The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
It was in the fall of 1978, a few months after I had joined the staff of a small circulation
monthly magazine called The Libertarian Review, that my friend Roy Childs, the editor of the
magazine, the man who had lured me away from all-news radio and freelancing for newspapers
by offering me a job on the magazine, walked into my office and handed me a thick book.
You will love this book, he told me.
It's one of the most important books written about political philosophy in the 20th century,
but far too few people, too few libertarians in particular, know it.
And you are exactly the right man to introduce it to a new generation of libertarians.
Roy wanted me to write a 2000-word article for our liberties heritage department on a
new edition of the book that had just been brought out by Michael E. Coughlin, a small
libertarian publisher in St. Paul, Minnesota.
I took a look at the book.
Coughlin had done a good job with the design and manufacture, but what was the text all
about?
Nationalism and Culture seemed to be the title. The author was someone called Rudolph Rocker.
I had never heard of either title or author. So I read the front matter of the book and from the
author's preface to the English edition written in 1936 and the translator's preface written in 1937,
I learned a few things about Rudolph Rocker. It seemed he was a European-style anarchist,
and Anarcho-Communist. He was born in Mainz, Germany in 1873, just eight years before,
some 800 miles away in Eastern Europe, in what is today the Ukraine, Ludwig von Mises was born.
Rudolf Rocker's parents died when he was a boy, and he spent some years in a Catholic orphanage
before his uncle Carl, his mother's brother, became financially able to take him in and see
to his Further Education.
Carl Naumann, the uncle, was a typographer and a self-taught learned man with a large
personal library.
He was also a socialist and a frequenter of radical meetings and lectures.
He stimulated an interest in radical politics in his nephew, and for a time the boy aspired
to follow in his uncle's professional as well as intellectual footsteps by becoming
a typographer himself.
In the end he did not pursue this course, but still the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
His father, whom he scarcely remembered, had been a printer.
His uncle and teacher had been a typographer.
Very well, he would be a bookbinder.
In his teen years, Rudolf Rocker served an apprenticeship with a bookbinder and learned
the trade.
He practiced the trade professionally for several years, but it wasn't long before the
radical politics took over his life.
In 1891, at the age of 18, he had been converted to anarchism, having already found the Marxists
who dominated the socialist politics of the time too rigid and doctrinaire for his tastes,
too quick to denounce people with similar views that involved some heresy or other,
people they might have been able to work with toward common goals if they hadn't been so
busy issuing denunciations.
At 19, Rocker had begun writing for the anarchist press and had found it necessary to leave
Germany in order to escape police harassment.
After living for a couple of years in Paris, he settled in London in 1895 at the age of
22.
Ludwig von Mises at this time was 14 years old.
He now lived in Vienna, in a prosperous home kept by family servants.
He was already something of a scholar, having spoken fluent Yiddish, German, Polish and
French since he was around 12.
He also read Latin and could understand spoken Ukrainian.
Now enrolled in an expensive secondary school designed to educate the top 5% or so of each
generation, he was painstakingly working on adding Greek to his collection of languages.
Rudolf Rocker, meanwhile, now in London, spent three more years as a bookbinder, then learned
of an opportunity for a writer and editor that was going to open up a few months' hints
on a Yiddish-language anarchist paper published in London's then largely Jewish East End.
Theologically speaking, the young Rudolf Rocker was an atheist.
By background, he was a German Catholic who spoke not a word of Yiddish and read not a
word of it as well.
Still Yiddish wasn't all that far removed from modern German, and Rocker, like Mises,
had a talent for language.
He taught himself Yiddish, got the job on the Jewish Anarchist paper, moved into the
East End, set up housekeeping with a Jewish girl he met there, and stayed with her for
the rest of his life.
The connection with the Jewish Anarchist paper didn't last as long, but when the paper went
And under, Rocker was invited to take over as editor of a rival Jewish anarchist paper.
And when that paper fell on hard times, he jumped to yet a third Jewish anarchist publication,
this time a monthly.
He stayed in the East End for 20 years, all told, earning a modest and always precarious
living as a writer, editor, lecturer, and all-around radical intellectual.
Bookbinding, he left permanently behind him.
Then came World War I, and the English government decided that Rocker, a German, was an enemy
alien.
He was locked up, then, after the war, deported to the Netherlands.
From there he made his way home to Germany, but not to Mainz, rather to Berlin, where
he spent the twenties editing the works of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin for
publication in a new German language edition, writing a biography of the German anarchist
Johann Most, and writing speeches, articles, manifestos, constitutions, declarations of
this, that and the other, whatever was needed, really, for a large association of German
trade unions.
It was probably a bit like being a political writer for the AFL-CIO in the America of the
1950s, except that in a decadent period like the era of the Weimar Republic, when experimentation
One of every kind was in the air and newly acceptable. A large national association of trade unions might actually be willing to put its imprimatur on something as out of the mainstream as the syndicalist economic theories Rocker was promoting at the time.
When he and his Jewish common law wife decided early in 1933, just after the Reichstag fire, that it would be prudent to leave Germany, and probably Europe,
Ludwig von Mises was 52 years old in 1933 and still resident in Europe. During the first three decades of the new century, when Rudolf Rocker was editing Yiddish and German publications, writing hundreds of articles and a book or two, and addressing audiences in three languages on two continents from the lecture platform, Mises was first studying, then teaching at the University of Berlin.
in 1912, Socialism in 1922 and Liberalism in 1927, within a year, in 1934, he would leave the University of Vienna to accept a position in Geneva as a visiting professor of International Economic Relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, he would maintain two degrees at the University of Vienna, while writing a book or two of his own on the side.
Two apartments, one in Geneva, one in Vienna, for the next four years.
But after German troops marched into Austria in 1938, Mises fled Vienna to live full-time
in Geneva.
And within two more years, by the end of 1940, Mises, like Rocker, seven years earlier, had
arrived in New York.
Mises lived in Manhattan for the rest of his life, 33 years, all told, teaching at New
New York University and writing the great books of his later years, Human Action, Theory
and History, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science.
From time to time, during those 33 years, Mises travelled up the Hudson River around
25 miles or so to a small town called Irvington, where he lectured or did editorial work for
the Foundation for Economic Education.
If, when he made those trips, he had stayed on US Highway 9 for another 17 miles or so,
he'd have come to the tiny hamlet near Peekskill, where Rudolf Rocker lived out the last quarter-century
of his life.
The two men, each in his way one of the leading spokesmen for libertarian ideas in the twentieth
century, lived that close to each other for nearly twenty years.
So far as I know, there's no evidence of either of them ever reading the work of the other,
or commenting on it, or even acknowledging its existence.
This is doubly a pity.
It's certainly a pity Rocker never read Mises, who was, after all, the first to explain why
socialism could never possibly work.
Rocker was a lifelong socialist.
His early rejection of the Marxists for being doctrinaire and inflexible and intolerant
should not be misinterpreted as meaning that he saw through their economic fallacies.
He didn't.
He described his own preferred economic system as a kind of voluntary socialism.
And he wrote in his magnum opus, Nationalism and Culture, that the most important problem
of modern economics is not continually to increase production and make it more profitable
As Rocker saw it, we should be concerned not about the profit of individuals, but rather about the satisfaction of the needs of all.
Arg. One winces. One gnashes one's teeth.
This is the book Roy Childs wanted me to introduce to a new generation of libertarians.
Rudolf Rocker thought of himself and is thought of today as an advocate of something commonly
called anarcho-syndicalism.
Whenever I see that term, I am put in mind of Murray Rothbard's caustic comments in
his essay written for the Volcker Fund in the mid-1950s called, Are Libertarians Anarchists?
Rothbard began by noting that the doctrine in question has been called by various names,
including collectivist anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian communism.
He suggests, in the interest of simplicity, that we term this set of related doctrines
left-wing anarchism.
He notes that the principal feature of anarchist communism is that it attacks private property
just as vigorously as it attacks the state.
Capitalism is considered as much of a tyranny in the economic realm as the state is in the
political realm.
Thus, the left-wing anarchists wish to abolish the state and capitalism simultaneously.
By way of alternative, the left-wing anarchists uphold syndicalism as the ideal.
In syndicalism, each group of workers and peasants is supposed to own its means of production
in common and plan for itself, while cooperating with other collectives and communes.
Logical analysis of these schemes would readily show that the whole program is nonsense.
Either of two things would occur.
One central agency would plan for and direct the various subgroups, or the collectives
themselves would be really autonomous.
But the crucial question is whether these agencies would be empowered to use force to
to put their decisions into effect.
Rothbard observes that all of the left-wing anarchists have agreed that force is necessary
against recalcitrance, but then the first possibility means nothing more nor less than
communism, while the second leads to a real chaos of diverse and clashing communisms,
that would probably lead finally to some central communism after a period of social war.
This left-wing anarchism must in practice signify either regular communism or a true
chaos of communistic syndics.
In both cases, the actual result must be that the state is re-established under another name.
It is the tragic irony of left-wing anarchism that, despite the hopes of its supporters,
it is not really anarchism at all.
It is either communism or chaos.
As Rothbard saw it in the mid-1950s, left-wing anarchists had made a point of rejecting logic
and reason entirely, so that irrationality indeed permeates almost all of their views.
And he saw little hope of educating them.
Of economics, he wrote, which would show them the impossibility of their system, they are
completely ignorant, perhaps more so than any other group of political theorists.
All this is true, unfortunately, of Rudolf Rocker, except the part about rejecting logic
and reason entirely until almost all his views were permeated by irrationality.
Actually, when Rocker stopped writing and thinking about economics, and he ignores economics
entirely for most of the more than 500 closely printed pages that make up nationalism and
and Culture, he became lucid and insightful, as well as logical and rational.
Get him off economics and on to history, say, or political philosophy, and you'll see a
miraculous transformation.
In this sense, you might call him the Jekyll and Hyde of left-wing anarchism.
You might also call him, I suppose, the Rodney King of anarchism.
He was constantly addressing his fellow anarchists, including, most emphatically, the American
and Individualist Anarchists, saying, in effect, why can't we all just get along?
In his last book, Pioneers of American Freedom, written during World War II and published
shortly after the war's end, Rocker wrote, typically, that the various economic ideas
advocated by various anarchists of various stripes, including mutualism, collectivism
Communism and Communism represent only different methods of economy, the practical possibilities
of which have yet to be tested.
It seemed to Rocker that the first objective is to secure the personal and social freedom
of men no matter upon which economic basis this is to be accomplished.
Anarchists he believed would do best if they did not condemn every other economic tendency
There is much more than merely this kind of libertarian ecumenism in Rudolf Rocker's
work, however, especially in nationalism and culture.
For example, there's the way he takes on Marx in the very first sentences of the very
The deeper we trace the political influences in history, he wrote, the more are we convinced
that the will to power has up to now been one of the strongest motives in the development
of human social forms.
The idea that all political and social events are but the result of given economic conditions
and can be explained by them cannot endure careful consideration.
That economic conditions and the special forms of social production have played a part in
the evolution of humanity, everyone knows who has been seriously trying to reach the
foundations of social phenomena.
This fact was well known before Marx set out to explain it in his manner.
A whole line of eminent French socialists like Saint-Simon, Considerand, Louis Blanc,
Proudhon and many others had pointed to it in their writings, and it is known that Marx
This reached socialism by the study of these very writings.
As Rucker saw it, the will to power which always emanates from individuals or from small
minorities in society is in fact a most important driving force in history.
The extent of its influence has up to now been regarded far too little, although it
has frequently been the determining factor in the shaping of the whole of economic and
social life.
This is so because the will to power leads to the establishment of the state, and wherever
the state goes, culture is undermined, held down, even crushed out of existence.
The state, Rocker wrote, was from the very beginning the hindering force which opposed
the development of every higher cultural form with outspoken misgiving.
States create no culture. Indeed, they are often destroyed by higher forms of culture.
Power and culture are, in the deepest sense, irreconcilable opposites, the strength of
one always going hand in hand with the weakness of the other. A powerful state machine is
the greatest obstacle to every cultural development. Where states are dying, or where their power
Rocker is still limited to a minimum, there culture flourishes best.
By culture here, Rocker means a system of widely, almost universally held values, including
the traditions and folkways those values lead to, and the symbolic formulations those values
are given in widely, if not universally acclaimed sporting events and works of art.
He is talking here about the basic glue that holds any human society together.
Culture, he writes, is not created by command.
It creates itself, arising spontaneously from the necessities of men and their social cooperative
activity.
No ruler could ever command men to fashion the first tools, first use fire, invent the
telescope and the steam engine, or compose the Iliad.
So much, then, for the reference to culture in Rocker's title.
But what about nationalism?
The old opinion, Rocker writes, which ascribes the creation of the nationalist state to the
The awakened national consciousness of the people is but a fairy tale, very serviceable
to the supporters of the idea of the national state, but false, nonetheless.
The nation is not the cause, but the result of the state.
It is the state which creates the nation, not the nation the state.
Indeed, from this point of view, there exists between people and the nation the same distinction
Every social unit is a natural formation, which, on the basis of common needs and mutual agreement, is built organically from below, upwards, to guarantee and protect the general interest.
Even when social institutions gradually ossify or become rudimentary, the purpose of their origin can, in most instances, be clearly recognized.
is the natural result of social union, a mutual association of men brought about by a certain
A certain similarity of external conditions of living, a common language, and special
characteristics due to climate and geographic environment.
In this manner arise certain common traits, alive in every member of the Union, and forming
a most important part of its social existence.
This inner relationship can as little be artificially bred as artificially destroyed.
The nation, on the other hand, is the artificial result of the struggle for political power,
just as nationalism has never been anything but the political religion of the modern state.
Belonging to a nation is never determined, as is belonging to a people, by profound natural
causes.
It is always subject to political considerations, and based on those reasons of state, behind
and which the interests of privileged minorities always hide.
In the pages of his best-known book, written in German in the late 1920s and early 1930s,
translated into English in the mid-30s, Rudolf Rocker provides what amounts to a one-volume
introduction to European history from the point of view of this conception of nationalism
and culture.
Along the way, he digresses profitably on all sorts of tangentially related topics.
One of my favorites among these instructive digressions is Rocker's ingenious discussion
of the fundamental conflict between liberalism and democracy.
The point of view of liberalism, he wrote, starts with the individual and judges the social
environment according as its institutions are useful or harmful to individuals.
All limitations play but an unimportant part for its adherents, and they can exclaim with
Thomas Paine, The world is my country, all men are my brothers.
Democracy, however, being founded on the collective concept of the common will, was more closely
related to the concept of the state, and made it the representative of the common will.
It's an analysis I like to think Mises himself would have enjoyed and appreciated.
In the end, I discovered, my friend Roy Childs was right. Nationalism and culture was a true
find, a great 20th century libertarian classic, but it proved devilishly hard to find a way to
summarize its argument and work in some basic biographical information about Rocker and try
to explain why it was worth looking beyond his obvious economic illiteracy and acknowledge the
The important place he really does occupy in the libertarian tradition, all in a couple
of thousand words.
It got put off month to month and wound up never getting done.
I guess in a way I've finally done it now, or something like it anyhow.
Of course the libertarian review ceased publication at the end of 1981, and Roy himself died
in 1992 at the age of 43.
Though I'm a bit late, okay, about 30 years late, scofflaw that he himself always was
when it came to deadlines, I think Roy would have understood.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.
www.fieggen.com