As reason tells us, all are born thus naturally equal, that is, with an equal right to their
persons, so also with an equal right to their preservation.
And every man having a property in his own person, the labor of his body and the work
of his hands, are properly his own, to which no one has right but himself.
It will therefore follow that when he removes anything out of the state that nature has
provided and left it in, he has mixed his labor with it, and joined something to it
that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.
Thus every man having a natural right to, or being proprietor of, his own person and
his own actions and labor, which we call property, it certainly follows that no man can have
Introduction by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
In an age of intellectual hyper-specialization, Murray N. Rothbard was a grand system-builder.
An economist by profession, Rothbard was the creator of a system of social and political
philosophy based on economics and ethics as its cornerstones.
For centuries, economics and ethics, political philosophy, had diverged from their common
origin into seemingly unrelated intellectual enterprises.
Economics was a value-free positive science, and ethics, if it was a science at all, was
a normative science.
As a result of this separation, the concept of property had increasingly disappeared from
both disciplines.
For economists, property sounded too normative, and for political philosophers, property smacked
of mundane economics.
Rothbard's unique contribution is the rediscovery of property and property rights as the common
foundation of both economics and political philosophy, and the systematic reconstruction
and conceptual integration of modern marginalist economics and natural law political philosophy
into a unified moral science, libertarianism. Following his revered teacher and mentor Ludwig
Ludwig von Mises, Mises teachers Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk and Carl Menger, and an intellectual
tradition reaching back to the Spanish late scholastics and beyond, Rothbardian economics
sets out from a simple and undeniable fact and experience, a single indisputable axiom,
that man acts, that is, that humans always and invariably pursue their most highly valued
and Ends, Goals, with Scarce Means, Goods.
Combined with a few empirical assumptions, such as that labor implies disutility, all
of economic theory can be deduced from this incontestable starting point, thereby elevating
its propositions to the status of apodictic, exact or a priori true empirical laws and
and Establishing Economics as a Logic of Action, Praxeology.
Rothbard modeled his first magnum opus, Man Economy and State, on Mises' monumental Human
Action.
In it, Rothbard developed the entire body of economic theory, from utility theory and
the law of marginal utility, to monetary theory and the theory of the business cycle, along
and Praxeological Lines, subjecting all variants of quantitative, empirical and mathematical
economics to critique and logical refutation, and repairing the few remaining inconsistencies
in the Misesian system, such as his theory of monopoly prices and of government and governmental
security production.
Rothbard was the first to present the complete case for a pure market economy or private
and Property Anarchism as Always and Necessarily Optimizing Social Utility.
In the sequel, Power and Market, Rothbard further developed a typology and analyzed
the economic effects of every conceivable form of government interference in markets.
In the meantime, Man Economy and State, including Power and Market as its third volume, has
has become a modern classic and ranks with Mises' Human Action as one of the towering
achievements of the Austrian School of Economics.
Ethics, or more specifically political philosophy, is the second pillar of the Rothbardian system,
strictly separated from economics but equally grounded in the acting nature of man and complementing
it to form a unified system of rationalist social philosophy.
The Ethics of Liberty, originally published in 1982, is Rothbard's second magnum opus.
In it, he explains the integration of economics and ethics via the joint concept of property,
and based on the concept of property, and in conjunction with a few general empirical,
biological and physical observations or assumptions, Rothbard deduces the corpus of libertarian
and Law, from the Law of Appropriation to that of Contracts and Punishment.
Even in the finest works of economics, including Mises' Human Action, the concept of property
had attracted little attention before Rothbard burst onto the intellectual scene with Man
Economy and State.
Yet as Rothbard pointed out, such common economic terms as direct and indirect exchange, markets
and Market Prices, as well as aggression, invasion, crime and fraud, cannot be defined
or understood without a prior theory of property, nor is it possible to establish the familiar
economic theorems relating to these phenomena without an implied notion of property and
property rights.
A definition and theory of property must precede the definition and establishment of all other
Economic Terms and Theorems.
At the time when Rothbard had restored the concept of property to its central position
within economics, other economists, most notably Ronald Coase, Harold Demsatz and Armin Alkean,
also began to redirect professional attention to the subject of property and property rights.
However, the response and the lessons drawn from the simultaneous rediscovery of the centrality
of the idea of property by Rothbard on the one hand, and Coase, Demsatz and Alkeon on
the other, were categorically different. The latter, as well as other members of the influential
Chicago School of Law and Economics, were generally uninterested and unfamiliar with
philosophy in general, and political philosophy in particular. They unswervingly accepted
the reigning positivistic dogma that no such thing as rational ethics is possible. Ethics
was not and could not be a science, and economics was and could be a science only if and in
so far as it was positive economics. Accordingly, the rediscovery of the indispensable role
of the idea of property for economic analysis could mean only that the term property had
had to be stripped of all normative connotations attached to it in everyday non-scientific
discourse.
As long as scarcity, and hence potential interpersonal conflict, exists, every society requires a
well-defined set of property rights assignments.
But no absolute, universally and eternally correct and proper or false and improper way
The way of defining or designing a set of property rights exists, and there exists no
such thing as absolute rights or absolute crimes, but only alternative systems of property
rights assignments describing different activities as right and wrong. Lacking any absolute ethical
standards, the choice between alternative systems of property rights assignments will
will be made, and in cases of interpersonal conflicts, should be made by government judges,
based on utilitarian considerations and calculations. That is, property rights will be so assigned
or reassigned that the monetary value of the output produced is thereby maximized, and
in all cases of conflicting claims, government judges should so assign them.
Profoundly interested in and familiar with philosophy and the history of ideas, Rothbard
recognized this response from the outset as just another variant of age-old self-contradictory
ethical relativism.
For in claiming ethical questions to be outside the realm of science, and then predicting
that property rights will be assigned in accordance with utilitarian cost-benefit considerations,
or should be so assigned by government judges, one is likewise proposing an ethic.
It is the ethic of statism, in one or both of two forms.
Either it amounts to a defense of the status quo, whatever it is, on the grounds that lastingly
existing rules, norms, laws, institutions, etc. must be efficient, as otherwise they
Rothbard did not dispute the fact that property rights are, and historically have been, assigned
in various ways, of course, or that the different ways in which they are assigned and reassigned
have distinctly different economic consequences.
In fact, his power and market is probably the most comprehensive economic analysis of alternative
property rights arrangements to be found.
Nor did he dispute the possibility or importance of monetary calculation and of evaluating
alternative property rights arrangements in terms of money.
Indeed, as an outspoken critic of socialism and as a monetary theorist, how could he?
What Rothbard objected to was the argumentatively unsubstantiated acceptance, on the part of
Coase and the Chicago Law and Economics tradition, of the positivistic dogma concerning the impossibility
of a rational ethic, and, by implication, their statism, and their unwillingness to
even consider the possibility that the concept of property might in fact be an ineradicably
and the normative concept, which could provide the conceptual basis for a systematic reintegration
of value-free economics and normative ethics.
There was little to be found in modern contemporary political philosophy that Rothbard could lean
on in support of such a contention.
Owing to the dominance of the positivistic creed, ethics and political philosophy had
had long disappeared as a science or else degenerated into an analysis of the semantics
of normative concepts and discourse, and when political philosophy finally made a comeback
in the early 1970s in the wake of John Rawls and his Theory of Justice, the recognition
of scarcity as a fundamental human condition and of private property and private property
Rights as a device for coordinating the actions of individuals constrained by scarcity was
conspicuously absent. Neither property nor scarcity appeared in Rawls' elaborate index,
for instance, while equality had several dozen entries. In fact, Rawls, to whom the philosophy
profession has in the meantime accorded the rank of the premier ethicist of our age, was
are the prime example of someone completely uninterested in what a human ethic must accomplish.
That is, to answer the question of what I am permitted to do right now and here, given
that I cannot not act as long as I am alive and awake, and the means or goods which I
must employ in order to do so are always scarce, such that there may be interpersonal conflicts
Regarding Their Use.
Instead of answering this question, Rawls addressed an altogether different one.
What rules would be agreed upon as just or fair by parties situated behind a veil of
ignorance?
Obviously, the answer to this question depends crucially on the description of the original
position of parties behind a veil of ignorance.
How then was this situation defined?
According to Rawls, behind the veil of ignorance, no one knows his place in society, his class
position or social status, nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural
assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength and the like.
It is taken for granted, however, that they know the general facts about human society.
They understand political affairs and the principles of economic theory.
They know the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology.
While one would think that scarcity ranks among the general facts of society and economic
theory, Rawls' parties, who supposedly knew about scarcity, were themselves strangely
unaffected by this condition.
In Rawls' construction of the original position, there was no recognition of the fact that
That scarcity must be assumed to exist even here.
Even in deliberating behind a veil of ignorance, one must still make use of scarce means, at
least one's physical body and its standing room, that is, labor and land.
Even before beginning any ethical deliberation, then, in order to make them possible, private
or exclusive property in bodies and a principle regarding the private or exclusive appropriation
of standing room must already be presupposed.
In distinct contrast to this general fact of human nature, Rawls' moral parties were
unconstrained by scarcities of any kind, and hence did not qualify as actual humans but
as free-floating wraiths or disembodied somnambulists.
Such beings, Rawls concluded, cannot but acknowledge as the first principle of justice, one requiring
an equal distribution of all resources.
Indeed, this principle is so obvious that we would expect it to occur to anyone immediately.
True, for if it is assumed that moral parties are not human actors, but disembodied entities,
the notion of private property must indeed appear strange.
As Rawls admitted with captivating frankness, he had simply defined the original position
so that we get the desired result.
Rawls' imaginary parties had no resemblance whatsoever with human beings, but were epistemological
somnambulists.
Accordingly, his socialist-egalitarian theory of justice does not qualify as a human ethic,
but something else entirely.
If anything useful could be found in Rawls in particular and contemporary political philosophy
in general, it was only the continued recognition of the age-old universalization principle
contained in the so-called Golden Rule as well as in the Kantian Categorical Imperative,
that all rules aspiring to the rank of just rules must be general rules, applicable and
and valid for everyone without exception.
Rothbard sought and found support for his contention regarding the possibility of a
rational ethic and the reintegration of ethics and economics based on the notion of private
property in the works of the late scholastics and, in their footsteps, such modern natural
rights theorists as Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke.
Building upon their work, in The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard gives the following answer
to the question of what I am justified doing here and now.
Every person owns his own physical body, as well as all nature-given goods which he puts
to use with the help of his body before anyone else does.
This ownership implies his right to employ these resources as one sees fit, so long as
as one does not thereby uninvitedly change the physical integrity of another's property
or delimit another's control over it without his consent.
In particular, once a good has been first appropriated or homesteaded by mixing one's
labor with it, Locke's phrase, then ownership of it can only be acquired by means of a voluntary
a contractual transfer of its property title from a previous to a later owner.
These rights are absolute.
Any infringement on them is subject to lawful prosecution by the victim of this infringement,
or his agent, and is actionable in accordance with the principles of strict liability and
the proportionality of punishment.
Taking his cues from the very same sources, Rothbard then offered this ultimate proof
for these rules as just rules.
If a person, A, were not the owner of his physical body and all goods originally appropriated,
produced or voluntarily acquired by him, there would only exist two alternatives.
Either another person, B, must then be regarded as the owner of A and the goods appropriated,
Produced or contractually acquired by A, or both parties, A and B, must be regarded as
equal co-owners of both bodies and goods.
In the first case, A would be B's slave, and subject to exploitation. B would own A,
and the goods originally appropriated, produced or acquired by A. But A would not own B, and
and the goods homesteaded, produced or acquired by B.
With this rule, two distinct classes of people would be created—exploitors, B, and exploited,
A, to whom different law would apply.
Hence this rule fails the universalization test, and is from the outset disqualified as
even a potential human ethic, for in order to be able to claim a rule to be a law, just,
It is necessary that such a rule be universally, equally valid for everyone.
In the second case of universal co-ownership, the requirement of equal rights for everyone
is obviously fulfilled.
Yet this alternative suffers from another fatal flaw.
For each activity of a person requires the employment of scarce goods, at least his body
and its standing room.
If all goods were the collective property of everyone, then no one, at any time and in
any place, could ever do anything with anything, unless he had every other co-owner's prior
permission to do what he wanted to do.
And how can one give such a permission if one is not even the sole owner of one's very
own body and vocal cords?
If one were to follow the rule of total collective ownership, mankind would die out instantly.
Whatever this is, it is not a human ethic, either.
Thus one is left with the initial principles of self-ownership and first use, first own,
that is, original appropriation, homesteading.
They pass the universalization test, they hold for everyone equally, and they can at
Rothbard did not claim that these fundamental principles of just conduct or proper action
were new or his own discovery, of course.
Equipped with near-encyclopedic knowledge ranging over the entire field of the sciences
as of man, he knew that at least as far as the social sciences are concerned, there is
little new under the sun.
In the fields of ethics and economics in particular, which form the cornerstones of the Rothbardian
system and which are concerned with non-hypothetical truths, it must be expected that most of our
knowledge consists of old, long ago discovered insights.
Newly discovered non-hypothetical truths, even if not impossible, should be expected
to be rare intellectual events, and the newer they are, the more suspect they are.
It must be expected that most non-hypothetical truths already have been discovered and learned
long ago, and merely need to be rediscovered and relearned by every successive generation.
But it also should be expected that scientific progress in ethics and economics, as in other
disciplines concerned with non-hypothetical propositions and relations such as philosophy,
logic and mathematics, will usually be extremely slow and painstaking.
The danger is not that a new generation of intellectuals cannot add anything new or better
to the stock of knowledge inherited from the past, but rather that it will not, or only
incompletely, relearn whatever knowledge already exists, and will fall into old errors instead.
Accordingly, Rothbard saw himself in the role of a political philosopher as well as an economist,
essentially as a preserver and defender of old inherited truths, and his claim to originality,
like that of Mises, was one of utmost modesty. Like Mises, his achievement was to hold on
to and restate long ago established insights and repair a few errors within a fundamentally
complete intellectual edifice. Yet this, as Rothbard knew well, was in fact the rarest
and highest possible intellectual achievement. For, as Mises once remarked about economics,
which holds equally true for ethics.
There never lived at the same time more than a score of men whose work contributed anything
essential to economics.
Rothbard was one of those rare individuals who did contribute to ethics as well as economics.
This is illustrated in The Ethics of Liberty.
All elements and principles, every concept, analytical tool and logical procedure of Rothbard's
Rothbard's private property ethic are admittedly old and familiar.
Even primitives and children intuitively understand the moral validity of the principle of self-ownership
and original appropriation.
And indeed, the list of Rothbard's acknowledged intellectual predecessors goes back to antiquity.
Yet it is difficult to find anyone who has stated a theory with greater ease and clarity
than Rothbard.
More importantly, due to the sharpened methodological awareness derived from his intimate familiarity
with the praxeological, axiomatic, deductive method, Rothbard was able to provide more
rigorous proof of the moral intuitions of self-ownership and original appropriation
as ultimate ethical principles or axioms, and develop a more systematic, comprehensive
and Consistent Ethical Doctrine or Law Code Than Anyone Before Him.
Hence the ethics of liberty represents a close realization of the age-old desideratum of
rationalist philosophy, of providing mankind with an ethic which, as Hugo Grotius demanded
more than 300 years ago, even the will of an omnipotent being cannot change or abrogate,
and which would maintain its objective validity even if we should assume, per impossibile,
that there is no god or that he does not care for human affairs.
When the Ethics of Liberty appeared in 1982, it initially attracted only a little attention
in academia.
Two factors were responsible for this neglect.
First, there were the anarchistic implications of Rothbard's theory, and his argument that
that the institution of government, the state, is incompatible with the fundamental principles
of justice.
As defined by Rothbard, a state is an organization which possesses either or both, in actual
fact almost always both, of the following characteristics.
A. It acquires its revenue by physical coercion, taxation, and B. It achieves a compulsory
is a monopoly of force and of ultimate decision-making power over a given territorial area.
Both of these essential activities of the State necessarily constitute criminal aggression
and depredation of the just rights of private property of its subjects, including self-ownership.
For the first, constitutes and establishes theft on a grand scale, while the second prohibits
It's the free competition of defense and decision-making agencies within a given territorial area,
prohibiting the voluntary purchase and sale of defense and judicial services.
Without justice, Rothbard concluded, as St. Augustine had before him, the state was nothing
but a band of robbers.
Rothbard's anarchism was not the sort of anarchism that his teacher and mentor Mises had rejected
as hopelessly naive, of course.
The anarchists, Mises had written, contend that a social order in which nobody enjoys
privileges at the expense of his fellow citizens could exist without any compulsion and coercion
for the prevention of action detrimental to society.
The anarchists overlook the undeniable fact that some people are either too narrow-minded
or too weak to adjust themselves spontaneously to the conditions of social life.
An anarchistic society would be exposed to the mercy of every individual.
Society cannot exist if the majority is not ready to hinder, by the application or threat
of violent action, minorities from destroying the social order.
Indeed, Rothbard wholeheartedly agreed with Mises that without resort to compulsion the
existence of society would be endangered, and that behind the rules of conduct whose
observance is necessary to assure peaceful human cooperation must stand the threat of
force if the whole edifice of society is not to be continually at the mercy of any one
of its members.
One must be in a position to compel a person who will not respect the lives, health, personal
freedom or private property of others to acquiesce in the rules of life in society.
Inspired in particular by the 19th century American anarchist political theorists Lysander
Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, and the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari, from the outset
Rothbard's anarchism took it for granted that there will always be murderers, thieves, thugs,
con artists, etc., and that life in society would be impossible if they were not punished by physical
force. As a reflection of this fundamental realism, anti-utopianism, of his private property
anarchism, Rothbard, unlike most contemporary political philosophers, accorded central
No one can be said to be the owner of something if he is not permitted to defend his property by physical violence against possible invaders and invasions.
Would, Rothbard asked, somebody be allowed to take the law into his own hands?
Questions? Would the victim or a friend of the victim be allowed to exact justice personally
on the criminal? And he answered, Of course, yes, since all rights of punishment derive
from the victim's right of self-defense. Hence the question is not whether or not evil
and aggression exist, but how to deal with its existence justly and efficiently, and
it is only in the answer to this question that Rothbard reaches conclusions which qualify
The classical liberal answer from the American Declaration of Independence to Mises was to assign the indispensable task of protecting life, liberty and property to government as its sole function.
Rothbard rejected this conclusion as a non sequitur, if government was defined by its power to tax and ultimate decision-making, territorial monopoly of jurisdiction.
Private property ownership, as the result of acts of original appropriation, production or exchange from prior to later owner, implies the owner's right to exclusive jurisdiction regarding his property.
In fact, it is the very purpose of private property to establish physically separate domains of exclusive jurisdiction, so as to avoid possible conflicts concerning the use of scarce resources.
No private property owner can possibly surrender his right to ultimate jurisdiction over and physical defense of his property to someone else, unless he sold or otherwise transferred his property, in which case someone else would have exclusive jurisdiction over it.
That is, so long as something has not been abandoned, its owner must be presumed to retain these rights.
As far as his relations to others are concerned, every property owner may further partake of the advantages of the division of labor and seek better and improved protection of his unalterable rights through cooperation with other owners and their property.
Every property owner may buy from, sell to or otherwise contract with anyone else concerning supplemental property protection and security products and services.
Yet every property owner may also, at any time, unilaterally discontinue any such cooperation with others, or change his respective affiliations.
Hence, in order to satisfy the demand for protection and security among private property owners, it is permissible and possible that there will be specialized firms or agencies
Providing Protection, Insurance and Arbitration Services for a Fee to Voluntarily Buying or
Not Buying Clients.
It is impermissible, however, for any such firm or agency to compel anyone to come exclusively
to it for protection, or to bar any other agency from likewise offering protection services.
That is, no protection agency may be funded by taxes or exempted from competition.
Free entry.
In distinct contrast, a territorial monopoly of protection and jurisdiction, a state, rests
from the outset on an impermissible act of expropriation, and it provides the monopolist
and his agents with a license to further expropriation.
Taxation.
It implies that every property owner is prohibited from discontinuing his cooperation with his
supposed protector, and that no one except the monopolist may exercise ultimate jurisdiction
over his own property.
Rather, everyone except the monopolist has lost his right to physical protection and
defense against possible invasion by the State, and is thus rendered defenseless vis-à-vis
and the actions of his own alleged protector.
Consequently, the price of justice and protection will continually rise and the quality of justice and protection will continually fall.
A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms, an invasive protector,
and will, if permitted, lead to increasingly more taxes and ever less protection.
Likewise, the existence of a judicial monopoly will lead to a steady deterioration of justice.
For if no one can appeal for justice except to the state and its courts and judges, justice
will be constantly perverted in favor of the state until the idea of immutable laws of
human conduct ultimately disappears and is replaced with the idea of law as positive
State-Made Legislation.
Based on this analysis, Rothbard considered the classical liberal solution to the fundamental
human problem of protection of a minimal or night-watchman state or an otherwise constitutionally
limited government as a hopelessly confused and naive idea.
Every minimal state has the inherent tendency to become a maximal state, for once an agency
is permitted to collect any taxes, however small and for whatever purpose, it will naturally
tend to employ its current tax revenue for the collection of ever more future taxes,
for the same and or other purposes.
Similarly, once an agency possesses any judiciary monopoly, it will naturally tend to employ
this privileged position for the further expansion of its range of jurisdiction.
Limitations, after all, are state constitutions, and whatever limitations they may contain,
what is or is not constitutional, is determined by state courts and judges.
Hence there is no other possible way of limiting state power except by eliminating the state
altogether, and, in accordance with justice and economics, establishing a free market
and Protection and Security Services. Naturally, Rothbard's anarchism appeared threatening
to all statists, and his right-wing, that is, private property anarchism in particular,
could not but offend socialists of all stripes. However, his anarchistic conclusions were
not sufficient to explain the neglect of the ethics of liberty by academia. Rothbard's
His first handicap was compounded by an even weightier one.
Not only had he come to unorthodox conclusions, worse, he had reached them by pre-modern intellectual
means.
Instead of suggesting, hypothesizing, pondering or puzzling, Rothbard had offered axiomatic
deductive arguments and proofs.
In the age of democratic egalitarianism and ethical relativism, this constituted the ultimate
academic sin, intellectual absolutism, extremism and intolerance.
The importance of this second methodological factor can be illustrated by contrasting the
reception accorded to Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty on the one hand, and Robert Nozick's
Anarchy, State and Utopia on the other.
This book appeared in 1974, three years after the publication of Rawls' A Theory of Justice.
Almost overnight, Nozick was internationally famous, and to this day in the field of political
philosophy, anarchy, state and utopia ranks probably second only to Rawls' book in terms
of academic recognition.
Yet while Rawls was a socialist, Nozick was a libertarian.
In fact, Nozick was heavily influenced by Rothbard. He had read Rothbard's earlier Man Economy
and State, Power and Market, and For a New Liberty, and in the acknowledgments to his
book he noted that it was a long conversation about six years ago with Murray Rothbard that
stimulated my interest in individualist anarchist theory.
To be sure, the conclusions arrived at by Nozick were less radical than those proposed
by Rothbard.
Rather than reaching anarchistic conclusions, Nozick's main conclusions about the state
are that the minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force,
theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts and so on, is justified, that any more extensive
state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified,
and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right.
Nonetheless, in claiming that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose
of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people
for their own good or protection, even Nozick's conclusions placed him far outside the political-philosophical
mainstream.
Why then, in distinct contrast to the long-lasting neglect of Rothbard's libertarian The Ethics
of Liberty, the stupendous academic success of Nozick's libertarian Anarchy, State and
Utopia?
The answer is method and style.
Rothbard was above all a systematic thinker.
He set out from the most elementary human situation and problem, Crusoe ethics, and
then proceeded painstakingly, justifying and proving each step and argument along the way
to increasingly more complex and complicated situations and problems.
Moreover, his prose was characterized by unrivaled clarity.
In distinct contrast, Nozick was a modern, unsystematic, associationist or even impressionistic
thinker, and his prose was difficult and unclear.
Ludwig was explicit about his own method. His writing, he stated, was in the mode of
much contemporary philosophical work in epistemology and metaphysics. There are elaborate arguments,
claims rebutted by unlikely counter-examples, surprising theses, puzzles, abstract structural
conditions, challenges to find another theory which fits a specified range of cases, startling
and Conclusions and so on.
One view about how to write a philosophy book holds that an author should think through
all of the details of the view he presents and its problems, polishing and refining his
view to present to the world a finished, complete and elegant whole.
This is not my view.
At any rate, I believe that there also is a place and a function in our ongoing intellectual
Methodologically, then, Nozick and Rothbard were poles apart.
But why would Nozick's unsystematic ethical explorations find so much more resonance in
in Academia than Rothbard's systematic ethical treatise, especially when their conclusions
appeared to be largely congruent.
Nozick touched upon the answer when he expressed the hope that his method makes for intellectual
interest and excitement.
But this was at best half of the answer.
For Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty, too, was an eminently interesting and exciting
book, full of examples, cases and scenarios from the full range of everyday experiences
to extreme lifeboat situations, spiced with many surprising conclusions and above all
solutions instead of merely suggestions to problems and puzzles.
Nozick's method rather made for interest and excitement of a particular kind.
Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty consisted essentially of one successively and systematically
drawn out and elaborated argument, and thus required the long sustained attention of its
reader.
However, a reader of Rothbard's book could possibly get so excited that he would not
want to put it down until he had finished it.
The excitement caused by Anarchy, State and Utopia was of a very different kind.
The book was a series of dozens of disparate or loosely jointed arguments, conjectures,
puzzles, counter-examples, experiments, paradoxes, surprising turns, startling twists, intellectual
flashes and philosophical razzle-dazzle, and thus required only short and intermittent
attention of its reader.
At the same time, few if any readers of Nozick's book likely will have felt the urge to read
it straight through.
Instead, reading Nozick was characteristically done unsystematically and intermittently
in bits and pieces.
The excitement stirred by Nozick was intense, short and fleeting.
And the success of anarchy, state and utopia was due to the fact that at all times, and
especially under democratic conditions, there are far more high-time-preference intellectuals,
In his subsequent book, Philosophical Explanations, Nozick further confirmed this judgment.
There he wrote,
I, too, seek an unreadable book, urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement,
revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through,
A book even to bring reading to stop? I have not found that book or attempted it. Still,
I wrote and thought in awareness of it, in the hope that this book would bask in its
light. At no point is the reader forced to accept anything. He moves along gently, exploring
his own and the author's thoughts. He explores together with the author, moving only where
The Theory of Money and Credit
If they are correct, I do not think it important for me to believe them correct, either.
Still I do believe and hope you will find it so, that these proposed explanations are
illuminating and worth considering, that they are worth surpassing.
Also that the process of seeking and elaborating explanations, being open to new possibilities,
the new wanderings and wanderings, the free exploration, is itself a delight.
Can any pleasure compare to that of a new idea, a new question?
There is sexual experience, of course, not dissimilar with its own playfulness and possibilities,
its focused freedom, its depth, its sharp pleasures and its gentle ones, its ecstasies.
What is the mind's excitement and sensuality?
What is orgasm?
Whatever, it unfortunately will frighten and offend the Puritans of the mind.
Do the two puritanisms share a common root, even as it expands others and brings them joy?
Despite his politically incorrect conclusions, Nozick's libertarianism was deemed respectable
by the academic masses and elicited countless comments and replies because it was methodologically
non-committal.
That is, Nozick did not claim that his libertarian conclusions proved anything.
Even though one would think that ethics is and must be an eminently practical intellectual
subject, Nozick did not claim that his ethical explorations had any practical implications.
They were meant to be nothing more than fascinating, entertaining or suggestive intellectual play.
As such, libertarianism posed no threat to the predominantly social-democratic intellectual
class.
On account of his unsystematic method, his philosophical pluralism, Nozick was tolerant
vis-à-vis the intellectual establishment, his anti-establishment conclusions notwithstanding.
He did not insist that his libertarian conclusions were correct, and, for instance, socialist
conclusions were false, and accordingly demand their instant practical implementation, that
That is, the immediate abolition of the social democratic welfare state, including all of
public tax-funded education and research.
Rather, Nozick's libertarianism was and claimed to be no more than just an interesting thought.
He did not mean to do any real harm to the ideas of his socialist opponents.
He only wanted to throw an interesting idea into the democratic, open-ended intellectual
Following the publication of Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick took even further steps
to establish his reputation as tolerant.
He never replied to the countless comments and criticisms of his book, including Rothbard's,
which forms chapter 29 of this book.
Nozick confirmed that he took his non-committal method seriously, for why, indeed, should
anyone reply to his critics if he were not committed to the correctness of his own views
in the first place?
Moreover, in his subsequent book, Philosophical Explanations, Nozick removed all remaining
doubts as to his supposed non-extremist tolerance.
He went further than merely restating his commitment to the methodological non-committal.
So don't look here for a knockdown argument that there is something wrong with knockdown
arguments, for the knockdown argument to end all knockdown arguing.
It will not do to argue you into the conclusion, even in order to reduce the total amount of
presentation of argument, nor may I hint that I possess the knockdown argument yet will not
present it.
Further, in a truly startling twist, Nozick went on to say that the use of knockdown arguments even constituted coercion and was hence morally offensive.
The terminology of philosophical art is coercive. Arguments are powerful and best when they are knocked down. Arguments force you to a conclusion.
If you believe the premises, you have to or must believe the conclusion.
Some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth.
A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether
he wants to believe it or not.
A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief.
Why are philosophers intent on forcing others to believe things?
Is that a nice way to behave towards someone?
I think we cannot improve people that way.
Philosophical argument, trying to get someone to believe something whether he wants to believe
it or not, is not, I have held, a nice way to behave towards someone.
Also, it does not fit the original motivation for studying or entering philosophy.
That motivation is puzzlement, curiosity, a desire to understand, not a desire to produce
Uniformity of Belief.
Most people do not want to become thought police.
The philosophical goal of explanation rather than proof not only is morally better, it
is more in accord with one's philosophical motivation.
Also, it changes how one proceeds philosophically.
At the macro level, it leads away from constructing the philosophical tower.
At the micro level, it alters which philosophical moves are legitimate at various points.
With this surprising redefinition of systematic axiomatic deductive reasoning as coercion,
Nozick had pulled the last tooth from his libertarianism.
If even the attempt of proving or demonstrating the ethical impermissibility and injustice
of Democratic Socialism constituted bad behavior, libertarianism had been essentially disarmed,
and the existing order and its academic bodyguards rendered intellectually invincible.
How could one not be nice to someone as nice as Nozick?
It is no wonder that the anti-libertarian intellectual establishment took kindly to
a libertarianism as gentle and kind as his, and elevated Nozick to the rank of the premier
In accordance with this non-methodical mindset, Nozick's philosophical interests continued
to drift from one subject to another. Already, in his philosophical explanations, he had
confessed, I have found, and not only in sequence, many different philosophies alluring and appealing,
Sogent and impressive, tempting and wonderful.
Libertarianism, ethics, carried no particular or even unique weight within Nozick's philosophy.
It was one exciting subject among innumerous others to be taken up for exploration or dropped
as one's curiosity demanded.
It was not entirely surprising then when, only a few years after the publication of
of the very book that had made him famous, it became increasingly obvious that Nozick
had all but abandoned even his kind and gentle libertarianism.
And when he at last acknowledged openly in The Examined Life, a book of neo-Buddhist
musings on the meaning of life, that he was no longer a libertarian and had converted
to communitarian social democracy, he still felt under no obligation to give reasons for
for his change of mind, and explain why his previous ethical views had been false. Interestingly,
this development seems to have had little effect on the status of anarchy, state and
and Utopia as Prime Libertarian Philosophizing.