Your role is just take notes and be quiet. 194 00:18:41.820 --> 00:18:44.420 Well, of course, Murray, he's not going to be quiet. 195 00:18:44.420 --> 00:18:48.340 So apparently, this was about 1957, 196 00:18:48.340 --> 00:18:50.740 and it's the first instance of the phenomenon 197 00:18:50.740 --> 00:18:55.580 of noticed case of stagflation. 198 00:18:55.580 --> 00:18:59.740 Okay, so you're violating the Phillips curve or something. 199 00:18:59.740 --> 00:19:01.380 And so Murray, of course, irrepressibly, 200 00:19:01.380 --> 00:19:04.580 finally says, you know, Dr. Burns, 201 00:19:04.580 --> 00:19:06.900 what happens if this condition continues? 202 00:19:06.900 --> 00:19:09.300 And he says, well, we don't have to resign. 203 00:19:09.300 --> 00:19:11.020 As far as I know, he didn't. 204 00:19:11.020 --> 00:19:13.860 So this may be, although Murray did notice, 205 00:19:13.860 --> 00:19:15.940 observed much later, that after Janet Reno 206 00:19:15.940 --> 00:19:19.060 took full responsibility for Waco, 207 00:19:19.060 --> 00:19:21.060 she didn't resign either. 208 00:19:21.060 --> 00:19:22.500 So there may be other examples. 209 00:19:22.500 --> 00:19:31.500 Murray also famously said that he liked gossip and he thought that gossip really was just the concrete details of history. 210 00:19:31.500 --> 00:19:35.500 So there's something to that too. 211 00:19:35.500 --> 00:19:53.500 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. 212 00:19:53.500 --> 00:19:58.500 But let me go through in somewhat chronological order, go through a few more things. 213 00:19:58.500 --> 00:20:10.500 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. 214 00:20:10.500 --> 00:20:18.500 Okay, Murray of course, some of you, many of you will know, had a lot of commies in the family. 215 00:20:18.500 --> 00:20:25.500 Pretty much most of his aunts and uncles were fellow travelers or communists in the garment district. 216 00:20:25.500 --> 00:20:39.500 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. 217 00:20:39.500 --> 00:20:47.500 Murray's father worked as a chemical analyst at the Tidewater Oil Refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey. 218 00:20:47.500 --> 00:21:06.500 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, 219 00:21:06.500 --> 00:21:11.880 to see here, these people have had my father trapped and imprisoned in the oil refinery for two or three weeks. 220 00:21:11.880 --> 00:21:18.980 He had to throw food over the fence because the trade union thugs were out there picketing and causing trouble and menacing everyone. 221 00:21:18.980 --> 00:21:27.480 And apparently the story was interesting enough that Frank Chodorov asked Rothbard to get his dad to give Chodorov a full account. 222 00:21:27.480 --> 00:21:36.480 and Chodorov writes this up in his newsletter analysis in April of 1949. It's the front page story of the Bayonne strike. 223 00:21:36.480 --> 00:21:42.480 So Murray came by some of his attitudes directly from his father. 224 00:21:42.480 --> 00:21:50.480 But again, in this medium, it's kind of a bit exceptional in the school. 225 00:21:50.480 --> 00:21:54.480 Now first, of course, his first school experience was public school which he hated. 226 00:21:54.480 --> 00:22:01.480 I can't imagine Murray Rothbard actually blending well in an American public school anyway. 227 00:22:01.480 --> 00:22:06.480 So once his parents realized that he was completely miserable and picked on and so forth, 228 00:22:06.480 --> 00:22:10.480 they found him a good private school where he was much happier. 229 00:22:10.480 --> 00:22:15.480 But even there he was basically surrounded by left liberals to communists. 230 00:22:15.480 --> 00:22:17.480 This was the political spectrum. 231 00:22:17.480 --> 00:22:22.480 There weren't that many likely a lot of right-wing soulmates in the private school. 232 00:22:22.480 --> 00:22:32.480 So Murray was sort of on his own, but on the other hand, he could certainly make the arguments as needed. 233 00:22:32.480 --> 00:22:39.480 So let's see, I may have, do I have anything on his, I don't have that up here, 234 00:22:39.480 --> 00:22:45.480 but there's some interesting inscriptions in his yearbooks. 235 00:22:45.480 --> 00:22:51.480 His fellow students saying, well, Rothbard, you won't get to punch me in Latin class anymore. 236 00:22:51.480 --> 00:23:02.480 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. 237 00:23:02.480 --> 00:23:07.480 People have thought maybe he'd become a famous historian and that they weren't far off. 238 00:23:07.480 --> 00:23:11.480 That's all interesting. 239 00:23:11.480 --> 00:23:20.480 Of course, he's got the capacity and the grades and he enrolls in Columbia University. 240 00:23:20.480 --> 00:23:26.480 University. Now remember, this is all happening during this great high point of the state we call World War II. 241 00:23:26.480 --> 00:23:35.480 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. 242 00:23:35.480 --> 00:23:49.480 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. 243 00:23:49.480 --> 00:24:19.480 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, 244 00:24:19.480 --> 00:24:30.480 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. 245 00:24:30.480 --> 00:24:47.480 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. 246 00:24:47.480 --> 00:25:05.480 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. 247 00:25:05.480 --> 00:25:12.480 And so I found out the genealogy of the sorts of things being taught at Columbia at that time was not good. 248 00:25:12.480 --> 00:25:17.480 Rothbard got an excellent education, but he had to reject pretty much all of their assumptions. 249 00:25:17.480 --> 00:25:21.480 Everything they systematically believed, he had to reject all of this. 250 00:25:21.480 --> 00:25:25.480 Because here's the department that's essentially founded by Francis Lieber, 251 00:25:25.480 --> 00:25:29.480 some of you know who that is, wrote Lincoln's General Orders 100, 252 00:25:29.480 --> 00:25:35.480 sort of a quasi-Hegelian immigrant who was Lincoln's legal advisor on suppressing the South 253 00:25:35.480 --> 00:25:40.480 and the laws of war and a kind of posthumous framework. 254 00:25:40.480 --> 00:25:45.520 And he's succeeded by John W. Burgess, who is interesting, but is another interesting 255 00:25:45.520 --> 00:25:51.240 character, an East Tennessee Unionist who became a Compton while being a pious Protestant, 256 00:25:51.240 --> 00:25:55.320 studied in Germany, became a Hegelian and came back to bring these happy ideas about 257 00:25:55.320 --> 00:26:01.920 the state to American university life and then helped design the curriculum and so on. 258 00:26:01.920 --> 00:26:05.960 And over time, the whole approach of Columbia in department after department becomes more 259 00:26:05.960 --> 00:26:18.960 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. 260 00:26:18.960 --> 00:26:28.960 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, 261 00:26:28.960 --> 00:26:36.620 So he says that when he was in Columbia, there was a sort of a methodological war going on 262 00:26:36.620 --> 00:26:42.420 between the fading institutionalists and the new sort of logical positivists and this was 263 00:26:42.420 --> 00:26:46.780 the kind of fight that was going on and of course he didn't find either position exactly 264 00:26:46.780 --> 00:26:50.020 appealing and so on. 265 00:26:50.020 --> 00:26:55.900 So some of you know the story that one of the courses Rothbard takes is with the young 266 00:26:55.900 --> 00:27:02.540 George Stigler, free market economist who has written a pamphlet I guess with Friedman 267 00:27:02.540 --> 00:27:09.620 called Roofs Without Ceilings, or was it ceilings without roofs, anyways, an attack on price 268 00:27:09.620 --> 00:27:10.620 control. 269 00:27:10.620 --> 00:27:16.140 Well this is a radical idea, nobody disbelieves in price controls in this university and this 270 00:27:16.140 --> 00:27:20.780 place, I mean how could you disbelieve in price control as a mystic fascist. 271 00:27:20.780 --> 00:27:34.780 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. 272 00:27:34.780 --> 00:27:43.780 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. 273 00:27:43.780 --> 00:27:54.780 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. 274 00:27:54.780 --> 00:28:05.780 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. 275 00:28:05.780 --> 00:28:14.780 and then the Republican Party sweeps the congressional elections and Rothbard thinks this is it, the New Deal will be repealed 276 00:28:14.780 --> 00:28:19.780 and he writes the famous letter to one of the New York papers hailing the impending repeal of the New Deal 277 00:28:19.780 --> 00:28:25.780 now that the country is obviously strategically premature 278 00:28:25.780 --> 00:28:34.780 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 279 00:28:34.780 --> 00:28:38.060 by Maurice Degler, so he finds out about Hayek 280 00:28:38.060 --> 00:28:40.100 and he's invited to come to hear some lectures 281 00:28:40.100 --> 00:28:43.460 and then he learns that Ludwig von Mises, 282 00:28:43.460 --> 00:28:45.220 of whom he's heard by now, is actually alive 283 00:28:45.220 --> 00:28:47.740 and living in New York and about to start a seminar, 284 00:28:47.740 --> 00:28:50.820 or has started the seminar, so immediately he signs up. 285 00:28:50.820 --> 00:28:54.100 And by then he's learned that there's a huge treatise 286 00:28:54.100 --> 00:28:56.300 coming out by Mises, so he devours that 287 00:28:56.300 --> 00:28:58.460 and he says, well, it's answered all the gaps 288 00:28:58.460 --> 00:29:00.540 that when he had studied all the schools 289 00:29:00.540 --> 00:29:02.240 of economic theory at Columbia University, 290 00:29:02.240 --> 00:29:04.700 gotten through the entire graduate program, 291 00:29:04.700 --> 00:29:13.700 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. 292 00:29:13.700 --> 00:29:19.700 And he reads Human Action and says, well, this is obviously the theory he's been waiting for. 293 00:29:19.700 --> 00:29:30.700 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. 294 00:29:30.700 --> 00:30:00.700 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. 295 00:30:00.700 --> 00:30:10.700 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. 296 00:30:10.700 --> 00:30:21.700 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. 297 00:30:21.700 --> 00:30:26.700 But now he's found a theory that helps explain this all better, and so he's working on a dissertation. 298 00:30:26.700 --> 00:30:56.700 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 299 00:30:56.700 --> 00:31:26.700 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 300 00:31:26.700 --> 00:31:29.060 and other applications like faith and freedom. 301 00:31:29.060 --> 00:31:30.220 And he has to have a pseudonym. 302 00:31:30.220 --> 00:31:31.460 He feels he has to have a pseudonym 303 00:31:31.460 --> 00:31:34.220 because these views are not really the sort of thing 304 00:31:34.220 --> 00:31:38.780 they want Colombian economists associated with. 305 00:31:38.780 --> 00:31:41.260 So he comes up with Jonathan Randolph as one pseudonym, 306 00:31:41.260 --> 00:31:42.900 which I think he used at least once. 307 00:31:42.900 --> 00:31:44.100 And then of course, Aubrey Herbert, 308 00:31:44.100 --> 00:31:47.020 loosely based on Oberon Herbert, 309 00:31:47.020 --> 00:31:48.900 the individualist writer in Britain, 310 00:31:48.900 --> 00:31:52.240 late 19th, early 20th century, 311 00:31:52.240 --> 00:31:55.180 and somehow related to, I think, Évelyn Waugh. 312 00:31:55.180 --> 00:32:06.180 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. 313 00:32:06.180 --> 00:32:15.180 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. 314 00:32:15.180 --> 00:32:21.180 So heretical views about a number of things begin early, and then he meets all sorts of people. 315 00:32:21.180 --> 00:32:32.180 He meets Ralph Reiko, George Reisman, a little bit later, Leonard Ligio, and so on, so he's got a group of simpatico people. 316 00:32:32.180 --> 00:32:47.180 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. 317 00:32:47.180 --> 00:32:52.680 So he does, at this time, he's doing consulting work for FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education, 318 00:32:52.680 --> 00:32:56.180 and he's landed the consulting position with the Volcker Fund. 319 00:32:56.180 --> 00:33:02.180 And the Volcker Fund is a whole other story. It's sort of like possibly the most important organization of the period 320 00:33:02.180 --> 00:33:06.680 in terms of attempting to support libertarian and quasi-libertarian scholarship. 321 00:33:06.680 --> 00:33:10.680 And they'll send Rothbard a stack of 20 books and they want his opinion. 322 00:33:10.680 --> 00:33:16.180 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. 323 00:33:16.180 --> 00:33:23.180 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. 324 00:33:23.180 --> 00:33:29.180 That's why we have this huge stack of memos from the early 50s down into 1962. 325 00:33:29.180 --> 00:33:40.180 You can see a lot more about how Rothbard's views on historical, political, philosophical, economic and other questions are developing 326 00:33:40.180 --> 00:33:43.180 and you begin to see the scope of the reading he's doing. 327 00:33:43.180 --> 00:33:54.180 David, of course, has memorably dealt with the memos that pertain to Leo Strauss, but he's dealt with everyone. 328 00:33:54.180 --> 00:34:07.180 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. 329 00:34:07.180 --> 00:34:16.180 And so, at any given time, he's got enough part-time jobs going to make a living. 330 00:34:16.180 --> 00:34:21.180 And then he has the grant, also from the Volcker Fund, to do the economic treaties. 331 00:34:21.180 --> 00:34:27.180 Well, actually, it begins with a textbook, becomes the treaties, but that's all explained in the introduction. 332 00:34:27.180 --> 00:34:35.180 And knowing that's going to run out, because he's going to be done, he begins making an application for a grant, 333 00:34:35.180 --> 00:34:41.180 and I think the Earhart Foundation to do something on America's Great Depression and in due course. 334 00:34:41.180 --> 00:34:46.180 So he has a number of publications come out right in a row because Man Economy and State's been underway, 335 00:34:46.180 --> 00:34:50.180 essentially done by 57, but then there's the problem of finding the publisher, 336 00:34:50.180 --> 00:34:55.180 then there's the infamous cutting power market out business. 337 00:34:55.180 --> 00:34:59.180 So that's published in, let's see, 62. 338 00:34:59.180 --> 00:35:04.180 Then the dissertation comes out as the Panic of 1819 and 63, but also the Great Depression book the same year. 339 00:35:04.180 --> 00:35:07.780 the same year so suddenly he's got three books on why did he take off why is he 340 00:35:07.780 --> 00:35:11.620 suddenly the host of the town one reason I suppose is that the Friedman and 341 00:35:11.620 --> 00:35:15.380 Schwartz book came out I was supposed to explain things like depressions this 342 00:35:15.380 --> 00:35:22.420 might have had a sinking effect also I suppose Rothbard's views weren't really 343 00:35:22.420 --> 00:35:28.620 going to take off in that climate but what I find sort of coming up towards 344 00:35:28.620 --> 00:35:37.620 The present is that, in attempting to assess Rothbard's impact, you find that a number of specialists know Rothbard's work. 345 00:35:37.620 --> 00:35:42.120 So people that work on monetary history of the early 19th century, they know The Panning of 1819. 346 00:35:42.120 --> 00:35:48.620 This book is cited by all sorts of historians, so they know the book on The Panning of 1819. 347 00:35:48.620 --> 00:35:55.120 And then there are the other scholars who work on Herbert Hoover, and they cite Rothbard's work on Herbert Hoover, 348 00:35:55.120 --> 00:35:59.440 whether it's Herbert Hoover and the food program in Europe 349 00:35:59.440 --> 00:36:03.360 or Herbert Hoover as a sort of corporatist, all of this. 350 00:36:03.360 --> 00:36:05.520 So the Hoover scholars know Rothbard. 351 00:36:05.520 --> 00:36:07.180 I don't know if they know that Rothbard also did 352 00:36:07.180 --> 00:36:09.160 depending on 1819. 353 00:36:09.160 --> 00:36:11.560 They don't really seem to know that Rothbard 354 00:36:11.560 --> 00:36:12.480 did more than one thing. 355 00:36:12.480 --> 00:36:14.400 They just kind of know him in these areas. 356 00:36:14.400 --> 00:36:15.340 I mean, if I had one reference, 357 00:36:15.340 --> 00:36:17.720 someone knows that Rothbard wrote a pamphlet 358 00:36:17.720 --> 00:36:19.760 on the Panama Canal Treaty. 359 00:36:19.760 --> 00:36:22.340 Doesn't seem to, but this is just, 360 00:36:22.340 --> 00:36:25.260 might have been an artifact of the search. 361 00:36:25.260 --> 00:36:27.380 Maybe people do realize Rothbard had this breadth, 362 00:36:27.380 --> 00:36:31.100 but I tend to think they often don't, okay. 363 00:36:35.540 --> 00:36:38.540 So he's doing all this work, he's got a huge amount of 364 00:36:45.420 --> 00:36:48.220 different kinds of knowledge to cross-reference and so on. 365 00:36:48.220 --> 00:36:49.860 Well, he's beginning to see 366 00:36:49.860 --> 00:36:51.860 how this fits together systematically. 367 00:36:52.340 --> 00:37:22.340 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. 368 00:37:22.340 --> 00:37:24.840 and other places where I've written on this for now. 369 00:37:27.020 --> 00:37:29.780 And at the same time, as we come into the mid-50s, 370 00:37:29.780 --> 00:37:31.060 the old right is on the wind. 371 00:37:31.060 --> 00:37:34.140 The old right movement that Rothbard joined 372 00:37:34.140 --> 00:37:37.220 and to which he started contributing 373 00:37:37.220 --> 00:37:40.140 is being phased out in favor of the new right. 374 00:37:40.140 --> 00:37:42.460 Now this is to use Rothbard's terminology. 375 00:37:42.460 --> 00:37:45.540 And in my view, Rothbard, by coming up with the concept 376 00:37:45.540 --> 00:37:48.180 of the old right and making this distinction 377 00:37:48.180 --> 00:37:49.700 was performing an act of piety 378 00:37:49.700 --> 00:37:52.420 and an important piece of historical reconstruction. 379 00:37:53.420 --> 00:37:55.420 I mean, it's not exactly unknown. 380 00:37:55.420 --> 00:37:58.100 You see this in George Nash's book 381 00:37:58.100 --> 00:37:59.980 on the conservative intellectual movement. 382 00:37:59.980 --> 00:38:01.820 He says, well, yeah, there was some changes 383 00:38:01.820 --> 00:38:03.380 in foreign policy views, but he treats it 384 00:38:03.380 --> 00:38:04.860 like it's sort of trivial and important. 385 00:38:04.860 --> 00:38:06.340 Those may matter a great deal. 386 00:38:06.340 --> 00:38:07.840 He's very complacent about it. 387 00:38:08.960 --> 00:38:10.380 Well, that's better than the guys that say 388 00:38:10.380 --> 00:38:13.000 it was wonderful that this happened. 389 00:38:13.000 --> 00:38:15.820 But Rothbard's very troubled by the passing 390 00:38:15.820 --> 00:38:18.860 of the non-interventionist position. 391 00:38:19.700 --> 00:38:23.700 had characterized, in a general sort of way, the old right movement. 392 00:38:23.700 --> 00:38:28.700 Now Rothbard also admits that he's done a kind of ideal typification of the old right. 393 00:38:28.700 --> 00:38:33.700 When he talks about the old right, he's got in mind a group of people who are sort of the best sample, 394 00:38:33.700 --> 00:38:39.700 whose ideas he now wishes to systematically improve, and so on. 395 00:38:39.700 --> 00:38:45.700 So he's rather frustrated with the direction of the right wing, 396 00:38:45.700 --> 00:38:54.140 and he obviously believes, among other things, that a foreign policy grounded on intervention 397 00:38:54.140 --> 00:39:01.540 and constant semi-mobilization and so-called peacetime is not going to be good for liberty. 398 00:39:01.540 --> 00:39:06.460 And true enough, I mean, now we finally have the political scientists like, oh, Mesers, 399 00:39:06.460 --> 00:39:12.420 Eikenberry and Dudeney write an article right after the Soviet Union falls about 1992 and 400 00:39:12.420 --> 00:39:18.420 and they say, gosh, the artificial phony consensus, social contract of the Cold War is over. 401 00:39:18.420 --> 00:39:22.420 What a terrible thing and now the presidency might decline. 402 00:39:22.420 --> 00:39:29.420 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 403 00:39:29.420 --> 00:39:33.420 because everything can be justified as necessary to defeat the Communists. 404 00:39:33.420 --> 00:39:38.420 I mean, better dental care, we can't defeat the Communists without better dental care provided by the Federal Government. 405 00:39:38.420 --> 00:39:46.420 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. 406 00:39:46.420 --> 00:39:57.420 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. 407 00:39:57.420 --> 00:40:03.420 They're doing pretty well on that front. I'll leave that aside for the moment. 408 00:40:03.420 --> 00:40:15.420 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. 409 00:40:15.420 --> 00:40:24.420 There's a lot of letters when they're not married. These are very sweet letters. I won't go into that, but touching. 410 00:40:24.420 --> 00:40:33.820 So, he's balancing these jobs. He does a series of abortive encyclopedia articles and then gets written back. 411 00:40:33.820 --> 00:40:38.420 Well, this isn't really what we wanted and this doesn't really seem to be a very good article in Rothbard, basically. 412 00:40:38.420 --> 00:40:45.420 He writes some letters saying, you dummies, do you understand this is a good article, you idiots? 413 00:40:45.420 --> 00:40:52.420 So they sent him like a $50 kill fee for these encyclopedia articles where he's working on a level 414 00:40:52.420 --> 00:40:55.420 and all that they don't apparently appreciate. 415 00:40:55.420 --> 00:40:57.420 It also does some speech running for Congressman Gwynn, 416 00:40:57.420 --> 00:41:00.420 who's the kind of old right fixture in New York. 417 00:41:00.420 --> 00:41:04.420 And he has a placer jobs in the area, and in New York City essentially, 418 00:41:04.420 --> 00:41:07.420 he doesn't want to leave New York, so it's a funny story. 419 00:41:07.420 --> 00:41:11.420 Again, in roughly the mid-50s, Mr. Hoyles of the Freedom Newspapers 420 00:41:11.420 --> 00:41:14.420 is impressed with Rothbard's writing, and he writes Rothbard and says, 421 00:41:14.420 --> 00:41:20.420 you know, dear Murray, I'd like you to edit a newspaper for me in Odessa, Texas. 422 00:41:20.420 --> 00:41:28.420 So Rothbard writes back and says, well, thank you very much, but I really can't see myself living in Odessa, Texas. 423 00:41:28.420 --> 00:41:31.420 So that didn't happen. 424 00:41:31.420 --> 00:41:36.420 So I suppose I need to fast forward. I don't know where... 425 00:41:36.420 --> 00:41:44.420 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, 426 00:41:44.420 --> 00:41:49.420 He's also digging out a huge amount of information about obscure, forgotten, 427 00:41:49.420 --> 00:41:57.420 passed over classical liberals, radical liberals, people like Molinari, Spence, Spooner and Tucker. 428 00:41:57.420 --> 00:42:02.420 He's always got a list. He's got his little sloppy type lists and books that I need to get. 429 00:42:02.420 --> 00:42:09.420 He's got this long list of obscure 19th century radical classical liberal anarchist stuff that he's found out exists. 430 00:42:09.420 --> 00:42:15.420 I think part of what happened is that Dorfman already knew about this stuff, because there's a very thorough history of, 431 00:42:15.420 --> 00:42:24.420 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. 432 00:42:24.420 --> 00:42:31.420 But so he has these long lists and he begins acquiring these books and he wants something like, 433 00:42:31.420 --> 00:42:40.420 Oh, the French translation of Jevons, because there's a preface by Penlevé or something he needs to say for the critique of mathematical. 434 00:42:40.420 --> 00:42:45.420 He's got all these want lists and he gradually acquires these things and begins to integrate these ideas. 435 00:42:45.420 --> 00:42:48.420 Anyway, what's problematic is where did liberalism go wrong? 436 00:42:48.420 --> 00:42:58.420 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. 437 00:42:58.420 --> 00:43:05.420 and he begins to see that maybe Molinari and some of these writers are pointing in the right direction 438 00:43:05.420 --> 00:43:13.420 and this of course intensifies and over the next few years he systematically begins to address these things. 439 00:43:13.420 --> 00:43:17.420 By the way, there's a late 19th century book, the exact title escapes me, 440 00:43:17.420 --> 00:43:23.420 but I'm sorry, early, I guess early 20th century, about 1910 or a little bit earlier, 441 00:43:23.420 --> 00:43:35.420 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. 442 00:43:35.420 --> 00:43:37.420 Pretty much what happened. 443 00:43:37.420 --> 00:43:47.420 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. 444 00:43:47.420 --> 00:43:52.300 There's kind of an interesting relationship between these two bodies of writing, I think. 445 00:43:54.060 --> 00:43:56.900 Okay, let's see. 446 00:43:56.900 --> 00:44:00.740 Well, I could go on a great length about the sorts of things he's reviewing. 447 00:44:00.740 --> 00:44:02.620 He's looking at Thomistic philosophers. 448 00:44:02.620 --> 00:44:03.820 He's looking at Whig history. 449 00:44:03.820 --> 00:44:05.140 He doesn't like Whig history. 450 00:44:07.140 --> 00:44:09.660 And a number of important essays come out of this period, 451 00:44:09.660 --> 00:44:12.980 the Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics, 452 00:44:12.980 --> 00:44:15.620 The Mantle of Science, which has created some controversy 453 00:44:15.620 --> 00:44:17.220 with the Randians at one point. 454 00:44:18.420 --> 00:44:22.980 A number of things as part of his systematic work 455 00:44:22.980 --> 00:44:25.020 and many of these essays of course are now reprinted 456 00:44:25.020 --> 00:44:29.460 in the Logic of Action volumes and then so on. 457 00:44:34.940 --> 00:44:38.860 Now he's got a kind of tenuous relationship 458 00:44:38.860 --> 00:44:41.040 with National Review because the old right publications 459 00:44:41.040 --> 00:45:11.040 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 460 00:45:11.040 --> 00:45:41.040 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. 461 00:45:41.040 --> 00:45:51.040 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? 462 00:45:51.040 --> 00:46:01.040 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, 463 00:46:01.040 --> 00:46:08.040 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, 464 00:46:08.040 --> 00:46:10.600 He's ready for new allies, he just can't find any. 465 00:46:11.880 --> 00:46:14.120 And as we get into the mid-sixties, 466 00:46:14.120 --> 00:46:15.520 there begin to be some interesting people 467 00:46:15.520 --> 00:46:17.200 riding on the left, which is William F. and Williams, 468 00:46:17.200 --> 00:46:19.520 there's a few people, and he begins to try 469 00:46:19.520 --> 00:46:21.520 to make contact with them. 470 00:46:21.520 --> 00:46:23.360 Or John Lukash, who's sort of got 471 00:46:23.360 --> 00:46:25.040 an eccentric style of conservatism. 472 00:46:25.040 --> 00:46:29.200 Rothbard writes to him, and then certain ones 473 00:46:29.200 --> 00:46:32.260 that didn't work out, like Ronald Radosh, and so on. 474 00:46:33.220 --> 00:46:35.360 And meanwhile, Rothbard struck up a very big correspondence 475 00:46:35.360 --> 00:46:37.360 with Harry Elmer Barnes, a revisionist historian 476 00:46:37.360 --> 00:46:39.620 and other wild character. 477 00:46:41.140 --> 00:46:42.200 They first wrote it in 48, 478 00:46:42.200 --> 00:46:44.600 but there's no record of any real correspondence again 479 00:46:44.600 --> 00:46:48.360 until 1959, and then there's the large correspondence 480 00:46:48.360 --> 00:46:51.960 down to Barnes' death, and Rothbard ends up kind of 481 00:46:51.960 --> 00:46:55.440 as the de facto editor of the Festschrift 482 00:46:56.640 --> 00:47:00.480 written about Barnes and so on. 483 00:47:00.480 --> 00:47:01.840 And then there's something comes along 484 00:47:01.840 --> 00:47:03.640 called the Dean Russell fracas, 485 00:47:03.640 --> 00:47:05.280 but I don't know if they have time, 486 00:47:05.280 --> 00:47:16.280 sort of enter this view within the small libertarian circles about anarchism. 487 00:47:16.280 --> 00:47:26.280 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. 488 00:47:26.280 --> 00:47:46.280 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. 489 00:47:46.280 --> 00:47:55.280 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. 490 00:47:55.280 --> 00:47:59.280 We just have to get these SDS guys to read Man Economy and State. 491 00:47:59.280 --> 00:48:03.280 Well, of course, true, but not likely to happen. 492 00:48:03.280 --> 00:48:11.280 Entirely true, the impulse is probably good, but didn't happen, probably wasn't likely to in the real world. 493 00:48:11.280 --> 00:48:15.280 So we'll just have to get someone to read it. 494 00:48:15.280 --> 00:48:19.280 Okay, now this is when Rothbard begins his sustained critique of the conservative movement, 495 00:48:19.280 --> 00:48:49.280 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 496 00:48:49.280 --> 00:48:52.480 to conservatism, it couldn't just be situational, 497 00:48:52.480 --> 00:48:54.320 there wouldn't be any point. 498 00:48:54.320 --> 00:48:57.200 We'd just be always conserving whatever garbage 499 00:48:57.200 --> 00:48:58.760 is going on right now. 500 00:48:58.760 --> 00:49:00.040 Seems like that's a good point. 501 00:49:00.040 --> 00:49:03.480 There are a number of other articles in Modern Age 502 00:49:04.980 --> 00:49:07.840 and elsewhere over the next several years, 503 00:49:07.840 --> 00:49:10.440 kind of running critique of the conservative movement. 504 00:49:10.440 --> 00:49:13.240 These are all, I think all these are online now. 505 00:49:13.240 --> 00:49:15.960 Lew Rockwell and the Rothbard Archive. 506 00:49:15.960 --> 00:49:21.460 1967, Rothbard takes the New York Driving Test. 507 00:49:21.460 --> 00:49:23.080 He doesn't pass. 508 00:49:23.080 --> 00:49:26.920 He writes this great letter to, I forget who it's to, but this great letter about how the 509 00:49:26.920 --> 00:49:33.320 the status-likey, vicious people have failed him and it's, you know, cruel example of status and 510 00:49:33.320 --> 00:49:38.400 I suppose partly tongue-in-cheek, I don't know, but it's a great letter. 511 00:49:38.400 --> 00:49:44.760 Now, he didn't have a Nevada driver's license, so apparently at that late date he didn't pass the driving test. 512 00:49:44.760 --> 00:49:49.640 But anyway, that's a funny letter. 513 00:49:49.640 --> 00:49:57.000 But I think I'm probably running a bit long, unless I can... 514 00:49:57.000 --> 00:49:59.040 Well, I just mentioned in passing, of course, you know, 515 00:49:59.040 --> 00:50:01.720 he goes on to continue his turn into history 516 00:50:01.720 --> 00:50:05.640 and begins writing the Conceived to Liberty volumes. 517 00:50:05.640 --> 00:50:08.680 And I have two points on that, and I'll close. 518 00:50:08.680 --> 00:50:11.880 One is that there was this funny program associated 519 00:50:11.880 --> 00:50:17.880 This historian, Jesse Lemish, in the New Left period, and he was going to write history from the bottom up. 520 00:50:17.880 --> 00:50:21.880 And I think it was, who was it that made the famous critique? 521 00:50:21.880 --> 00:50:31.880 Another historian said, well the problem with itinerants and sailors and layabouts is they don't usually leave many documents for the historian. 522 00:50:31.880 --> 00:50:34.880 So it's smart to write history from the bottom up. 523 00:50:34.880 --> 00:50:37.880 A good point. 524 00:50:37.880 --> 00:50:42.880 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. 525 00:50:42.880 --> 00:50:48.880 He's actually concerned about the taxpayers and the frontiers of many actual people in colonial America. 526 00:50:48.880 --> 00:50:53.880 He's actually concerned with the concrete guys who aren't famous and weren't George Washington. 527 00:50:53.880 --> 00:51:00.880 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. 528 00:51:00.880 --> 00:51:05.880 I'll give you one quip. This is in volume two of Conceived in Liberty. 529 00:51:05.880 --> 00:51:10.880 He's just talking about Governor Dinwiddie and one of his wars, and he just says in passing, 530 00:51:10.880 --> 00:51:18.880 like all hardliners everywhere, he was resolved to fight to the last life and bit of property of everyone else. 531 00:51:18.880 --> 00:51:23.880 Page 232, and I read that now and I think, oh yeah, sort of like Pearl. 532 00:51:23.880 --> 00:51:27.880 Or Frum. There's a number of people that come to mind when I... 533 00:51:27.880 --> 00:51:34.880 And then there's a very similar line in Ammon Hennessy's autobiography, which Murray had read and extensively underlined. 534 00:51:34.880 --> 00:52:04.880 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.