Murray Rothbard was at the forefront of the libertarian movement for over 40 years.
During this time, he made and broke many alliances and wrote for every conceivable libertarian publication,
including some of his own.
One publication he was associated with from the beginning of its print run was Liberty Magazine.
This paper examines the relationship of Murray Rothbard to Liberty Magazine,
where he began as an editor and writer and later became an object of criticism and ridicule.
I don't know what I could possibly say about Murray Rothbard that has not been said about
him at the Mises Institute for the past 17 years since his death in 1995.
He was a student of Ludwig von Mises, a prolific author, an inspiring teacher, a revisionist
Most Historian, an astute political observer, the most comprehensive system builder within
Austrian economics, a libertarian icon, and the greatest enemy the state ever had.
In the words of his greatest student, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Rothbard has remained beyond his death
without doubt the most important and highly respected intellectual authority within the
and the entire libertarian movement.
And to this day, his rationalist, axiomatic, deductive, austro-libertarianism provides
the intellectual benchmark in reference to which not only everyone and everything within
libertarianism is defined, but increasingly everyone and everything in American politics.
The print edition of Liberty magazine was published from August 1987 until December
2010.
It is now available only online.
Each of the back issues is now posted online at the Liberty website and also at the Mises
Institute website.
Liberty began as kind of a bi-monthly, consistently publishing six issues a year.
Starting in 1999, Liberty generally appeared monthly. There were a total of 208 issues
of the printed magazine produced. The founder, publisher and editor of Liberty was R.W. Bradford,
who also wrote under two pen names. According to an editorial titled Why Liberty, that appeared
in the first issue, Liberty was to be a journal produced by libertarians for libertarians,
a journal with the space and inclination to discuss issues that interest libertarians written
from an apologetically libertarian perspective. The original associate editors were Murray
Rothbard, Douglas Casey, Stephen Cox and Ross Overbeek. Rothbard, whom Bradford says didn't
know me from Adam, was the second person he contacted after his old friend from college,
Steven Cox.
Bradford says in his fifth anniversary retrospective, How We Started Liberty, that Rothbard was
immediately interested and encouraging.
Bradford also described Rothbard as the best known of those involved in liberty, perhaps
the most influential living participant in the libertarian movement, and a first-rate
writer who devoted incredible energy to shaping libertarian opinion.
The editors settled on the name Liberty mostly by default, since the other names they considered
seemed too cute or insufficiently descriptive. Future senior editors of Liberty included
Carl Hess, John Hospers, and Harry Brown. Its many contributing editors over the years
have included such libertarian giants as Ralph Raco, Sheldon Richmond, and Robert Higgs.
Rothbard's last issue as a senior editor was that dated March 1990. After Bradford's
death in December of 2005, Stephen Cox assumed the position of editor beginning with the
March 2006 issue. I first noticed Liberty sometime in the late 1990s on the magazine
rack at my local Books-a-Million bookstore. I hesitated to subscribe after that because
Because the subscription appeals I received in the mail attacked by name someone I knew
and greatly respected, named Lew Rockwell.
After occasionally perusing Liberty for a few years at the magazine rack, I wrote my
first article for Liberty in 2007, the second in 2009, and some short reflections during
and after that time.
After all the back issues of Liberty were posted online a year or so ago, I began looking
through them, first to help fix the Liberty Archive on the Mises website, and then because
of the great treasure trove of information about libertarianism and the libertarian movement
that they contain.
If you really want to get an insight into the history of libertarianism, and especially
the disputes and controversies among libertarians, read the back issues of Liberty Magazine.
You may not like some of the things you read, like Rothbard modeled his approach to ideology
and social change on those of Marx and Lenin, or one of the reasons I never became an acolyte
of Murray Rothbard was his notion that he was Lenin and we had to obey.
But in spite of that, you will learn a great deal about libertarianism.
One thing I quickly noticed in my reading of the Liberty Back issues was the number
A number of references to Murray Rothbard, not just when he served as an editor, but
after his departure from the magazine in 1990 and even after his death in 1995.
Although Rothbard was only associated with Liberty for 16 issues, he is actually mentioned
in some way in 176 of the 208 issues that were printed.
His enemies regularly invoke his name.
Rothbard was certainly the most polarizing figure to ever be mentioned in Liberty.
We can see this in a couple of letters to the editor that appeared after the publication
of Rothbard's, in the words of R.W. Bradford, delightfully vicious article, Ronald Reagan
and Autopsy, that appeared in the March 1989 issue.
Here's the first letter, cancel my subscription to Liberty immediately.
I don't want another issue. Reason? That diatribe against Ronald Reagan by Murray Rothbard
was the most disgusting thing I've ever read. Now, contrast that with this. Kudos for Murray.
Though I've been a critic of Murray from time to time, I think his greatest article to date
is Ronald Reagan and Autopsy. It was pure Rothbardian excellence. Murray Rothbard is
is mentioned 2,632 times in Liberty Magazine. I know because I counted, documented, and
examined each and every occurrence of Rothbard, Murray Rothbard, Murray N. Rothbard, Murray
Newton Rothbard, M.N.R., Rothbards, Rothbardian, Rothbardians, and just plain Murray. I might
I might have missed a few references to Rothbard when he was just referred to by the pronouns
he, his, or him, but I think I got all the direct references.
Rothbard is mentioned in every conceivable place in the magazine, on the cover, in the
table of contents, in footnotes, in articles he wrote, in articles written by others, in
reflections he wrote, in reflections written by others, in ads for books by Rothbard or
for Others or for Back Issues of Liberty, in Letters to the Editor, in indexes, in
book notes, in book reviews he wrote, and reviews of books by him, books about him,
and books unrelated to him in any way.
All seemed well at the beginning of liberty in August of 1987.
Rothbard had given Bradford permission to publish and use as a subscription premium
his essay called The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult. Writing on Liberty's 5th anniversary,
two years after Rothbard's departure, Bradford remarked about the bonus given to subscribers.
I have no doubt that it was an important factor in goosing the response to our advertising.
We continue to use it from time to time and it still polls. Beginning with the November
For 1988 issue, Rothbard's essay was instead offered for sale for $4. This continued off
and on for the next 20 years. Another way that Rothbard endured in a subtle way throughout
the pages of Liberty was in regular ads for back issues of the magazine that mentioned
the title and author of articles in each issue. Rothbard's name appeared on the cover of
the first issue to promote his article endorsing Ron Paul for President in the 1988 election.
Of the 16 issues of liberty that Rothbard was associated with, his name graced the cover
of 13 of them. After his departure from the magazine, Rothbard appeared on two more covers.
The first was in the March 1995 issue that contained a tribute to him upon the occasion
of His Death, and the second was in 2004, when Liberty reprinted his Ronald Reagan and
Autopsy as part of a symposium on Reagan after the former president's death.
During his 16-issue period of association, Rothbard authored 11 full-length articles,
22 short reflections, 5 interviews or editorial commentaries, 1 book notes column and 1 book
review.
Early in the May 1988 issue, did Rothbard not have something he wrote appear, although
he's mentioned 35 times by others in that issue. Ads for the Center for Libertarian
Studies appeared in the first two issues of Liberty, followed by ads for the Mises Institute
in the next 14, and an ad for the Rothbard-Rockwell Report in the March 1990 issue, the final
issue that Rothbard was associated with.
In 1988, Rothbard talked to an interviewer about liberty. The libertarian movement was
beginning to crumble before liberty was founded. Everybody was so concerned with talking to
the outside, to Democrats or Republicans or whoever, that we forgot to develop our own
thinking, our own ideology, our own point of view. This does not mean that there was
no dissent from Rothbard's views in the pages of liberty. But aside from the denigration
There were only three criticisms of Rothbard by name to appear in the magazine when he served as an editor, and only one of them was a whole article devoted to rebutting something he had written.
David Brown criticized Rothbard in a 1988 piece over his hostility to Rand.
Jeffrey Friedman criticized Rothbard's style of libertarian thought in the May 1989 issue.
issue, also in that issue is a rebuttal by an environmentalist to an earlier piece by
Rothbard on environmentalism. Rothbard and Bradford replied to Friedman in the next issue.
Here Bradford defended Rothbard against Friedman's charge that he has worked to make libertarianism
into a narrow dogmatic philosophy. In Bradford's analysis, he sheds some light on Rothbard's
Early Relationship with Liberty and its editor.
Rothbard has contributed both his advice and writing freely.
Written a letter soliciting subscriptions, helped us recruit writers and made frequent
editorial suggestions.
All this he has done on behalf of a journal that explicitly opens itself to the full range
of libertarian thinking, including frequent criticisms of many of his own passionately
held beliefs.
On more than one occasion he has told me that some essay or another that we have published,
including some written by me, have infuriated him. He has criticized my editorial judgment
once or twice, but on no occasion has he suggested that we change Liberty's open editorial policy.
In a September 1989 issue, Bradford favorably reviewed Man Economy and Liberty. The only
The only controversy between Rothbard and Bradford during this time appears to be over
Rothbard's steadfast adherence to the non-aggression principle.
Bradford had written an article in the second issue of Liberty in defense of Robert Nozick
in which he criticized moralistic libertarians and a libertarianism based on the morality
of the non-initiation of force.
Rothbard replied in the next issue.
Bradford responded to Rothbard's reply and to the criticism of others in the following
issue. There he accused Rothbard of not addressing his central argument that the non-aggression
axiom is unsatisfactory as a basis for libertarian theory. This was followed by Bradford's article
The Two Libertarians in the May 1988 issue. There he abdicated a consequentialist libertarian
and Position, contrary to Rothbard's moralist libertarianism.
Although a major rebuttal to this was penned by Sheldon Richmond in the September 1988
issue, there was nothing forthcoming from Rothbard.
This difference of opinion was not personal, for as Bradford explained in his 10th anniversary
editorial in the September 1997 issue, from the start Murray understood that liberty would
At my first meeting with him, I warned him of my disagreement with much of his political
theory and suggested that I might publicly disagree with him from time to time. This
he accepted joyously. He always shared his pungent and powerful opinions and cheerfully
accepted the fact that sometimes his advice was not followed.
By 1990, though, things between Bradford and Rockford were not going so well.
In his 10th anniversary editorial, Bradford maintains that Rothbard told him as early
as 1987 that he was thinking of abandoning libertarianism in favor of the political right.
And in 1999, says Bradford, Rothbard had decided, along with Lew Rockwell, to join his erstwhile
and all enemies, the conservatives, after going through a phase as a paleo-libertarian.
Bradford insisted that his relationship with Rothbard during this time remained cordial
and that he continued to contribute to each issue.
But after the publication of Rockwell's A Paleo-Libertarian Manifesto in Liberty's
January 1990 issue, things went downhill.
Rothbard asserts that he received a fax from Rockwell telling him that Murray had decided
that he wouldn't be writing for Liberty in the future and would like to resign his position
as senior editor.
Even so, Rothbard claims that his relationship with Rockbard still remained cordial, even
as his relationship with Rockwell had deteriorated.
Between this time and Rothbard's death in 1995, Rothbard maintains that he and Murray
spoke occasionally, even though he heard from time to time that Rothbard had denounced him
in the pages of his newsletter.
Because of the lack of time, I can only briefly mention some of the men and instances and
refer you to my full paper when it is published.
Rothbard was criticized most viciously in the pages of Liberty by David Ramsey Steele
and Mark Skousen.
Some of the criticisms are so ludicrous that I don't think I could read them through
without laughing.
Like Steele's statement that Rothbard wasn't an outstanding thinker and made no lasting
contributions to any branch of thought.
Or Skousen's claim that today Friedman's influence is ten times Rothbard's.
Well, at least he didn't say, like Don Boudreau recently did, that Rothbard wasn't one-one-hundredth
In light of the current events regarding the Cato Institute, I should also mention that
in an interview with Cato's President, Ed Crane, in Liberty's November 1990 issue,
Rothbard's name comes up quite a bit. Crane faulted Rothbard for the unwillingness to pay
any respect to people who disagreed with him. He also charges Rothbard with intolerance.
There has always been a kind of, I don't want to say racist, a very intolerant attitude
among people like Rothbard and Rockwell on ethnic and cultural matters and even on the
question of sexual diversity.
Crane concludes about Rothbard, I'm a little disappointed that Murray seems to be so motivated
by hatred of all the enemies that he sees out there.
I don't advise anyone to get on his wrong side.
After Murray died in January 1995, there appeared a tribute to him in Liberty's March 1995
issue consisting of short remembrances by Gary North, Ron Paul, Sheldon Richmond, Robert
Higgs and, of course, Liberty's editor.
However, Bradford's assessment of Rothbard's influence was premature.
In the end, this is Bradford, his influence on libertarians waned, partly because of his
his apparent retreat toward his old nemesis, the political right, partly because of his
increasing relish for ideological infighting, and partly because a new generation of libertarian
intellectuals found his brand of libertarianism too simplistic.
I think that now, in 2012, 17 years after Rothbard's death, that his influence is stronger
and it is the influence on libertarians of R.W. Bradford that has waned.