Today, March 2nd, is Murray Rothbard's birthday. Had he lived, he'd be 84 years old today.
And there's sadness in that, because 84 in the world of today, though still a ripe old
Age is not really all that old. Lots of people live to be 84. Even libertarians do it. Both
Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek live to be 92. Milton Friedman lived to be 94.
Henry Hazlitt lived to be 98. In Radicals for Capitalism, his important 2007 book about
the history of the modern American libertarian movement, Brian Doherty setters his story
Around What He Describes as Five Thinkers Without Whom There Would Have Been No Uniquely
Libertarian Ideas or Libertarian Institutions of Any Popularity or Impact in America in
the Second Half of the Twentieth Century.
Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman.
Four men and one woman, Doherty writes. Four Jews and one Catholic. Four economists and
one novelist. Four minarchists and one anarchist. Two native-born Americans and three immigrants.
Two Nobel Prize winners and three who remained not only aloof from most professional and
intellectual accolades, but generated a heated hostility from cultural gatekeepers.
He makes no mention of it, but there's yet another facile point of comparison he might
have used in discussing his five major figures, their longevity.
For of his five major figures, three, Mises, Hayek and Friedman, lived into their 90s.
The other two, Rand and Rothbard, never made it to 80.
Rothbard never made it to 70.
It's almost as though radicalism makes you die young.
Mises, Hayek and Friedman were minarchists, classical liberals to be more precise.
Rand was a minarchist too, but of a more radical stripe.
She required that her limited night watchman state get along without any power of taxation,
which she rightly regarded as theft.
And Rothbard, who lived the shortest life of them all, was, of course, an anarchist,
The only writer among them with the courage to assert boldly that the state didn't need limiting, it needed abolishing.
Another way of putting this would be to say that Rothbard was the only pure libertarian among Doherty's Big Five,
not a classical liberal or even a more radical monarchist like Ayn Rand,
but a thinker who saw the implications of the libertarian axiom, the non-aggression axiom,
and unflinchingly accepted those implications, the only one among Doherty's big five who
was unafraid to follow his thinking where it must inevitably lead him.
Brian Doherty calls Rothbard the most uniquely and characteristically libertarian of libertarians,
the one whose influence explains most about what makes the ideas, behavior and general
It's not for nothing that during the 1970s Rothbard came to be widely known as Mr. Libertarian.
This is not to say, however, that Rothbard received universal applause.
He didn't.
He had his detractors then, as he has them now.
Take Jennifer Burns for example, the University of Virginia history professor who published
a widely discussed book on Ayn Rand this past fall, fall 2009.
In a presentation at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. in October 2009, Burns said
she considers the whole Mr. Libertarian thing applied to Rothbard a load of rubbish.
I think in a lot of history about libertarianism, there's Rothbard, quote, Mr. Libertarian.
I just don't see it. I went in the archives, I looked at who people were reading, who they're
referencing, and I feel like this is a PR campaign on Rothbard's behalf to say that,
you know, I was the one who did all this because what I thought was a lot of criticism and
not a lot of references to him.
Burns focused a great deal of attention during this part of her Cato Institute presentation
on the 1969 convention in St. Louis, where the libertarian caucus within Young Americans
for Freedom, or YAF as we all used to call it back then, split off from the rest of the
organization, walked out of the convention and launched what we know today as the modern
libertarian movement.
Burns notes that two rather different writers were, in effect, competing for the allegiance
of these libertarian former YAFers.
The famous novelist and philosopher, Ayn Rand, and the much less well-known, even somewhat
obscure, New York economics professor, Murray Rothbard.
Immediately after the convention, Murray Rothbard and his new comrade, Carl Hess, attempted
to pull the exodus of libertarians to the left, but it was Rand who emerged as the more
decisive influence. Rothbard's call for a pan-ideological movement was soundly rejected
by Libertarian Caucus Organizers.
In an open letter to Rothbard, distributed in St. Louis, Don Ernsberger scoffed at Rothbard's
quote, small group in New York and told him quote, join the left if you will Dr. Rothbard,
but don't try to hand us that crap about the forces of freedom being there.
Your view is pure negation.
Rothbard and Hess pulled together a few left-right conferences in the year following St. Louis,
but their radical libertarian alliance was short lived.
More durable were the many neo-objectivist groups that emerged in the fall of 1969.
Byrne's description of these events of 40 years ago is accurate.
The late Bill Bradford, the creator, editor and publisher of Liberty Magazine, created
much consternation a few years back when he said that Murray Rothbard was never considered
a particularly important figure in the libertarian movement by anyone outside New York until
until the 1970s.
But in fact, Bradford's memory was accurate too.
At the time Jennifer Burns is talking about, in the late 1960s, Rothbard was not that well
known outside New York, even in the libertarian movement.
He wasn't cited that much back then by libertarian writers and activists, unless they were New
Yorkers.
And he came in for more criticism than praise when he was cited, because libertarians back
Back then were less open to anarchism than they would be a few more years down the road.
They found the thought of it somewhat unsettling, even alarming.
It wasn't until the seventies that Rothbard began to come into his own.
By then he was in his late forties and early fifties, and he'd been at this business of
libertarian proselytizing for at least two decades.
I had been born in the Bronx on March 2, 1926, into a family and social milieu of immigrant
Eastern European Jews committed to Communism.
This is how Rothbard himself described it in a 1994 article.
I grew up in a Communist culture.
The middle-class Jews in New York whom I lived among, whether family, friends or neighbors,
were either communists or fellow travelers in the communist orbit.
I had two sets of communist party uncles and aunts on both sides of the family.
But more important, the one great moral question in the lives of all these people was, should
I actually join the communist party and devote the whole of my life to the cause, or should
I remain a fellow traveler and selfishly devote only a fraction of my energy to Communism.
The one exception to this Communist milieu, Rothbard wrote, was my father, David.
My father emigrated to the United States from a Polish sztetl in 1910, impoverished and
knowing not a word of English.
Like most immigrants of that era, he had resolved to become an American in every sense.
for him, not only learning English and making it his language, but also abandoning Yiddish papers and culture and purging himself of any foreign accent.
It also meant devotion to the basic American way, minimal government, belief in and respect for free enterprise and private property, and a determination to rise by one's own merits and not via government privilege or handout.
With his father, as his mentor and teacher, Rothbard says, I grew up in the same spirit.
Murray was good at school. He skipped a couple of entire grades, graduating from high school and enrolling at Columbia University at the age of 16.
By the time he was 20, he held a master's degree in mathematics and had entered Columbia's Ph.D. program in economics.
It was then that free market economist George Stigler, later of the University of Chicago, joined the Columbia faculty.
His first couple of lectures, according to Rothbard's biographer Justin Raimondo, consisted of an attack on the concept of rent control,
an idea very dear to the hearts of many New Yorkers to this day, and a refutation of the idea that a minimum wage
Rothbard was more than delighted, actually. He was also curious, especially after he learned that Stigler had collaborated with someone named Milton Friedman on a pamphlet on the subject of rent.
Control, and that the pamphlet had been published by an organization called the Foundation for
Economic Education, FEE, which was located just a short distance up the Hudson River
north of New York City.
Rothbard wrote to FEE, paid them a visit, and wound up working for them part-time.
Through his new contacts at FEE, he met Frank Chaturov, editor of Analysis, for which he
He also met another Fee part-timer named Ludwig von Mises, an economist from Vienna who would
shortly be set up in an endowed professorship at New York University.
Through his new contacts at Fee, Rothbard also encountered much published writing he
had never known about before.
The works of writers like Frank Chotirov's mentor, Albert J. Nock.
The Works of Writers like Isabel Patterson, Garrett Garrett, John T. Flynn, and Herbert
Spencer.
Then, in 1949, when Rothbard was 23 years old, his new friend Ludwig von Mises published
a new book, a book called Human Action, a treatise on economics.
Rothbard had heard earlier that year that the book was in preparation, and had asked
his informant, someone at Fee, what's the book about?
The Books About Everything, he was told, and when he read it, Rothbard found this to be true.
He also found Human Action to be, in his own words, an enormous revelation.
Justin Raimondo writes that Rothbard had always known what he was against—the New Deal,
the Fair Deal, the herd mentality of the Columbia University graduate class in those days.
But he had a problem.
He had, as he himself put it in a 1972 interview, a definite instinctive feeling or insight or
whatever that there was something wrong with all the schools of economics.
I was very unhappy with all the schools of economic theory.
I thought that when the institutionalists were criticizing the orthodox Anglo-American
economics that they were right, and when the orthodox people were criticizing the institutionalists,
Rothbard reviewed Human Action for Frank Chatarov's monthly analysis, calling it
a work of monumental grandeur that demands and deserves a lifetime of study.
By this time, Rothbard had already become a regular attendee of Mises' famous seminar,
held each Thursday evening for 21 years on the NYU campus in Greenwich Village.
The seminar ran from 725 to 925, and then continued, less formally, in Child's Restaurant
and the Café Lafayette. It attracted NYU graduate students, students from other area colleges
and universities, and a miscellany of members of the general public, including many libertarians,
not a few of whom were teachers or writers themselves. Mises' salary at NYU was paid
not by the university, but by a private educational foundation, the William Volcker Fund, which
which also paid Friedrich Hayek's salary at the University of Chicago throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s.
The Volcker Fund and the Foundation for Economic Education, FEE, were the most important libertarian organizations of the period
and had an enormous influence on the development of the libertarian movement during those years.
Rothbard himself was experiencing some difficulty locating a teaching job at this time.
He had been awarded his Ph.D. in economics by Columbia in 1956, and had looked energetically for an academic post somewhere in the New York metropolitan area, but to no avail.
He was 30 years old and married. He needed more income than his part-time gig with Fee was bringing him.
So he made arrangements to expand his role at the Volcker Fund, which also employed him part-time.
His job was scouting libertarian talent with an eye to conscious and deliberate movement building.
He read books, magazines, scholarly journals, newspapers, any sort of publication that might
introduce him to writers and thinkers previously unknown to the folks at Volcker, and he wrote
Rothbard wrote memos on what he'd been reading and what he had found and what he recommended doing about it.
He did this work for Volcker throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s.
It was 1966 when he was 40 years old before he ever landed a teaching job, and once he'd landed one, he hung on to it.
Apart from a semester or three as adjunct faculty at City College of New York, Rothbard held only two teaching jobs in his entire academic career.
The one at Brooklyn Polytechnic, later the Polytechnic Institute of New York University from 1966 to 1986,
and the one at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas from 1986 to the time of
his death in early 1995. Meanwhile, he was writing. He was always writing. He
applied for and received foundation grants above and beyond his regular
income from Fee and Volcker to support the research and writing of his early
books, Man, Economy and State and America's Great Depression. He also wrote
wrote dozens if not hundreds of articles and reviews for periodicals, and gradually his writings were winning him an audience.
According to Raimondo, a piece Rothbard did for the New York Times op-ed page in 1971 led to articles in Newsweek, Time, Esquire, Playboy, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post,
and all that publicity got him a contract to write a book-length introduction to libertarianism for a mainstream publisher, Macmillan.
The result, for a new liberty, appeared in 1973.
Three years later, he was invited to a meeting at a Colorado ski resort by one of the wealthiest men in America, Kansas oilman Charles Koch,
who wanted to talk with Rothbard about building a libertarian movement.
What sorts of movement institutions did Rothbard think a man with money who wanted to help the movement ought to endow?
It is to this meeting in Colorado in the mid-70s that much of the organizational structure of the libertarian movement as we know it today may be traced.
In the next few years, with financial support from Charles and David Koch,
Rothbard had a hand in the creation of, or the shaping of, some of the most important libertarian institutions of the past half century.
The Center for Libertarian Studies, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, the Literature of Liberty, Inquiry Magazine, the Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Libertarian Party.
Internal power struggles within the network of organizations funded by Koch money forced Rothbard out in the early 1980s.
But within six months he had found a new birth from which to go on influencing the institutional infrastructure of the libertarian movement,
the post of Academic Vice President of the new Ludwig von Mises Institute, which would open its doors a few months later in early 1982.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was no greater influence on the libertarian movement than
Murray Rothbard.
In those years, if not in 1969 or 1970 or 71, he really was Mr. Libertarian.
In part, of course, this was due to his ingenious version of libertarianism.
It was painstakingly and very, very elegantly and persuasively cobbled together from disparate
sources, Aristotelian philosophy, Austrian economics, American individualist anarchism,
and American historical revisionism, particularly as that revisionism touches on the origins
of government regulation of big business, and on the reasons for and consequences of
The Various Wars in Which the U.S. Government Has Been Involved
Rothbard was one of the most erudite individuals and one of the most brilliant intellectuals
of the 20th century. Read through his major works, Man Economy and State, Power and Market,
America's Great Depression, For a New Liberty, The Ethics of Liberty, The Four Volumes of
Conceived in Liberty, His History of America from Colonial times through the years of the
American Revolution, and the two volumes of his posthumous, unfinished Austrian perspective
on the history of economic thought.
Read through all this, and a few of the seminal Rothbard essays, Left and Right, The Anatomy
of the State, and War, Peace and the State, and you're swept away, not only by the sheer
reading Rothbard, you have the sense that he's looking down on everything from an immense
height, so that he, and thus you, can see all the interconnections, and exactly how
and everything relates to everything else.
Still, impressive as Rothbard's purely intellectual achievement undeniably was, a good case could be made that it was his strategic vision for the libertarian movement that has turned out, 15 years after his untimely death, to be his most influential legacy.
I'm not speaking here of his shorter-term strategic proposals, like the famous proposal
during the Vietnam War years that libertarians should try to make common cause with the New
Left, or his equally famous proposal in the wake of the collapse of European communism
in the early 1990s that libertarians should try to make common cause with conservatives.
I am speaking now of Rothbard's vision of what was needed to make a movement like ours
thrive and grow, the kinds of institutions it would need, the kinds of talent it would
need to seek out and nurture in order to perpetuate itself and ensure its own growth.
We see that vision at work all around us in the world we live in today.
So when we reflect on how far the libertarian movement has come in the last half century,
how much it has grown, we should be aware that a substantial part of the credit for
that growth belongs to Mr. Libertarian, Murray R. Rothbard.
This is Jeff Riggenbach.