I'm getting ready for the final episode of the History of Political Philosophy with Dr. David Gordon.
But before we finish here today, I'd like to introduce to you the founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, President Lew Rockwell.
Thank you, Mark.
Before we get started, I just want to thank the two generous donors who made this conference possible this week,
Mr. Steve Berger and Mr. Ken Garshina. These are two of the small but very effective group, the Austrian hedge fund managers, both stars on Wall Street. Ken came to us because he'd been a student of Walter Block's at Holy Cross College. Steve Berger because of his readings in Austrian economics and we thank them very much for making this Gordon seminar possible.
And I want to take this opportunity to present to David, David if you want to come up here.
Each year the Mises Institute presents the Murray and Rothbard Medal of Freedom and David
is the recipient this year. This was established by Mr. George W. Connell. George was a civil
engineer graduate of Purdue who worked all over the world in Libya, in Saudi Arabia,
in California and Texas and England and had a great devotion to the principles of freedom
and shortly before his death in 2004 he asked us to establish an annual Rothbard prize to
be given to a scholar or a public intellectual for a lifetime of achievement for the ideals
of liberty and the tradition of Murray Rothbard and we're very delighted to give this to David
this year.
It's a beautiful medal with Murray's picture on it. It also includes a $20 gold piece from the days when the American government hadn't been entirely corrupted.
And, of course, David could tell many stories about David. People who have been at this seminar and watched it on the internet already know that there can't be too many people who could give ten lectures of this sort without a note.
When I had the privilege of going through Murray Rothbard's office in Las Vegas after his death,
one of the letters I came upon was from the mid-1970s. Murray had been to a Liberty Fund conference
and he was writing someone about it and I talked a little bit about the conference,
but he said the most extraordinary and wonderful thing that happened to him at the conference
was that he met the closest thing to a universal genius that he'd ever met in his life
and it was this young man, David Gorton, and of course they became very close. I always
think that even aside from David's intellectual achievements, when I would see the two of
them together, especially when I would see Murray's face after seeing David and not having
seen him for a while, that it was really the look of a father upon a son. I think David
was in many ways Murray's son as well as his intellectual collaborator and heir and just
One of the many things David has done, this most wonderful, essential Rothbard, and David
of course has much else to do. He's done much, and David, it's a great honor to present you
this medal. Come on up here.
Thanks very much, Lew. I'm very grateful to you and the Mises Institute for your support
over the years and for this great honor. It was a complete surprise to me. In fact, I'm
So surprised I won't be able to give the final lecture.
I'm going to talk today about
Robert Nozick and
Murray Rothbard.
Robert Nozick lived from 1938 to 2002.
graduated from Columbia and then attended Princeton. His main teachers in philosophy
department were Carl Hemphill, the philosopher of science, Hilary Putnam was then at Princeton
also a philosopher of science and the specialist in Greek philosophy, Gregory Blasto. Since
Since it's the last lecture, it will allow me to tell one story that Nozick told me.
When he was in the class of Hilary Putnam, Putnam had on the final exam, one of the questions
was, write your own question and answer it.
So Nozick's question was, write your own question and answer it, and the answer was, write your
After he graduated from Princeton, he studied at Oxford for a while, and then he became
professor at Harvard, where he taught, I think, from the mid-1960s, with a couple years interruption
at Rockefeller University down to his death. I think he was, at the time, one of the youngest
persons ever to get tenure at Harvard. I think he got it around age 30.
Nozick was extraordinarily fast in argument. His specialty was counter-arguments. Any position
In fact, Thomas Nagel, who was a very close friend of Nozick's for a long time till he
wrote a review of Anarchy State Utopia that offended Nozick, said about him, it was in
the eulogy he wrote, he gave at Nozick's funeral, he said, Nozick could destroy any position
when he himself came up with, so he knew when he would write something he would have to
stop giving arguments at some point because he knew he couldn't come up with anything
that he himself would be unable to demolish. Now, he wrote not only on political philosophy
in Anarchy, State and Utopia, but he had a very wide range of interests. He wrote philosophical
Explanations, which came out in 1981, and he wrote other works that examine life and
nature rationality, and then his last book was Invariances. He also has a collection
of his essays called Socratic Puzzles. I'm going to be confining my remarks entirely
to his most famous work in political philosophy, Anarchy, State and Utopia.
After he wrote the book, which is his libertarian work, he, for a while, abandoned libertarianism.
The most anti-libertarian remarks he made are in the book The Examined Life, but toward
By the end of his life, he came back to a somewhat libertarian position. He told me that his own position was, he felt he was fairly close to Hayek's position. He didn't think he had deviated. He said, if you consider that libertarian view, then he thought he qualified as libertarian. He said, well, people usually are willing to classify Hayek as libertarian.
at least in the classical liberal tradition. So he didn't think that the fact that he had
at one time held a more radical view should disqualify him from being called a libertarian.
There are a whole lot of things, topics one could talk about in Anarchy, State, and Utopia,
but I just want to, I'll just mention a few things. First, I want to say something about
His classification of theories of distribution and the famous Wilt Chamberlain example that
arises out of that classification, because the reason I want to say something about this
is that people confuse very often, he sometimes talks about end state principles of distribution,
Nozick first distinguished two kinds of theories of distribution, theories that say how wealth or any other good should be distributed.
One is one view in which the only thing that matters is a certain structure of the distribution.
Supposing we have, let's say, there are five people and we want, say, a particular, let's say a single good with five people,
And we have the good distributed this way, so we have three people get one unit, two
people get two units of the good. Now, on this kind of view, which is an, he calls an
End-State View, all that matters is that you have this distribution, doesn't of course
have to be this particular one, but all that matters is structure, a certain structure
of the distribution is instantiated. So it doesn't matter who the people are in the distribution,
As long as you have the range this way, then the principal is satisfied.
You can have current time slice, this is under this, you have current time slice where what
matters is what the situation is, say, at the present moment, you say, well, you want
the distribution to be this way now, so then you could have variations of other end states
that aren't current time slice that would depend, say, you want a certain pattern to
be, a certain arrangement to be realized in the future. We could see the diff, to get
an example of this, suppose you take, which is not, this would not be an end state theory,
Suppose you take a, you accept the Marxist view, which I'll later be talking about in
No Six Reasons to Reject, the Marxists say that workers are exploited under capitalism.
So suppose somebody was like this end state view and he said, well, let's say this under
of Capitalism, this is the actual, this turns out to be the actual distribution, say the
workers are these, you have two capitalists, so they get twice as much, and this comes
about because the workers are exploited. A Marxist, someone who thought that was a bad
thing, wouldn't be satisfied if the support of the end state theory said, well look, since
These workers are getting exploited, all that we're saying is that these people are getting
more rather than these people, but in your view it would be just the same pattern with
other people in the better position, but it would be the same arrangement.
So the markets would say, you know, it matters which people are in which positions, but the
So one of the end state theories say, no, all that counts is a particular arrangement, is all that's required for the correct distribution.
So you have these end state theories. Now these are opposed to historical theories.
Now in historical theory, the distribution doesn't just depend on this particular arrangement.
It depends how you got to the particular arrangement that you're holding is just.
So say in libertarian theory, any libertarian who knows himself would hold, say your just
This arrangement is one that depends on who is a legitimate owner of a property and that
depends on how the property was acquired in the past by particular people.
So you see, in the historical theory, it's not just a matter of a particular state of
affairs at one time, it depends on what's happened in the past.
Now, here's where the part that I think people get confused.
Within the historical theory, there are two kinds of historical theory.
One is patterned and the other is non-patterned.
So the confusion is people think that the pattern is the same as the end state, but
remember, the end state is the non-historical view, patterned and non-patterned are variants
of the historical view.
Now, the patterned view would say what the correct distribution now is depends on some
fact, some dimension, natural dimension of people at a particular time in the past.
For example, suppose somebody said wealth or income should be distributed according to
how much people in the past benefited consumers, then that's a particular dimension, how much
in the past people benefited consumers, that determines the present distribution.
So by knowing certain information, certain characteristics of people in the past, we can then determine the present distribution.
Now there are also some examples, suppose you say everyone should get equal incomes,
and the advantage of a lease well-off. So if you have any, you would say at a particular time, you'd say, what are the, what are the distribution? And you say, are these any inequalities to the advantage of a lease well-off? If they're not, then you change matters so they become, so that it fits this principle.
But you could also say in the theory that Nozick favors non-pattern principle because it just says if you're the legitimate owner of something, you can pass it on to anyone you want or exchange it with anybody you want, so there isn't any way of taking the distribution at one time and then saying, well, there's some characteristic of that distribution which enables us to sort of map onto that and get
The New Distribution
Now you might be able to say, sort of, come up with some tricky way of fitting the non-pattern
view and say you could come up with some, say that there's really a pattern there, somehow,
but it isn't really the same as a pattern because it's just saying whatever happens,
anything the just owners come up with is all right.
You could rig up some sort of pattern just when you see what they do, but you couldn't
in advance come up with some sort of way of going from what the libertarian owners do
to get to what the distribution should be in some future time. You just have to say
whatever they come up with is all right. I think we can see what a non-pattern view,
I haven't explained it too well, but I can see more if we look at the famous Wilt Chamberlain
an example. What Nozick imagines is, well, let's start off with some sort of distribution,
say, that some supporter of egalitarianism favors. Let's suppose we start off, we say
everyone has an equal income. Then he says, well, each person has been assigned a certain
So he says supposing Wilt Chamberlain, for those of you who are too young to remember he was a famous basketball player,
suppose he says he'll play basketball and he sets up a game and he charges people 25 cents admission to see him play basketball.
Ball. And it turns out everybody else is interested in seeing him play, so it turns out because
of that, he gets $250,000, which means much more than anybody else get. In those days
when he wrote in 1974, that was an enormous salary. I imagine it still would be if you
adjusted for inflation. I take it even if you don't adjust for inflation.
Alright, so Nozick says, well, could the egalitarian object to this? He would say, you start off
with everybody having equal amount, you've given everybody his proper share, everybody
has just given up a quarter of his own money and the result is a situation where Wilt Chamberlain
now has $250,000, so the supporter of the pattern principle would say, well, we then
have to take the money away from Chamberlain, redistribute it so everybody has an equal
amount of money, but then Nozick said, well, look, then you're saying that a person can't
even spend 25 cents of money that you yourself say is his legitimate share as he wants, because
Everybody, remembering the example, is voluntarily paid 25 cents to see Chamberlain play basketball.
So I say, if you want to maintain a pattern, if you want some sort of distribution of this
kind where what people get depends on some natural dimension of what they got at some
point in the past, you say they should be all equal, so you then say, well, what are
the deviations from that? So you're now having to correct that. He says that will require
constant interferences with liberty. So his point, which applies very much to Rawls' theory,
is that pattern theories of justice, pattern theories of distribution are very hard to
to Maintain, and I think this is a very important insight.
I want to turn now to another topic in Anarchy State Utopia, the famous first part, where,
as you know, in libertarian theory, there are two views among libertarians.
Some say a minimal state, so-called night watchman state, is justifiable, and then others
such as Murray Rothbard say, no, even protection and justice should be provided by competing
agencies on the free market.
So Nozick was the foremost defender of the minimal state view.
I want to say something about his arguments for that in the first part of the book.
This is, unfortunately, his argument, to get his argument, involves saying a little bit
about his chapter on risk, which is the most difficult chapter in the whole book.
This is, it's really, as I mentioned, he had a labyrinthine mind, and this is the most
labyrinthine of all the chapters in the book.
He's not one writer who will just set out his argument very clearly.
He'll say something and then you have to look at, say, one sentence that he said somewhere
else and try to figure out how he's fit things all in.
Of course, the days when one could call him up and ask him were much easier to handle
Nozick's argument against the anarchists was this. He said, well, let's start with the situation that libertarian anarchists support, where we start off with each person has libertarian natural rights, and he's free to protect himself, and he's free to do whatever he wants to do.
and protect other people. If there are violations of rights, he can punish rights violators or hire people to do that, so just as libertarian anarchists want.
So what he wants to do is say, well, from this starting point, he can show by a series of steps that you can derive a minimal state.
By a state, he means an agency that has a de facto or close to monopoly on the use of force in the society.
Say, you would have, just like the United States, the government is the final arbiter
There may be circumstances in which the state will allow private people to exercise force in themselves, but the state claims the right to supervise anyone else's use of force, plus a state will provide protective services, if necessary, without cost to everybody.
We won't have a situation, say, in a situation, say, where everybody bought protective services, even if it was, say, everybody favored the same agency, all bought protection from that agency, that wouldn't be a state on Nozick's Construal because it would just be something like everybody's buying from one firm, say, just as it turns out everybody buys this car from a single firm,
If you had a firm, everybody likes the cars that this firm puts out, that wouldn't mean
convert the car agency into a socialist firm.
It would still be a private firm, but it would just be everybody buys from that firm.
So if you had just one protection agency, but everybody bought that, voluntarily bought
The protection from that, that wouldn't be a Nozickian state.
So Nozick thinks he can show that a minimal state will arise from the starting point by
a series of steps, none of which violates libertarian rights.
Now this isn't enough because you could imagine, let's say each of you voluntarily gives me
all your money. You all decide you like my lectures or you want me to hurry up and finish, so to get me to do this, you give me all your money.
That's, I think, a very good idea, but it's probably not, from your point of view, a good thing to do.
So you wouldn't be violating any of your rights or anybody else's rights if you did that, but there'd be no reason to do it.
So it isn't enough for Nozick to say there's a series of steps that everybody can take
that don't violate anybody's rights and will result in a minimal state, starting from a
state of libertarian anarchy.
He has to show that each step will be to the advantage of people to take in that state.
There's a complication in the final step that I'll get to when I reach that point, but he
claims he can do that.
He can show, starting from libertarian anarchy, he can show how to get to the state.
What he imagines, he says, well, we will start off with people who form protection agencies,
policies, just, as I say, just the way Murray Rothbard favors, just the way any libertarian
anarchist would.
I should mention that he says in the preface to Anarchy State Utopia, it was a long conversation
with Murray Rothbard that got him interested in individualist anarchism.
So you could take part one of the book to be in effect an explanation why I am not a
of Rothbardian, that's what Nozick is doing there. So, you have been competing private
protection agencies. Now, Nozick assumes that, say, supposing one agency gets more customers,
he assumes that agencies will generally be stronger the more customers they get. So,
Once you get, say, there's some sort of imbalance, some agency has significantly more customers
than another, people will tend to shift from the other agencies to that one because you
want to be in an agency that, if there's any disputes, will win the disputes.
Nozick's imagining that if, say, two agencies come into conflict and they can't settle the
The Theory of Money and State The Theory of Money and State
isn't telling the other agencies you can't defend people, try to attract clients or compete
with us. It will win disputes if other agencies choose to fight with it, but that doesn't
stop these other agencies from existing. Also, it isn't providing protective services to
anyone, if necessary without cost, it's just providing services to people who agree to
pay for its services.
So what Nozick is going to go on is to say he can show from that situation where you
If you have a dominant agency, the dominant agency will be able to turn itself into a minimal state and it will do so in a way that not only doesn't violate anyone's libertarian rights, but it will be to the advantage, everyone, it will be to the advantage of people in that dominant agency to get into the minimal state.
They'll find it in their interest to do so.
Now, before I get to Nozick's argument for that, I think there's a problem for the argument, as I've so far presented it. Remember, what he's saying is that because of this process where the larger agency will win out over smaller agencies, once an agency gets significantly more money, the larger agency will win out over smaller agencies, once an agency gets significantly more money, the larger
is larger, there'll be a tendency for people to go to that agency until you get a dominant
agency. So he's saying, unlike the standard case, there's no natural tendency toward monopoly
on the free market. The size of a firm relative to other firms, how many firms are in the
industry, just depends on particular economic conditions of the industry. There's no natural
tendency to monopoly. Nozick fully accepted that point about economics, but he thought
With protection services, it's different because one agency's strength is another's weakness.
So you have this snowballing effect will take place.
So what I think is the problem with this is his argument might work too well in this sense.
And if he's right, then not only will the people in one agency get to be dominant over
the other, it would seem like people would, or almost all people would leave that agency
and join the monopoly agency.
For his argument to work, there have to be a significant number of people outside the
Dominated Agency, because as you'll see, his argument depends on saying that the
dominant agency can restrict the other agencies in certain ways and then it has
to compensate its clients by providing them with low-cost or free protection
services. So if it doesn't do that because everybody's in the dominant
agency, then it isn't meeting the second criterion that Nozick has set out for
of the State, because say everybody, almost everybody joins a monopoly agency and they're
paying for its services, they're not meeting the criteria Nozick has set up where the agency
is providing low cost or no charge protection services for people who are at least some
people in the society.
So Nozick seems to have an arbitrary stopping point. He's saying, well, here's the reason
people will get into the, leave their protection agencies and get into the dominant agency,
but this process will stop at a certain point that enables the rest of my argument to go
through. And he doesn't say why there would be this stopping point.
All right, but let's put this aside. So we now have, if he's right, there's a dominant
agency and various other agencies who are independent, who people are in those agencies
they're protecting themselves. If they're in a dispute with the dominant agency, then
they'll lose, but still they're operating. Possibly they're people who don't, independent
Now we get to the difficult chapter, which is the one on risk. Nozick says, what happens, let's imagine a situation where a client of a dominant agency commits some crime, or is charged with some crime, or is charged with some crime,
and Crime against the client of one of the non-dominant agencies.
So the non-dominant agency puts the client of the dominant agency on trial and then imposes
some punishment.
So you might think, well, that isn't a problem because if it turns out, let's say the client
then goes to his dominant agency and they decide he's not guilty, then the dominant
agency can simply say the other agency should pay compensation to the client for putting
him on trial and saying wrongly in their view holding that he was guilty.
So why is there a particular problem here?
Why would this lead to any difficulty for the independent agency?
They might not like having to pay compensation, but they're still in existence, they're still
operating.
Now Nozick thinks, though, supposing there are certain kinds of penalty that they could
He said impose like, say, the death penalty or putting people in prison for a long time.
He said if people who might be on trial, they might be afraid if, let's say, this non-dominant
agency used what the first agency thought was risky decision procedure, procedures they
thought had an undue risk of imposing these bad penalties on them. This would make them
afraid. People would say, oh, well, what if I'm arrested by this agency, then they might
decide to put me on trial where, say, you only need 6 out of 12 jurors for a guilty
And then I might be, they might subject me to execution, so even if, I'd be really afraid
of this, so they're imposing this risky decision procedure on me.
So you might say, well, couldn't you then sort of say if they impose such a procedure,
And you say, well, the dominant agencies can say, don't carry out the sentence till we have a chance to look at it, and then you can just, if it turns out we disagree, then you can just compensate our client for the getting him afraid, so you can still have compensation there, you're still paying, you can still have, the non-dominant agency can still put its
Use whatever procedures it wants, it just has to compensate people that it's put under
this risk if they're found not guilty by the dominant agency.
So Nozick said, no, this won't work.
You see how he thinks of all sorts of complications, because he said if people know that an agency
will impose risky decision procedures, then even people who were never arrested for any
crime will be afraid because they'll be afraid that if they are arrested, they will be subject
to non-risky decision procedure.
So they'll be afraid and they will never be compensated because remember they're not arrested
for anything, so the agency hasn't done anything to them.
It's just the fear that if they were arrested and subject to these risky decision procedures,
they would be, get these bad penalties that makes them afraid.
So there is uncompensated for fear here and Nozick thinks as a result of this, the dominant
Agency can tell the other agencies, you can't impose risky decision procedures that we contend
are risky on our clients.
Now, suppose it does that, it says you can't impose these procedures because you'll be
generating this kind of fear, you're unable to compensate our clients for this because
Because even if you find them guilty and we disagree and find them not guilty, you won't
be compensating the ones, the clients of our clients who were made afraid and who didn't
do anything that you didn't put on trial and arrest.
So it can tell the agencies, you can't use risky decision procedures.
Yet one more complication. When we're imagining these agencies use risky decision procedures,
they're not doing anything that's intrinsically wrong. They're not violating rights because
it isn't that they're using decision procedures that everybody realizes are wrong, that would
wrong that would be unfair or inequitable to use. It isn't say, we're deciding whether clients are guilty by reading tea leaves.
It's say they just have a different view of what proper procedures are from that of the dominant agency.
So, the Nozick Hold, if the agency prohibits them from using procedures, then these risky
procedures is really putting the clients of that agency at a disadvantage because then
they can't protect themselves in the way that they think best, in the way that they
think is suitable.
They think these procedures are all right, but they can't use them.
Remember, the first agency can prohibit them because according to its own view of risky
procedures, these procedures are too risky, but it has to recognize the clients of the
non-dominant agency find these procedures acceptable.
So nobody said, well, if it prohibits them, then it has to offer them, those people, the
and independence who are disadvantaged and not being able to protect themselves, has to offer them compensation and the compensation is that they get either low-cost or no-cost protection services from the dominant agency, so it's kind of an odd sort of compensation is that if instead of being able to get protection from the agency you want, you
receive protection from the agency you don't want. Now you do have the right to refuse
and say, well, I want to get, say, compensation and money instead, but Nozick thinks very
few people will want to do that because then they won't be able to protect themselves
in the way that they want. So Nozick thinks, well, if this is right, then what's going
is right, then what's going to happen? You'll have not only an agency that will be able to be dominant in the sense that no agency can challenge it, but it is able to supervise the use of force by all the other agencies. These other agencies are still able to protect clients so long as they don't have disputes with the dominant agency, but
This, Nozick says, well, any state should be willing to do this, any state should be willing to let people settle disputes among themselves, as they wish.
Plus, not only is it supervising the use of force, though, but it has to provide protection services for those who it's disadvantaged by prohibiting using the risky decision procedures
that agency. So it's met, according to Nozick, these two criteria for the state. So we have then, first, the ultra-minimal state, you have the dominant agency, is prohibiting other agencies from using risky decision procedures on its clients. Then it's required immediately morally to transform itself into the minimal state, the state that is providing
The protection services at non-market prices are free to the clients. It's disadvantaged.
So according to Nozick then, it's a minimal state. We've shown, we've drawn the rabbit out of the hat.
We've shown how you get from libertarian anarchy to minimal state without violating any libertarian rights.
and in a way that shows how people operate each step as people be acting in their interests.
I don't find this derivation very plausible because first of all it would first apply
only to cases where there are very severe penalties, such as hanging or long imprisonment.
It's hard to think of anything other than death penalty, which could apply because even
if, say, you were sentenced to long imprisonment, you would know that your agency can review
the case.
Maybe you'd still be afraid because you think your agency, I mean, if your agency confirmed
by its own procedures, you really couldn't object much, although maybe you'd still be feeling the extra fear then, but it would apply then only to a few cases, you couldn't say, how could you say, prohibit the non-dominant agencies from acting in all sorts of other crimes, so long as it doesn't apply these penalties, and then couldn't it also always refuse to apply the risky decision procedures to clients or the dominant agencies.
Why would the other agencies have to put so much emphasis on these particular decision procedures that's arousing the dominant agency to act?
And then, is it very likely that most people will think they're going to be seized and arrested anyway?
I mean, suppose there's some agency, say, that uses six-man juries, so you think if
somebody's arrested for murder, you'll have not a chance, if you're innocent, you'll
have more of a chance of being wrongly found guilty than you would with a normal 12-person
unanimous jury.
Is that going to make people really fearful, given that most people or very few people
were ever arrested for murder?
It seems like he knows that he's just taken one very small possibility and somehow elevated
it into something extraordinarily serious, it seems like, much ado about very little.
So supposing he does get, supposing though his argument works, as I'm sure he would
have granted his argument works, then what happens if, say you have, in addition to the
dominant agency, suppose you have a second agency that's the second most powerful, couldn't
It used the same sort of argument as Nozick had to prohibit clients of the third agency
from imposing risky decision procedures on its client. So then if it did that, then it
would be exercising state-like function. So it would be, seems odd to say, you could say
there's a state in existence if the dominant agency isn't the only one who can prohibit
and other people from using risky decision procedures in the way Nozick won.
But now I want to turn to the second person in my lecture, Murray Rothbard, who's the
writer who's most influenced my own thinking in politics and political theory.
Murray Rothbard is the one who, I think, is the one who has the most plausible position of any of the philosophers I mentioned.
Rothbard lived from 1926 to 1995.
He was a PhD in economic history from Columbia University,
where he studied under Joseph Dorfman and then he had it he worked for the
William Volcker Fund where he wrote reviews and reports on an amazing variety
of scholarly subjects he had an extraordinary range of command of
sources and books on all sorts of things not only economics but history
Philosophy, Political Science, anything you mention he knew a great deal about. He taught
at Brooklyn Polytechnic and then at the University of Nevada Las Vegas until his death in 1995.
Unfortunately, I can't recommend any good secondary literature on Rothbard.
I want to talk in particular about Rothbard's main book on political theory, The Ethics
of Liberty, which was originally published in 1982, and it's since been reissued and
published by the Mises Institute, or available through the Mises Institute, I should say.
In this book, there are an enormous number of insights. It would be easy to give different
lectures on various topics. I've just selected a few. Now, one that I want to start with
is one point where I think Rothbard makes a decisive advance from Nozick. Nozick isn't
really clear on this issue. I think he probably had the correct view, but Rothbard is the
clearest on this, and his precursor in the people I've talked about before is really
Immanuel Kant on this particular point, and the point is this, in the Lockean tradition
that Nozick was in of how property is acquired, individuals can acquire property by mixing
their labor with land, they come to acquire it, Locke said that the earth is given to
to Everyone in Common. So everyone starts off with, you start off with common ownership
and then you ask, how do people go from common ownership to individual ownership? Now, in
Rothbard's view, I don't claim he was the first to say this, but as I say, Kant has
this also, and I mentioned in other arguments, very clear in Rothbard's system that this
This is the case, you start off with property as being unowned, you say, no one has any
claim to land until people do something to acquire it.
Now, we say Nozick is a bit unclear on this, we have to distinguish what the situation
that Rothbard is describing, unowned property from this situation.
Suppose we say in the situation before people start acquiring land, let's say you just have
people living on the earth, no one has appropriated any land yet.
We could say, we could imagine this system, people are free to use whatever exists as
they like, but they can't prevent other people from using this also. I don't mean to imagine
a Hobbesian state of affairs where you have the right to take what you want in the sense
you're under no obligation not to, but anyone else is free to take it from you if you can.
I imagine a situation where, say, if I come across an oasis in the desert, I'm free to
take water from it, but I can't, say I've had my water and I walk away, I can't say,
Okay, this is my oasis now, so you can't use it in ordinary property. When you acquire property,
you have the right to exclude others from the use of the property. That's the whole point of
ownership. So I'm imagining, say, a system of common use where somebody else can't push you away
Say, while you're drinking water, but you can't stop them from also taking water.
We could see a situation somewhat like this, checking out books in a public library, say,
you can use the books, but you can't prevent other people from using them also.
I'll say when you return them, then other people are free to take them out.
You can't say, this is my book, you can use it only if I say so.
So this is a very different system from one where you say, you start off land as
unknown, people are free to acquire it. Now the reason I think Nozick doesn't say
explicitly he's starting off with a common use rule, but he has, he spends a
a great deal of time on provisos to the Lockean labor mixture. He says, well, maybe you should
say, besides being able to acquire land by doing something to it, like mixing your labor
under certain conditions, you also have to make sure that no one is made worse off by
These provisos make a great deal of sense if you start with the common use system, because
then when you appropriate land, you're depriving people of something, you're saying those people
no longer have a liberty, which they did before, namely abusing that when they wanted, provided
nobody else was using.
Now, even if you're not using some item that you appropriate, no one else can use it without
your permission.
So, there's been a loss there.
So, it makes much more sense to talk about, are there qualifications, are there provisos
to add to initial appropriation if you favor that system.
But on Rothbard's view, you say, you start off, no one owns any land, so it makes more
There's more sense to say that you don't have to meet any provisos other than appropriate,
you just have to appropriate the land because you're not depriving anyone of some liberty
that he had before. It isn't that the other person had he got there before you could have
appropriated land so he's losing something there, but he isn't losing any liberty to
to use any unused object that he wants, even one that someone else had used first.
So this, I think, is a decisive advantage of Rothbard over Nozick.
Nozick is, I think, could get out of possibly saying that he favors the common use system.
We could say, well, the provisers are just because we can't specify fully what the correct
principle of appropriation is, but it's very, rather hazy what he meant.
So Rothbard, I think, is much clearer here.
As I mentioned, Kant also had the same view.
Kant said we start with the surface of the earth and then people are free to appropriate
parts of it.
We have to do so in a way where their acts of appropriation become possible, they can
all be realized together, but in Kant's view you don't have to, all you have to do to appropriate
something is to come to possess it, you don't have to meet any provisos.
Now, if you take matters in Rothbard's, if you take Rothbard's view of property, here
I'm not just talking about this particular point, but his whole view of property, then
I think you can see that the problem of distribution, as Rawls has put it, really doesn't arise
at all, because Rawls is saying, well, we're starting off with a group of people in a society
and we're asking, how should we distribute all the land, say, all the territory that
this is, the group is resident in, like we're imagining, say, the people of the United States
are all getting together and saying, how should we distribute the land in the U.S.? What should
be the rules governing the distribution of property? In Rothbard's system, there's no
question of distribution in that sense at all. And he starts all, I think you can see
this in one of the very important chapters, I think the sixth chapter, called A Crusoe
So social philosophy, and he imagines a single person, Robinson Crusoe, who's on an island
by himself, so he says, well, couldn't Crusoe just appropriate the island to his own use
and build things, make, grow food, build tools, and clearly they would all be his.
Now we could imagine people on different islands, different Robinson Crusoe, they all have the
same name of course, but they'd be appropriating land on their own areas and we could imagine
these people becoming aware of one another and then engaging in trade, they'd each be
the exchanging items that they made for others that they might like better.
So Rothbard said, well, could anybody object to that?
We say each one is the owner of his island, his or her island, and then people are engaging
in voluntary exchange.
So isn't this perfectly all right?
We couldn't have a Rawlsian come in and say, oh, you can't do that. You have to meet certain criteria of exchange.
You have to exchange. Some islands might have more resources on them than others, so it's unfair that you're able to benefit more from this island than the other islands.
Rothbard says, isn't it quite clear that people could, would be the proprietors of their own island, could exchange freely the way they wanted?
And I should say, if you look at Rawls' book, A Law of Peoples, I didn't talk about that this morning lecture on Rawls,
but Rawls himself says that people in different countries don't have to, you don't have to apply the difference principle between countries.
He thinks it's all right for one country to have a higher standard of living than another.
He said even if one country has more natural resources than another, he doesn't think
this is grounds for redistribution.
So here he himself is rather Rothbardian.
He just doesn't apply that within society.
But now Rothbard says, well, supposing we imagine instead of having each person on a
on a separate island, we have the people are all on the same territory and each one is
appropriated property. Why can't they do that? What's wrong with that? Why did the
fact they're all in the same territory mean that there's some special problem of distribution
of the kind Rawls favors? I think if you look at matters in this Rothbardian way, you can
You can see that the whole Rawlsian way of looking at distribution dissolves.
There is no separate process of distribution at all.
You just have individuals who legitimately acquire property, and then those individuals
are free to trade or give gifts as they wish.
That's all there is to it.
In Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard doesn't confine himself to what happens in a libertarian,
once we have a libertarian system, or problems of libertarian theory.
He's also concerned with another topic that we've discussed a great deal in these lectures,
mainly the nature of ethics, how do we know what is right, what's good, we've seen different
theories such as Aristotle's, we've had the Lockean theory, Hobbes' theory, we've seen
various approaches. Rothbard was very much in the Aristotelian natural law tradition,
much like Aristotle and St. Thomas were one writers he thought very highly of.
He thought though that there had been an important modification in correct natural law views
Mises applied to political philosophy beginning especially with Locke and other individualist
philosophers that was better than, there is an improvement on Aristotle and Aquinas.
I remember in the lecture on Aristotle I mentioned there was a problem in that Aristotle first
discusses how each person can lead a good life, that each person has a nature and our
purpose is to realize our nature, mainly reason, fully exercising itself, so he has a whole
count of how we do that.
But then he also starts talking about the polis, which is the complete community of
which people live well.
And sometimes he says that people are just parts of the polis. The polis is superior to people.
I suggested, following Fred Miller, that there's a way of taking Aristotle in a more individualist way.
He isn't saying that people are completely subordinate to the polis.
But, on the other hand, he does have these passages that suggest that it's not completely individualist.
There's some sort of common good that's different from the goods of each particular individual.
And as a result, the people in the policy are subject, even in his ideal city state,
they're subject to quite a bit of central, of control by the ruling authorities.
and there's all sorts of disputes in his theory on just what the relation is between the common good and the individual good.
So Rothbard thought that it's important to eliminate the notion of the common good from natural law theory,
If you're taking the common good to be something apart from the good of the individuals who are in the society.
So all you have in his version of natural law is each individual is trying to achieve the best life for him or herself.
yourself, and the society in which they live, where you have the competing protection agencies,
is simply a framework in which they can do this.
It isn't, there's no entity with a good of its own.
In these lectures I've had quite a few critical comments on the Straussian political interpretation
of various philosophers where they're all, they say they're all secret atheists.
There isn't a Straussian view of Murray Rothbard as far as I know, but I mention Strauss because
Here, for once, there's a point at which Rothbard praises Strauss, and he thinks very highly
of an argument that Strauss gives in Natural Right and History. The argument is this, one
The view that's opposed to the Aristotelian, Thomistic natural law position that Rothbard favors is one that says ethics is completely subjective, people, ethical terms just express persons' preferences.
If I say something is good, either it's just equivalent to a statement that I like that thing, or I'm not stating I like it, but just I'm expressing a like for it.
These are, of course, theories of the kind held by logical positivists, such as A.J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson.
There is no truth in ethics, just people have different preferences.
Now one argument that Leo Strauss used against that view, one that Rothbard accepted, is
there are terms that we use in ordinary language that have clear criteria for use, but nevertheless
Using these terms involves some judgment of something being good or bad.
Suppose, for example, that I say, someone is a coward.
Well, that is a statement.
It isn't just an expression of...
I'm not just expressing some sort of liking or disliking that I could do as I like.
I like orange juice. You can't really say, well, you're wrong about that. Just, well, I like orange juice. If you don't, you're not disagreeing with me. You just have a different preference. You don't like orange juice.
Here, if I say, someone's a coward, then you might say, no, he isn't at all. And say, he wasn't really fleeing in battle. He misunderstood what was going on.
If I was wrong, I couldn't just say, well, I just say he's a coward, that's all there is to it.
There are criteria for the correct and incorrect use of the concept.
Nevertheless, if I've said someone is a coward, I've certainly expressed...
I've said the person has a bad trait.
So, just using the term necessary, it entails that I've also made a judgment of value, so there isn't, in using this term, there isn't, as David Hume famously said, a split or dichotomy between the fact, namely, the person, say, has fled in the face of the enemy, and the value judgment, I'm free to make the value judgment or not, as I like it.
The two are inextricably combined. Just saying, using the terms, involves one in value judgments as well.
So, on Strauss's view, which Rothbard accepted, then just using our ordinary language brings value judgments with it.
and how values are not, as this view says, purely subjective.
Strauss anticipated a famous argument, this very influential analytic philosophy,
that Philippa Foote used and other writers used this also, exactly the same kind of argument.
Ludwig von Mises didn't accept the argument. He replied to Strauss, and his reply anticipated the reply that R.M. Heer, remember I mentioned him in the, is responding to Roth, gave to, gave to Philippa Foote.
So the Strauss-Mises exchange anticipated this analytical philosophy exchange between foot
and hair.
I should say also, just passing, I understand Mises and Strauss really didn't like each
other personally.
They met at a conference on relativism where this issue was discussed and they didn't
get along at all.
I think Mises, Murray Rothbard told me, Mises remarked of Strauss, he said,
in Germany was nothing but a high school teacher.
So Rothbard then, as I say, defended a natural law view and he thought this was one argument,
the very good argument to refute ethical subjectivism. He also, in defending natural law of view,
he disagreed with the views of his own great teacher in economics, Ludwig von Mises. Mises
thought one could get around the whole problem of nature of ethics and still defend the free
Market, and the way Mises did this, he said, well, we can show that interferences with
the free market will fail from the point of view of the ones who want to interfere with
the market themselves.
So we don't have to make, have any appeal to natural law, Mises didn't accept natural
law, we don't have to appeal to any controversial value judge, we just say to the person, say,
Well, you want to achieve certain goals and the measures you propose won't get you where
you want.
Remember, it's just like one of the hypothetical imperative that I was talking about in the
Kant lecture.
If you want this, you should do that, so Mises is saying you won't get what you want by doing
what you're saying.
So it's just, it's not making value judgment to say that you shouldn't be a socialist or
or interventionist, it means, right, it's just sort of an imperative, there's a sort of a principle no one could rationally refuse that you should adopt suitable means to the ends you want, then that's all that's needed, according to Mises, to argue for the free market.
For example, suppose the government says there isn't enough cheap housing available for
poor people, so the government passes a rent control law.
That's an example, incidentally, there's an interesting story that I'm not going to go
The government says we want to have more housing available to poor people, so we have rent control.
But what's going to happen, once you have rent control, then landlords won't be very anxious to put rental property on the market or they'll withdraw, they won't keep apartments in good repair.
They'll tend to withdraw apartments from the market.
So the result will be that there are fewer apartments available for the poor, so you won't be getting what the people who favor rent control won't be getting what they want.
Mises goes on to argue, well, then there they can try to cope with that by more intervention, and then that will fail also.
So they'll either have to, they could stay where they are if they want, but then they'd just be in a situation where they're not getting what they want.
So they could either try to have more, even more intervention, it'll fail, or they'll have to go back to the free market.
Then also we are as well, if they try to apply, just socialize everything, then his famous calculation argument shows that can't possibly work.
They won't be able to have a developed economy producing a wide variety of goods under socialism,
so that won't work.
So Mises said, look, you don't have to have any special natural law arguments or any other
kind of special arguments to defend capitalism.
You can just use these value-free arguments to say, these measures won't get you what
you want.
Rothbard doesn't reject these arguments, quite the contrary, he thinks there's a great deal
to them.
He certainly thinks Mises is right that interventionism fails or socialism won't work.
He himself has given the same points in his own books.
But he says it isn't sufficient, using these arguments doesn't suffice to defend the market.
It won't get rid of all the opponents because let's say someone favors rent control.
He could say, well, what I'm aiming for is just cheap apartments for a particular group
of people and I'll make sure by the legislation that they get access to the low-cost apartments.
So I don't care if other people aren't able to get apartments at a low rent, or if those
people, as a result of the measures I want, other people, or more people can't get apartments
than before.
I don't care about the effects of other people's long as the ones I want get something.
So if somebody took that view, then Mises' argument wouldn't work against him, because
they wouldn't have the goal that Mises is attributing to them.
Mises is certainly right that certain goals can't be achieved by intervention, but he
hasn't shown that all interventionists have to have those particular goals.
They might have other goals that can be achieved.
So we can't, although Mises' arguments are extremely important, part of the case for the free market, they don't do the full job.
I just want to conclude with one other, I think very good, excellent insight in the book that Rothbard has,
Because he discusses the unanimity criteria, you remember I mentioned this briefly this
morning where it was a case where I said where probably Rawls would seem to have to oppose
a situation where everybody is better off by a certain distribution of wealth and no
one worse off because he would have to say some distribution where some people were poorer
is closer to the difference principle, the one where, say, these other people are better off, because it's closer to equality.
So, Rothbard doesn't reject the unanimity criteria. In this sense, he doesn't say, well, suppose some change makes some people better off, doesn't make anyone worse off.
How is this established? Suppose everybody approves the change, then it's all right.
He doesn't say, no, that's wrong. Even if everybody approves a certain change, we shouldn't do it.
But he says this is not, you can't use this as the basis of a correct or a real full political ethics.
He thinks that James Buchanan, not the president before Lincoln, but the famous economist, is guilty of this point.
At this point, Buchanan and his colleague, Gordon Tullock, try to justify measures by using the unanimity criterion.
Then they say, well, since you can't have unanimity, then they try to say, well, you have practical unanimity, come close to that.
So you come as close as you can to that, and that's really a key part of their whole system.
So Rothbard said, well, what's the big problem with doing social philosophy in this way, relying on the unanimity criteria?
It privileges the status quo, the existing state of affairs.
I mean, supposing, let's say, you start off with a system of slavery.
Slavery, some people, or slaves, you could say, well, should we free the slaves?
You couldn't do so on the grounds of the unimity criteria because the owners wouldn't be made
better off, they wouldn't like the change.
So freeing slaves doesn't meet the unimity criteria.
But certainly we would say you should do it, the slaves are being deprived of their natural
rights.
So Rothbard said you can't, as you can in other people who favor modern welfare economics,
do away with natural rights.
You need this for correct political ethics.
and in this I think he was entirely right. So I think I'll now end. Any questions?
The question was, do either Nozick or Rothbard talk about how an individual's anarchist society would respond to external threats, and it was suggested that in response to such threats, a society would need a unified form of defense, that an
and Individualist Anarchist system wouldn't work. Well, so far as I know, Nozick didn't
write on foreign policy issues. He did have views about foreign policy. I think he probably
would have agreed with you on the point. He didn't. Rothbard did write on foreign policy
Defense Issues, he didn't agree with you, he claimed that the free market or system
protection agency could adequately defend against other agencies, against external threats.
I think if you want to pursue this further, there are two very good anthologies, one's
One is edited by Hans Hoppe and another by Ed Stringham, in which this issue is very
much discussed, but the details on how the individualist anarchist system would do this,
I don't think I can go into now, but in general I would say, if you say, if we think in general
The market is more efficient than the government in providing services.
It's not clear why defense should be an exception.
If you need some kind of unification, as you suggest, to defend against, say, some massive
external threat, what would prevent the relevant agencies from making agreements to have unified
defense measure, it's not an area that's something not the defense policy is not
something I specialize in, so I can't give you any more detailed answer. Matthew?
But so many people in the 20th century thought in those terms. Could it be that if you see private association, the logic moving toward competitive minimalist states, that people could end up identifying with competing bureaucracies as defenders of freedom?
and private protection agencies. Is this at all like the situation, say, in the Cold War, where you had competing blocks of nation, some, say, one would claim to represent freedom, and there would be opposition of different bureaucracies, and we suggested this is, I think, right, this was not a very desirable state of affairs.
Affairs. Well, you remember both in Nozick and in Rothbard, we're assuming everybody
accepts basically libertarian law code. You don't have competing agencies in the sense,
say, that some support libertarian rights and there are others who say are totalitarian
or who have completely different views of rights.
You do have a problem with what, if you had such an agency that would be considered an
outlaw agency and then there's a question of how to deal with that.
But in the system that Nozick is setting up, you wouldn't have such a phenomenon.
That's not the way you set up the hypothesis.
You do have, this he goes into in part three of Energy, State, Utopia on Utopia, you do
have people who have communities with different conceptions of life, they're within the framework
of a minimal state, you would have separate communities where people would each be pursuing
and different views of the good life, but none of these would be violating anyone's right through acting as these bureaucratic blocks that you call attention to.
Dan?
You mentioned Rothbard's risk of getting essentialism as a method for performing natural law bearing and risk of getting it.
I'm wondering if you think his chapter on emotional punishment is consistent with that method or if he changes years closer to war on the most deontological justification for punishment as a response to property rights violations.
The question was, I talked about Rothbard's Aristotelian essentialism. Is this view consistent with what Rothbard says in his book?
and is this view consistent with what Rothbard says in his chapter on proportional punishment
that perhaps the view there is one more ontological theory that rather than stress what the natural
tendencies would be, there he's relying on other considerations.
Well, it's certainly true that Rothbard's views in that chapter are different from Aristotle's.
Remember, Aristotle's view was correct, justice was you restore the situation as best you
can to what it was before the crime was committed.
And in fact, Fred Miller, when he discusses this, has a footnote citing, say, Randy Barnett
That had a similar view, you know, Randy Barnett's view, you don't have anything beyond making
the person who's committed the crime give back what he's given.
But whether this means that you couldn't have an Aristotelian theory on the basis for Rothbard's
views, I don't know.
You see, when you talk about natural tendencies in the Aristotelian sense, you're not talking
about what it's likely people are going to do. You would be saying what is most in accord
with reason exercised to its fullest. And then to make your point, you would have to
show that this is incompatible with the desert-based view that Rothbard has, or maybe he would
have to show that it's compatible with the Aristotelian view. He doesn't really give any, try to derive the view from any view, Aristotelian view of essence. He does discuss it independently, but I think that leaves the question.
On behalf of Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute, I want to thank you for being here this week.
I want to thank our audience who's visited us on the web.
These lectures will be archived in the media archives of Mises.org.
Board, and once again I'd like to thank Steve Berger and Ken Garshina for sponsoring this
event and our production crew and staff for taking such good care of us this week and
most especially to Dr. David Gordon to thank him and to congratulate him on his work here
this week.
Thank you very much.