The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
As seasoned denizens of the libertarian blogosphere know well, libertarians and libertarianism
turn up pretty frequently these days in the writings of mainstream journalists.
Sometimes we get an entire article devoted to us.
When we do, it's usually an attack on our ideas, most commonly an attack that makes
clear that its author hasn't done his or her homework and doesn't know what he or
she is talking about.
More often we only get brief references in articles about subjects of more general interest.
And now and then those brief references touch on aspects of the libertarian tradition.
Here are two such cases, a pair of book reviews that ran recently in the venerable New York
Times book review.
The first, which appeared on April 17th, was a review of Francis Fukuyama's new book,
The Origins of Political Order.
At one point, in what I'm sure he thought was just an uncontroversial aside, the reviewer,
Michael Lind, made an effort to distinguish wise and good neoconservatives like himself
from those on the right who notoriously try to explain society in terms of homo economicus, you know, libertarians like Friedrich Hayek.
Unlike these deluded folk, Lind explained, Fukuyama says that a strong and capable state has always been a precondition for a flourishing capitalist economy.
and Economy.
The problem, of course, is that Hayek says the same thing.
He wants to limit that strong and capable state with regard to its permissible range
of action in ways that Lind and Fukuyama probably wouldn't like, but that's another matter.
And the other problem is that Hayek often criticized the notion of homo economicus and
by no means based his own understanding of the workings of society upon it.
One wonders if Lind has ever actually read any Hayek.
It is not uncommon, of course, to see mainstream journalists accused of not bothering to read
Hayek before they sit down to write about him.
Consider, for example, what happened when, three weeks after the Lind review was published,
the New York Times Book Review ran another piece that contained a passing reference to
libertarianism.
This piece was a review of the new definitive edition of the Constitution of Liberty, volume
17 in the collected works of F. A. Hayek, edited by Ronald Hamowy and published by the
University of Chicago Press.
The review was written by none other than Francis Fukuyama himself, and it provoked
comment in the libertarian blogosphere from none other than our own Jeffrey Tucker, who
who wrote that Fukuyama didn't give the reader much evidence that he actually read the book.
For one thing, he critiques Hayek as if Hayek was a consistent Rothbardian.
Moreover, the whole burden of Hayek's book is to address the precise point that Fukuyama
accuses him of neglecting, how we can know that the state will fail at planning.
Well, yes, yes, and yes.
On the other hand, it is rather a coup for our team, is it not?
When a mainstream intellectual acknowledges, as Fukuyama did in his review, the extraordinary
breadth and depth of Hayek's erudition, and his ability to wander far beyond economics
into history, philosophy, biology and other fields.
Those are Fukuyama's exact words, I'm quoting.
Also, it is a good thing, is it not, when a writer of Fukuyama's stature acknowledges
that, again quoting, unlike Glenn Beck, Hayek was a very serious thinker, and it would be
too bad if the current association between the two led us to dismiss his thought.
Most important of all, Fukuyama's review makes specific mention of the editor of this
new edition of Hayek's book.
I mentioned this editor's name about a minute ago, Ronald Hammowy.
How many of you noticed?
How many of you recognized that name?
I thought so.
Ronald Hammowy is a man whose name and accomplishments deserve to be better known and more widely
acknowledged, especially among libertarians.
He was born during the Great Depression years in Shanghai, China, the son of American parents.
He grew up and got his first formal education in New York City, graduating from Stuyvesant
High School in the early 50s, when its student body was still exclusively male.
From Stuy he went off to Cornell, but came back soon enough and took a job in a record
shop on Times Square.
It was at this point, during his brief period as a college dropout, that Hamowy fell in
with what I guess you could call the wrong crowd, though I confess I myself would be
inclined to say that he fell in with exactly the right crowd.
He hooked up with his old friend George Reisman, whom he had known since junior high school,
and Reisman introduced him to two new friends.
One was an undergraduate at City College of New York, a native New Yorker named Ralph
The other was another native New Yorker, a slightly older man, maybe 30 or so, who had
a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia but no teaching position.
His name was Murray Rothbard.
Rothbard was only about a decade older than Hamowy, but Hamowy was awed by Rothbard's
erudition.
It soon became evident, he recalled many years later, how truly amazing was the depth and
and breadth of Murray's knowledge.
He appeared to have read everything and could cite the relevant bibliography on almost any
topic that came up.
At another point in the same memoir, delivered originally as a talk nearly a decade ago,
Hamowy recalls thinking that Rothbard seemed to have totally mastered the literature in
those fields in which he had an interest.
not only gave the youthful Ronald Hamowy an intellectual hero to admire and emulate, he
also gave that same youthful Ronald Hamowy some useful employment.
By then, after a couple of years of joining his new friends in attendance at Ludwig von
Mises' famous weekly seminar at New York University, Hamowy had decided to return to
his undergraduate studies, this time at City College.
During my last year as an undergraduate at City College, he wrote in 2002, I agreed to
take on the job of typing the second volume of Man Economy and State.
Looking back, he thinks of the assignment as having benefited him in a number of ways,
one of which was having had the opportunity to read and discuss a first-rate text in economic
theory.
One of my major subjects as an undergraduate had been economics, but I confess to have
learned more economics during the six-month period I spent typing Murray's manuscript
than I did during my whole undergraduate career.
Speaking as the guy who is currently reading the second volume of Man Economy and State
into a microphone so that it can be released in an audio version, I think I know just what
Hamowy is talking about here.
In 1960, Ronald Hammowy began graduate study with the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago.
His work was supervised and directed by a visiting Austrian professor, previously with
the London School of Economics, a man in his early sixties named Friedrich August von Hayek.
According to Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton, it was in the fall term of 1960,
Hayek's first term as a graduate student at the University of Chicago that his slightly
older friend Ralph Reiko, another of Hayek's graduate students, conceived the idea of starting
an independent journal dedicated to promoting an open society and individual liberty.
This was New Individualist Review, which published its first issue in April 1961.
The masthead listed Ralph Reiko as editor-in-chief and Ronald Hamowy as book review editor.
By the time of the New Magazine's fourth issue, which is dated winter 1962, Hamowy had become
co-editor-in-chief with Reiko, a status he maintained for two years.
Reiko went back to his original status as editor-in-chief all by himself with the issue
One of Hamowy's most effective contributions to New Individualist Review as a writer
was his November 1961 denunciation of the conservative movement in America and in particular
William F. Buckley Jr. and his magazine National Review, whom he accused of promoting a belligerent
foreign policy likely to result in war, a suppression of civil liberties at home, a
devotion to imperialism and to a polite form of white supremacy, a tendency toward the
The Union of Church and State, the conviction that the community is superior to the individual
and that historic tradition is a far better guide than reason, and a rather lukewarm support
of the free economy.
They wish, in gist, to substitute one group of masters, themselves, for another.
They do not desire so much to limit the state as to control it.
One would tend to describe this devotion to a hierarchical warlike statism and this fundamental
opposition to human reason and individual liberty as a species of corporativism suggestive
of Mussolini or Franco.
But let us be content with calling it old-time conservatism.
The conservatism not of the heroic band of libertarians who founded the anti-New Deal
Ronald Laura and William Henry Longton are convinced, and I agree with them, that New Individualist Review was one of the very finest periodicals of its type published in the 1960s.
They write that the high intellectual quality of the articles appearing in the journal,
together with a vigorous campaign to solicit manuscripts of equal scholarly merit, soon
established the review as one of the best student periodicals in the country.
Over the course of the 17-issue life of the review, some of the most respected scholars
in the country appeared in its pages, including three University of Chicago economists who
who were later to become Nobel laureates.
Although its subscription list never numbered more than 800, it included the editors of
several prestigious magazines and nationally circulated newspapers, dozens of university
and college libraries, and several hundred prominent academics throughout the United
States and Western Europe.
Laura and Longton did an analysis of the first 15 issues of the review and found that of
Of the 98 articles that appeared, 52 were authored by graduate students and younger academics,
while 46 were the work of established scholars, many of international repute.
Nor was the journal confined to students and faculty at the University of Chicago.
No fewer than 58 essays and reviews were contributed by scholars outside the university, among
Among the most noteworthy being Ludwig von Mises' review of Murray Rothbard's two-volume
treatise on economics, Man, Economy and State, G. Warren Nutter's analysis of the nature
of Soviet planning, later reprinted in Barron's, and Murray Rothbard's essay that traced many
of the policies subsequently associated with the New Deal to the programs initiated under
Herbert Hoover's presidency.
Milton Friedman writing in 1981, some 13 years after the review had ceased publication, noted
that of the articles that appeared in it, most remained timely and relevant.
More important perhaps, this student venture, despite its narrow base and its limited resources,
set an intellectual standard that has not yet, I believe, been matched by any of the
and the more recent publications in the same philosophical tradition.
Ronald Hamowy and Ralph Reiko were awarded their PhDs during the second half of the 60s
and left libertarian journalism behind for the greener pastors presumably enjoyed by professors of history.
But the lure of libertarian journalism didn't completely fade away for either of them.
And so it was that they worked together again on another libertarian magazine almost 10 years after their first one, New Individualist Review, had closed up shop.
Inquiry was a fortnightly like National Review, except that it was not conservative in its sympathies.
It described its politics as Jeffersonian liberal and its regular contributors included libertarians like Murray Rothbard, Carl Hess and Thomas Szasz.
The magazine was edited by libertarians. Williamson Bill Evers, perhaps the most prominent of the various young Rothbardians then rising through the libertarian movement, was the original editor-in-chief.
Ralph Reiko took a leave of absence from his academic job to come out to San Francisco and edit Inquiry's extensive book review section.
He came in as senior editor in the very first issue, in November of 1977, and he remained senior editor, book review editor, until the magazine ceased publication in the summer of 1984.
Also, for one year, 1980, out of the nearly seven years Inquiry existed,
Raco served as the magazine's publisher, in addition to taking care of the back of the book,
as each issue's book review section was known.
Meanwhile, Ronald Hammowy came on board in June 1979 as a consulting editor.
A year later, in June 1980, he became editor in chief of the magazine,
Inquiry was published by a brand new libertarian think tank called the Cato Institute, in a
and a frank attempt to reach out to non-authoritarian liberals and leftists with a libertarian message packaged in a style they could understand and accept.
It was, I think, the best and most professional libertarian magazine that had been published by anybody in this country in at least a quarter century.
And much of what was best about it was the work of Ronald Hamowy and Ralph Reiko.
Hamowy and Reiko went back into academia in the 80s, where they devoted themselves to advancing the libertarian cause through teaching and scholarship.
It was Hamowy's service as the editor of the new definitive edition of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty that touched off these ruminations in the first place.
His earlier anthology of articles on drug prohibition was commissioned and published by the Pacific Research Institute,
Back in the days when, under its founding president, David J. Thoreau, it eschewed neoconservatism and instead hewed a consistently libertarian line to the truth about current public issues.
And anyone who has viewed Raco's recorded lectures on topics in intellectual and cultural history knows from direct experience what a masterful teacher can do to advance the libertarian cause.
But these men weren't always teachers and scholars.
Long ago, in their youth, in the pre-internet era,
when publications printed on paper were ever so much more important than they are now,
Ronald Hammowy and Ralph Reiko were sharply focused
incisive libertarian journalists, and they rank among the best
who have plied that noble trade. This is Jeff Rigenbach.
The Theory of Money and Credit