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NOTE Authors Forum: Rothbard vs. The Philosophers

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When Murray Rothbard died in January 1995, he left all his unpublished papers to the Mises Institute.

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Although Rothbard, as you know, published a great deal in his life on economics, history, political philosophy, an amazing amount,

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It turned out that there was a great deal that new material that had not been published,

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if you just read his published works, you wouldn't have a complete understanding by

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any means of what Rothbard had achieved.

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And particularly important in the unpublished work were certain reports on books that Rothbard

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had written for the William Volcker Fund, which was a foundation that he was working for in

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the late 1950s and early 1960s. Roberta Medugno was the first scholar to make use of these

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reports. She published a number of these reports first in an Italian edition. She translated

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the papers in Italian, but they're now available in the original English in the book Rothbard

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versus the Philosophers. The book, in addition to having Rothbard's papers, has a long introduction

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about 65 pages, so by her, Roberta is a historian of political theory and she discusses, I'll

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mention a bit later, certain issues in the collection particularly interest her and she

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also includes in the papers detailed notes identifying various people and events that

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Rothbard talks about in the papers. Now, probably in the papers, probably the most dynamite

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item is a very negative review that Rothbard did of the Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich

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Hayek. Although Rothbard admired Hayek greatly as an economist, he didn't think very much

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Such-and-All of the Constitution of Liberty, and he said that this really supported certain

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political measures that he considered status, such as, he was saying, for example, he said

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in the report that Hayek had opposed the Supreme Court in the 1930s declaring too much of a

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New Deal Unconstitutional, Hayek said it was all right that they invalidated the NRA, but

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they went too far. This is not what you would expect from someone who's a complete free

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market supporter. But Rothbard also criticized Hayek for what he considered a lack of rationalism.

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He was emphasizing social evolution too much and not stressing rationalism.

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Now Rothbard himself, and this comes out elsewhere in the paper, favored an approach to ethics

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that placed much greater stress than Hayek did on the importance of reason.

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In some reports on Leo Strauss, although Rothbard is very critical, say, of Strauss on Machiavelli,

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he said that some of the arguments Strauss uses smack up numerology, he agrees with Strauss

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on that certain values can't be separated from certain factual statements, say how we

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use certain terms in language we can, certain values follow directly from those so we can

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have an objective ethics based on values just given certain factual statements.

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So very important in this collection are these papers on Leo Strauss.

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There are other very important papers, one is a very critical review of a book called

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of Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi. This is a book that was very critical of the free

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market that claimed that the free market was really self-contradictory because it could

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only come about through certain measures by the state to put it into place. And the Polanyi

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tended to have a very negative view of the market and the exalted primitive society didn't

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like trade very much, or at least he thought it was somewhat overrated, and Rothbard isn't

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very favorable to that view at all.

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Now in Roberta's introduction, as I say, she's a scholar of history, political thought, and

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She's particularly interested in the understanding Rothbard's view of natural law, how it varied

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from the medieval view of natural law, and sort of put in under lock, put in certain

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individualist assumptions that were a development of the medieval view, and she wants that she's

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She's addressing in probably the printable topic I would say of the introduction is

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she wants to consider is can one come up with a Hayekian version of natural law that will

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meet Rothbard's criticisms.

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She wonders whether one could be somewhat more favorable to Hayek on natural law than

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Rothbard is and see not as much as an irrationalist as Rothbard did.

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I'm sorry, I can't answer that now, I'm doing something else.

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But in, in one thing she had in her, in, she intended to say in her own remarks was that

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how much she, when she was working on the papers, how much she enjoyed coming in contact

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with a great mind like Rothbard and how much this meant to her when she was working on

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the papers and that she hopes in her future research to have a chance to do even more

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work on Rothbard's papers.