- Raimondo, Justin.
An Enemy of the State.
Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000.
ISBN 978-1-57392-809-0.
-
Had Murray Rothbard been a man of the Left, he would probably
be revered today as one of the towering intellects of the twentieth
century. Certainly, there was every reason from his origin and education
to have expected him to settle on the Left: the child of Jewish immigrants
from Poland and Russia, he grew up in a Jewish community in New York
City where, as he later described it, the only question was whether
one would join the Communist Party or settle for being a fellow
traveller. He later remarked that, “I had two sets of Communist
Party uncles and aunts, on both sides of my family.” While studying
for his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in
the 1940s and '50s, he was immersed in a political spectrum which
ranged from “Social Democrats on the ‘right’ to
Stalinists on the left”.
Yet despite the political and intellectual milieu surrounding him,
Rothbard followed his own compass, perhaps inherited in part from
his fiercely independent father. From an early age, he came to believe
individual liberty was foremost among values, and that based
upon that single desideratum one could deduce an entire system of
morality, economics, natural law, and governance which optimised the
individual's ability to decide his or her own destiny. In the context
of the times, he found himself aligned with the Old Right: the
isolationist, small government, and hard money faction of the
Republican Party which was, in the Eisenhower years, approaching
extinction as “conservatives” acquiesced to the leviathan
“welfare-warfare state” as necessary to combat the
Soviet menace. Just as Rothbard began to put the foundations of
the Old Right on a firm intellectual basis, the New Right of
William F. Buckley and his “coven of ex-Communists”
at National Review drove the stake through that
tradition, one of the first among many they would excommunicate
from the conservative cause as they defined it.
Rothbard was a disciple of Ludwig von Mises, and applied his
ideas and those of other members of the Austrian school of
economics to all aspects of economics, politics, and culture.
His work, both scholarly and popular, is largely responsible
for the influence of Austrian economics today. (Here is a
complete bibliography
of Rothbard's publications.)
Rothbard's own beliefs scarcely varied over his life, and yet
as the years passed and the political tectonic plates shifted,
he found himself aligned with the Old Right, the Ayn Rand
circle (from which he quickly extricated himself after diagnosing
the totalitarian tendencies of Rand and the cult-like nature
of her followers), the nascent New Left (before it was taken over
by communists), the Libertarian Party, the Cato Institute, and
finally back to the New Old Right, with several other zigs and
zags along the way. In each case, Rothbard embraced his new
allies and threw himself into the cause, only to discover that
they were more interested in factionalism, accommodation with
corrupt power structures, or personal ambition than the principles
which motivated him.
While Rothbard's scholarly publications alone dwarf those of many in
the field, he was anything but an ivory tower academic. He revelled in
the political fray, participating in campaigns, writing speeches and
position papers, formulating strategy, writing polemics aimed at the
general populace, and was present at the creation of several of the
key institutions of the contemporary libertarian movement. Fully
engaged in the culture, he wrote book and movie reviews, satire, and
commentary on current events. Never discouraged by the many setbacks
he experienced, he was always a “happy warrior”, looking
at the follies of the society around him with amusement and commenting
wittily about them in his writings. While eschewing grand systems and
theories of history in favour of an entirely
praxeology-based
view of the social sciences (among which he counted economics,
rejecting entirely the mathematically-intense work of
pseudoscientists who believed one could ignore human action when
analysing the aggregate behaviour of human actors), he
remained ever optimistic that liberty would triumph in the end
simply because it works better, and will inevitably
supplant authoritarian schemes which constrain the human
potential.
This is a well-crafted overview of Rothbard's life, work, and legacy
by an author who knew and worked with Rothbard in the last two decades
of his career. Other than a coruscating animus toward Buckley and
his minions, it provides a generally even-handed treatment of the many
allies and adversaries (often the same individuals at different times)
with which Rothbard interacted over his career. Chapter 7 provides
an overview and reading guide to Rothbard's magisterial
History of Economic Thought,
which is so much more—essentially a general theory of
the social sciences—that you'll probably be persuaded to add
it to your reading list.
April 2011 