WEBVTT NOTE Rothbard vs. Leo Strauss and Hayek 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Why are we discussing Rothbard's criticism of Leo Strauss and Hayek? 2 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:14.000 Well, when Rothbard wrote on these topics in his papers for the Volcker Fund, 3 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:19.000 other movements different from libertarianism were prominent. 4 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:29.000 On one side there were the Strossians, and the Strossians were very popular among American conservatives. 5 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:42.000 In this case, Rothbard defended the libertarian idea of natural rights against a conservative interpretation of natural rights. 6 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:48.000 On the other side, there were Hayek and the Hayekians. 7 00:00:48.000 --> 00:01:01.000 And in this case, Rothbard was defending the Misesian Rothbardian paradigm against the Fallibilist evolutionist paradigm. 8 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:13.000 So, the main points of my discussions will be the discussion of Strossian concept of modern natural law, 9 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:17.600 The Criticism of Hayekian Evolutionist Theory of Institutions 10 00:01:17.600 --> 00:01:21.000 and The Criticism of Hayekian Phalibidism. 11 00:01:22.600 --> 00:01:27.000 So, let's see the criticism of Leo Strauss. 12 00:01:28.400 --> 00:01:36.000 According to Rothbard, Strauss' work has a great virtue and a great effect. 13 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:44.760 The Great Virtue is the searching for a rational basis for ethic and absolute ethical values. 14 00:01:44.760 --> 00:01:54.280 The great fact is that Strauss, while favoring what he considers to be the classical and Christian concepts of natural law, 15 00:01:54.280 --> 00:02:02.520 is bitterly opposed to the 17th and 18th century conceptions of luck and the rationalists, 16 00:02:02.520 --> 00:02:10.960 particularly to their absolute deductive championing of the natural rights of the individual, liberty, property and so on. 17 00:02:10.960 --> 00:02:17.360 Strauss, in fact, has been the leading champion, along with Russell Kirk and the Catholic scholars in America, 18 00:02:17.360 --> 00:02:26.160 of a recent trend in lock historiography to standard completely the bad individualistic natural rights type of natural law 19 00:02:26.160 --> 00:02:32.160 of the 17th and 18th centuries from the good, classical Christian type. 20 00:02:32.160 --> 00:02:41.760 Good, presumably, because it was so vague and so prudential that it offered very little chance to defend individual liberty against the state. 21 00:02:41.760 --> 00:02:48.360 In this reading, Hobbes and Locke are the great villain in the alleged perversion of natural law. 22 00:02:48.360 --> 00:02:54.160 To my mind, this perversion was a healthy sharpening and development of the concept. 23 00:02:54.160 --> 00:03:05.160 This memo of 1960 is where the Rothbard criticism of Leo Strauss first appeared. 24 00:03:05.160 --> 00:03:17.160 According to Strauss, modern natural rights are a degeneration of the classical ancient natural law tradition 25 00:03:17.160 --> 00:03:23.160 that was an expression of civic virtue and public good. 26 00:03:23.160 --> 00:03:35.160 The modern theory of natural rights plays with its individualism, plays the individual at the centre of the universe, 27 00:03:35.160 --> 00:03:45.160 which consequences such as the solution of the political problem through economic means, which throws, of course, disapproved. 28 00:03:45.160 --> 00:03:54.600 The main ends of politics with the natural right doctrine, with modern natural rights, 29 00:03:54.600 --> 00:04:01.800 the main ends of politics ceased to be wisdom, virtue and public good 30 00:04:01.800 --> 00:04:08.520 and became the defense of the property right of the individual. 31 00:04:08.520 --> 00:04:22.520 Rothbard questioned the thesis that identified the break with the past in the modern theory of natural rights. 32 00:04:22.520 --> 00:04:29.520 Rothbard underlined the scholastic Thomist and Christian roots of the Lockean doctrine of natural rights, 33 00:04:29.520 --> 00:04:37.520 but within this continuity he found in the individualism of modern natural rights a development and an enrichment. 34 00:04:37.520 --> 00:04:45.520 The beginning of a new way of understanding the human being and the ends of politics. 35 00:04:45.520 --> 00:04:55.520 While Rothbard appreciated the Strossian idea of natural law as a battle against the prevailing relativism of values, 36 00:04:55.520 --> 00:05:05.520 on the other hand, he was unable to accept it at the point where Stross invited his readers to reclaim the classic natural right doctrine 37 00:05:05.520 --> 00:05:13.520 in its original form that, if fully developed, is identical with the doctrine of the best regime. 38 00:05:13.520 --> 00:05:24.520 Rothbard said that while Aristotle's vision of man led to the state being seen as the place of the good and virtuous action, 39 00:05:24.520 --> 00:05:32.520 it was in contrast the Levellers and John Locke in 17th century England who transformed classical natural law 40 00:05:32.520 --> 00:05:38.920 law into a theory grounded on methodological and hence political individualism. 41 00:05:38.920 --> 00:05:46.520 So in some way for Rothbard, everything began with the English levelers. 42 00:05:46.520 --> 00:05:56.320 Let's see the criticism of Hayek. 43 00:05:56.320 --> 00:06:06.760 To explain the reasons for liberty, Hayek starts from evolutionary and fallibilist positions 44 00:06:06.760 --> 00:06:13.760 that are clearly at odds with Rothbard's rationalism. 45 00:06:13.760 --> 00:06:22.880 The starting point in Hayek's thought is the false dichotomy between natural and artificial. 46 00:06:22.880 --> 00:06:27.880 and the latter term identifying the product of an intended project. 47 00:06:28.880 --> 00:06:36.880 There is an intermediate category of phenomena resulting from human action but not from human planning. 48 00:06:36.880 --> 00:06:43.880 Following the reasoning of the late scholastic, Hayekian teaching explains that in this sense 49 00:06:43.880 --> 00:06:50.880 our traditional, spontaneously evolved morals are perfectly natural rather than artificial 50 00:06:50.880 --> 00:06:57.880 and it would seem fitting to call such traditional rules natural laws. 51 00:06:57.880 --> 00:07:08.880 So, according to Hayek, something is natural if it had evolved spontaneously over time. 52 00:07:08.880 --> 00:07:19.880 It is important to go beyond this false dichotomy between natural and artificial 53 00:07:19.880 --> 00:07:25.880 Because this dichotomy leads us to social constructivism, according to Hayek. 54 00:07:25.880 --> 00:07:31.880 So according to a correct understanding of the evolution of political and social institutions, 55 00:07:31.880 --> 00:07:39.880 these are the result of a spontaneous order that makes use of the knowledge scattered among different individuals 56 00:07:39.880 --> 00:07:45.880 and in which no single mind had a planning or coordinating role. 57 00:07:45.880 --> 00:07:58.880 But the truly irreconcilable points between the evolutionary theory of Hayek and Rothbard's theory of natural law are rationalism and fallibilism. 58 00:07:59.880 --> 00:08:08.880 This is why one of Rothbard's criticisms is Hayek's continuous and all-pervasive attack on reason. 59 00:08:08.880 --> 00:08:25.880 The faith in the rational capacities of man to discover and correctly to interpret the laws of nature and absolute ethical values 60 00:08:25.880 --> 00:08:32.880 is not really compatible with the evolutionist and fallibilist position. 61 00:08:32.880 --> 00:08:39.880 The foundations of liberty are completely different for Hayek and Rothbard. 62 00:08:39.880 --> 00:08:45.880 Hayek bases the reasons for liberty on human ignorance. 63 00:08:45.880 --> 00:08:51.880 The necessary starting point of his theory of liberal society 64 00:08:51.880 --> 00:08:56.880 is fallibility, partiality and the scattering of knowledge 65 00:08:56.880 --> 00:09:00.880 about particular situations in time and place 66 00:09:00.880 --> 00:09:15.880 Among Millions and Millions of People, given these, liberty becomes a necessary condition to use at best the human knowledge spread among millions and millions of people. 67 00:09:17.880 --> 00:09:27.880 So, the value of individual liberty, according to Hayek, rests chiefly on the recognition of the ignorance of all of us. 68 00:09:27.880 --> 00:09:39.880 But, of course, for Rothbard, human ignorance is too uncertain a basis for liberty. 69 00:09:39.880 --> 00:09:47.880 According to the authentic rationalist theory, we should be able to know what is best for man 70 00:09:47.880 --> 00:09:53.880 and to found absolute values on human nature. This is Rothbard's position. 71 00:09:53.880 --> 00:10:00.280 This is why Rothbard dismissed the Hayekian premises as an attack on man's reason. 72 00:10:00.280 --> 00:10:08.880 The attempt to establish what is absolutely good for man by appealing to human nature, 73 00:10:08.880 --> 00:10:18.880 which to Hayek is a cultural idea, demonstrated the great distance between Rothbard and Hayek's evolutionary argument. 74 00:10:18.880 --> 00:10:29.280 In this sense, Rothbard's criticism of Hayek is paradigmatic of the split we find today 75 00:10:29.280 --> 00:10:38.000 within the Austrian School between those libertarians who refer back to the Lockean idea, 76 00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:46.440 the Lockean version of the idea of a right reason and the heirs of the theory of a limited, 77 00:10:46.440 --> 00:10:49.960 and fallible evolutionary kind of knowledge. 78 00:10:52.320 --> 00:10:57.320 This contrast was made explicit by Rothbard in 1992 79 00:11:00.680 --> 00:11:03.640 in the present state of the Austrian School, 80 00:11:03.640 --> 00:11:07.000 from which the profound differences 81 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:12.000 between the Hayekian and the Misesian paradigms emerged. 82 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:26.000 In this paper, once again, Rothbard took his distance from Hayek's entire work, in that it was devoted to a denigration of human reason. 83 00:11:27.000 --> 00:11:41.000 In this work, Rothbard criticized the Hayekian theory of a spontaneous order, since, from his point of view, it implied a lack of awareness on the part of the human being. 84 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:57.400 And moreover, accepting such a theory would lead to a conservative and to an uncritical attitude towards customs and institutions, state included. 85 00:11:57.400 --> 00:12:09.000 Of course, according to Rothbard, it would be a mistake to accept all social institutions just because they had evolved spontaneously over time. 86 00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:25.000 Joe Salerno, on his side, already in 1990 contrasted Mises' rationalism with Hayek's irrational emphasis on spontaneous order. 87 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:35.000 Salerno's idea is that to achieve social change we could not rely on spontaneous and unintended consequences. 88 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:44.000 So, to conclude, I would like to say that I think that this analysis, 89 00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:50.000 Rothbard's analysis of these philosophers has a great value, 90 00:12:50.000 --> 00:13:00.000 has a great value because what Rothbard is suggesting to us is that in spite of the totalitarian outcomes 91 00:13:00.000 --> 00:13:04.000 of the abuse of reason and of social constructivism, 92 00:13:04.000 --> 00:13:14.000 We can't deny, to human reason, the right to change, to modify unjust social institutions.