TRULY
AWESOME
If
only he were here to see how far we have come. Rothbard died
on January 7, 1995. During the course of his sixty-eight years,
he had written 28
books and hundreds of articles that, taken together, are
the foundation stones of a mighty ideological edifice outlining
a paradigm of pure liberty. As the leading student of Ludwig
von Mises, the greatest figure of the "Austrian"
or pure free market school of economics, Rothbard almost single-handedly
implanted the Misesian flag on American soil – and not
only that, but, building on the achievement of his mentor,
Rothbard's monumental Man,
Economy, and State clarified and expanded what Mises
had wrought; Power
and Market pioneered new frontiers in refuting the legitimacy
and efficiency of state action in every possible realm of
human endeavor; America's Great Depression exposed
the role of bank-credit expansion, and not free market capitalism,
as the true villain of that catastrophe. And then there is
the capstone of his career, the two-volume Austrian
Perspective on the History of Economic Thought [Vol.
I, Classical Economics; Vol. II, Economic Thought
Before Adam Smith] – a work that gives new meaning
to the word "awesome."
KNOWING
MURRAY
If
Rothbard's economic insights were the sum total of his contribution,
that would have been enough for any man: but with Rothbard,
that is just the beginning. As a social theorist, his interests
– and encyclopedic knowledge – encompassed all of
social science. There is Rothbard the historian: his four-volume
set on the American Revolution, Conceived
in Liberty, puts the first successful libertarian
revolution in history in its political, economic, and socio-religious
context, and is a veritable treasure house of knowledge, packed
with nuggets of fascinating historical facts. There is Rothbard
the political economist: his recently-republished The
Ethics of Liberty is a model of theoretical and stylistic
elegance. Then there is Rothbard the polemicist and best builder
of an ideological movement: For
a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto is still
the best introduction to libertarianism as a political worldview
and program. Indeed, one could write a whole book on the subject
of Rothbard and his intellectual impact – and that indeed
is what I have done. An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
will be published in July by Prometheus Books. As a thinker
and a towering figure in the libertarian movement, Rothbard
had an enormous impact on my development as a writer and an
activist. I met him in 1978, when he was the leading intellectual
light of the Cato Institute, then based in San Francisco.
As part of a group of self-styled "radical" libertarians centered
in and around the libertarian student organization, I was
amazed and delighted when Rothbard took a personal interest
in our intellectual and political development: here was this
intellectual giant who not only paid attention to our juvenile
polemics, but also was a whole lot of fun to be around. Knowing
Murray was an education and a joy – the two things
most young people today assume are opposites in a dichotomy.
The bonds of our friendship were both personal and ideological,
and as far as the latter is concerned what really struck me,
at the time of our first meeting, was the great emphasis that
Rothbard put on opposition to globalism and imperialism. It
was really the key to understanding his politics, and his
ideological odyssey from the Old Right to the New Left and
back again.
A
YOUNG OLD RIGHTIST
In
the late forties and early fifties, when Rothbard came of
age and began producing the veritable flood of political journalism
that supplements his more scholarly work, the old "isolationist"
(that is, noninterventionist) conservative movement was passing
away, its defeated leaders and publicists either retiring
or forced out by the triumphant (and vengeful) War Party.
As an economics student at Colombia University, young Rothbard
had entered this overwhelmingly leftist milieu as a convinced
free marketeer of the "limited government" variety –
and he was literally a minority of one, at least on
a campus where the Social Democrats constituted the "right-wing,"
the Stalinists occupied the "Center," and the Trotskyists
claimed the Left. Where was a budding young libertarian scholar
to find solace and support? The answer came, one day, as he
perused the Colombia University bookstore newsstand, bulging
with the usual Trotskyist newspapers and Stalinist tracts
– and perhaps the latest edition of The New Leader
– when his eyes locked on to a pamphlet whose title stood
out as if on fire: "Taxation is Theft!" It was a pamphlet
by Frank
Chodorov, a disciple of Albert
Jay Nock, and Rothbard fell upon it like a starving man
on a morsel. Chodorov had just been fired from his job as
editor of the Georgist periodical The Freeman for his
opposition to World War II and was living in a loft in lower
Manhattan, eking out a precarious living as editor of Analysis,
a broadsheet with at most 1500 subscribers – and Rothbard
eagerly joined their ranks. "This," recalled Rothbard years
later, "was it" – he had found his libertarian
lodestar, and his course was set.
CHODOROV,
THE TEACHER
Chodorov
was an impressive man, a great raconteur and teacher, and
he made a huge impression on young Murray Rothbard: he also
ran a small libertarian book service: and their correspondence
is filled with Rothbard's book orders along with a detailed
account of his joy at discovering H. L. Mencken, Nock, Garet
Garrett, Isabel Paterson, all the libertarian greats. Chodorov
was a keen critic of the globalist policies of our ruling
elites: in launching a crusade against Communism, we would
absorb and mimic not only the methods but the ideology of
the enemy. Just as Americans fought and beat the national
socialists in the trenches, and then came home to discover
that they had lost the battle for liberty on the home front,
so the foresaw that they would come home from the great war
against the Reds facing a similar anomaly. In "A Jeremiad,"
published in 1950, at the height of the cold war, Chodorov
saw where it would all lead: "the net profit of The War will
be a political setup differing from that of Russia in name
only." War (or the hysteria that precedes it) would stunt
and threaten to destroy whatever hope there was for human
liberty. "There will be a resurrection," he wrote, "for the
spirit of freedom never dies. But its coming will take much
time and travail." Rothbard absorbed this insight and saw
clearly, early on, the centrality of the war question, proudly
referring to himself as an "isolationist," an epithet that
he wore as a badge of honor. Now this label was in the category
of a political swear word in the postwar period, even more
than it is today: the War Party, having dragged us successfully
into the European conflict, was intent on driving anyone who
had ever opposed them out of politics and into disgrace. As
I detailed in a previous column, they even staged sedition
trials in the wake of their great "victory," and the triumphalist
mood was inescapable – and oppressive especially to Rothbard,
who instinctively rebelled against the atmosphere of intellectual
conformity and intimidation that permeates a country in wartime.
A
MINORITY OF ONE
He
struck back in the pages of Faith and Freedom, a libertarian
journal put out by Spiritual Mobilization, a Christian group
that had developed a consistently anti-statist ideology based
on their interpretation of the fundamentals of Christian doctrine.
Rothbard, a New York Jew, not to mention an agnostic, was
perfectly willing to find any allies he could in a world dominated
by collectivism, mostly of the left, be they Protestant, Catholic,
Greek Orthodox, or Buddhist – as long as they opposed
the depredations of the State, and especially its penchant
for periodic bouts of mass murder, his tolerance and willingness
to work in a coalition was practically unbounded. This was
in part due to his essential good humor, and in part the legacy
of long years of being a member of a small minority –
all too often, in those days, a minority of one, a lone anarcho-capitalist
and isolationist living in the postwar world of collectivism
and global intervention. But his voice did not go unheard.
Writing under the pen-name "Aubrey Herbert," Rothbard wrote
a monthly column in which he plugged away at the idiocies
of the cold war: in "The Real Aggressor," published in 1954,
Rothbard attacked the conservatives who had jumped on the
cold war bandwagon with such unseemly alacrity. Once champions
of peace and noninterventionism, these very same people "have
now become outright internationalists." Stating his case with
characteristic directness, he wrote:
"Here
I think one point should be made and made bluntly. Some people
may prefer death to communism; and this is perfectly legitimate
for them – although death may not often be a solution
to any problem. But suppose they also try to impose their
will on other people who might prefer life under communism
to death in a 'free world' cemetery. Is not forcing them into
mortal combat a pure and simple case of murder? And is not
anti-Communist murder as evil as murder committed by Communists?"
WAR
PSYCHOSIS
Conservatives
were "sinking into a war psychosis" and fast abandoning their
devotion to free markets and individual liberty in the interests
of pursuing the anti-Communist jihad. This was, he
believed, because they misconceived the nature of the State
as a policeman, instead of a criminal gang with a monopoly
on crime, a legitimized and considerably more powerful version
of the Mafia – except without their code of honor.
After all, Mafia hit men only carryout small scale massacres:
a dozen at a time, at most. The State is truly the engine
of mass murder – and this insight was what drove
Rothbard to swim determinedly against the tide and make one
last isolationist stand against the rising tide of "anti-Communist"
interventionism. At Rothbard's suggestion, an all-isolationist
issue of Faith and Freedom was published, featuring
not only "The Real Aggressor" but a gem of a piece by Garet
Garrett and an excellent article by the industrialist Ernest
T Weir. This unusual event – a sudden resurgence of dreaded
"isolationism" on the Right – brought the nascent libertarian
movement to the annoyed attention of The New Leader,
the semiofficial organ of social democratic anti-Communism.
In its pages William Henry Chamberlin charged that Rothbard
had "laid down a blueprint for American policy tailor-made
to the specifications of the Kremlin."
BACKGROUND
TO BETRAYAL
It
was a shock being red-baited, but the shock soon wore off.
Here he was, sitting at the feet of Ludwig von Mises, absorbing
the profoundly anti-collectivist doctrines of the most consistent
and radical advocate of the free market – and at the
same time researching and writing his own seminal works that
would be the foundation stones of a thoroughgoing philosophy
of freedom – and the conservatives of the "New Right"
variety were calling him a Commie! The great irony was that
William Henry Chamberlin had been highly critical of US intervention
in World War II, and had in fact staunchly opposed it, even
going so far as to write an entire book detailing the reasons
for his stance: America's Second Crusade, as Rothbard
pointed out in a letter to The New Leader. But the
irony was lost on the humorless and fanatical wackos who were
in the process of taking over the conservative movement. Most
of them were ex-Communists or some kind of exotic anti-Stalinist
leftist, and were consumed with a desire to wreak vengeance
on the god of their youth, which had so conspicuously failed
and betrayed them.
ROTHBARD
RED-BAITED
Rothbard
took up the cudgels on behalf of the old isolationism, but
it was a struggle he was doomed to lose – at least for
the moment. In column after column he lashed out at the bloody
and profitable business of the cold war – bloody for
most of us, profitable for a few. In 1955, he took on the
powerful China lobby, which had built up a large base of support
in the American conservative movement: "Why Fight for Formosa?"
was published in the summer of 1954, and it caused a controversy
that led to Rothbard's departure from the magazine. How would
we react if there was a large Communist contingent parked
on a island somewhere very close to the American coast,
just bristling with weaponry? It would be a few years yet
before Americans – horrified by the Cuban missile crisis
– would be able to answer such a question with any honesty.
At any rate, such impertinence caught the eye of one Willi
Schlamm, an ex-Commie turned "conservative" who had once edited
Red Flag, the official newspaper of the Communist Party
of Germany: Schlamm attacked Rothbard in the pages of Faith
and Freedom: it was yet another cheap red-baiting slur.
"Why do the pro-war conservatives," asked Rothbard, in his
rebuttal, "supposedly dedicated to the superiority of capitalism
over Communism, by thirsting for an immediate showdown, implicitly
grant that time is on the side of the Communist system?" Schlamm
sneeringly replied:
"The
trouble with libertarian economists is that they presume everybody
else to be guided by their own genteel value system (in which
productivity excels). They are right as economists, but fatally
wrong as theologians: they do not perceive that the Devil
is real and that he can generously satisfy powering human
cravings."
THE
MTYH OF SOVIET POWER
As
a student of Mises, Rothbard knew that communism could not
endure: Mises had demonstrated the economic impossibility
of socialist economic planning as early as 1926, and all attempts
to refute him had failed. What Schlamm and his ilk did not
realize is that being right as an economist is quite
enough; that productivity is not only a nice luxury to have
around but absolutely necessary to human survival. While the
socialist Devil is indeed real, the great paradox is that
he defeats his own followers to the extent that they are successful.
Communism had to fail: it could not possibly compete
with the relatively free economies of the West, and would
soon fall behind in every respect. But the Potemkin village
of the old Soviet Union was, at the time, pictured in the
Western media as a mighty colossus by both the Left and the
Right, albeit for different reasons. The Left because they
admired this power, or wanted to, and the Right because they
feared it: both contributed to the myth of Soviet invincibility.
THE
NEW DISPENSATION
Chodorov
had gone on to edit yet another journal titled The
Freeman, this one run by the libertarian Foundation
for Economic Freedom. But this new position did not last
very long, for he would not go along with the holy war against
the Soviet Union, and in a spirited exchange with the indefatiguable
Willi Schlamm Chodorov declared once again his implacable
opposition to the new internationalist dispensation: the old
isolationists of the 1940s, he wrote, had accurately predicted
the results of the late world war: conscription, centralization,
confiscatory taxation, the loss of individual liberties, inflation
and mountains of debt. "All this the isolationists of the
1940s foresaw," he concluded,
"not
because they were endowed with any gift of prevision, but
because they knew history and would not deny its lesson: that
during war the State acquires power at the expense of freedom,
and that because of its insatiable lust for power the State
is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates."
THE
GREAT PURGE
Words
to remember – but they were written to no avail. Chodorov
was soon out as editor of The Freeman, and shortly
after that Rothbard's column at Faith and Freedom discontinued.
With the death of Garet Garrett, and the legendary Colonel
Robert R. McCormick, the isolationist publisher of the Chicago
Tribune, and the retirement of others such as John T Flynn,
the purge of the old isolationists from the American Right
was complete. The America First generation gave way to the
William Buckley generation – a degeneration that Rothbard
found increasingly intolerable.
THE
GREAT DEBATE
The
really juicy details of the Rothbard-Buckley encounter –
as well as Rothbard's stormy relationship with Ayn Rand –
are between the covers of my book, and I won't spoil it for
you: suffice to say that he passed rather quickly through
these circles, writing a lot of book reviews for National
Review and socialized to some extent with the Buckley
circle. But he soon found the atmosphere of cold war hysteria
prevalent among the editors to be utterly intolerable. In
a memoir of that time, he recalls listening to an argument
between a National Review editor and his wife over
luncheon: the subject of their debate was whether, upon launching
a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, we should
or should not give them some warning.
A
LETTER TO BILL BUCKLEY
In
a letter to Buckley, Rothbard detailed the reasons for his
optimism that the Soviet state was even then withering at
its core. The revolutionary spirit had gone out of the Soviet
rulers, and while they make motions in the direction of the
old Marxist icons, "the point is that the new opportunists
do not care anymore." The old dream of a world communist revolution
has been abandoned by the nomenklatura, which is only
concerned with feathering its own nest. Far from overthrowing
capitalism in the West, the Soviets were faced with the high
probability of a revolt at home – and soon. "I am not
expert enough to say how far this process has already gone
in the Soviet Union," he wrote,
"But
the point is that it must, in the nature of things, be underway
already, and its importance will grow as time goes on. If
we realize this, and remember also that revolutionary inspiration
has always, historically, died out after a time, we will see
that Time is on our side, and we will realize that we need
not dig in for a long and bloody battle to the death with
an enemy that is even now withering from within."
A
RADICAL PROPOSITION
In
the winter of 1957, with the cold war never colder, this was
a radical proposition. It was also radically right.
But Buckley, who has strongly implied if not actually stated
that he was working for the CIA at the time – and I'm
inclined to believe him, since they were apt to pick up any
number of intellectuals-for-sale at this time – was not
at all amenable to this view, and so they parted ways. Rothbard
also parted ways with Ayn Rand: The occasion was a silly "trial"
staged by the Randians, in which he was cast into the outer
darkness for the sin of refusing to give up his Episcopalian
wife (the Randians were atheists). But another major reason
for the break was Rand's ignorant endorsement of the cold
war, and her crazy contention that the West had a moral right
to launch a military invasion of any communist country at
any time. As Americans went about their business while a nuclear
sword of Damocles hung over their heads, the "Objectivists"
(as Rand's followers called themselves) sat at the feet of
the Master and absorbed her abysmal ignorance of and indifference
to foreign affairs.
THE
NEW TURN
The
growth of the movement against the Vietnam war and the draft
was the impetus that set an independent libertarian
movement on its course, and Rothbard was the catalyst. With
Leonard Liggio, he developed a new analysis of American corporatism
and its relationship to foreign policy, with an emphasis on
historical revisionism. He and Leonard, who became prominent
in New Left circles, were applying the insights of the Old
Right to a new situation in which war, once again, was the
number one topic of discussion. Together they founded Left
and Right, the seminal journal of modern American libertarianism,
devoted to creating a New Left-Old Right alliance against
imperialist war, featuring scholars from all sides of the
political spectrum, as well as the work of libertarians and
the important essay, "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,"
Rothbard's manifesto breaking with the old conservatism and
raising the banner of a reborn classical liberalism. Strategically,
this meant an alliance with the New Left against the liberal-conservative
pro-war "center." Later Rothbard recalled his jubilation at
the first big demonstrations against the Vietnam war:
"Here
at last was not a namby-pamby 'peace group like SANE [the
Committee for a Sane Nuclear policy, made up of cold war liberals]
but a truly radical antiwar movement which zeroed in on the
evils of American warmaking; and here was a movement that
excluded no one, that baited neither reds nor rightists, that
welcomed all Americans. Here, at last, was an antiwar Left
that we could be happy about!"
ROTHBARD
AND THE NEW LEFT
Anti-militarism
pervaded the New Left critique of the university, Rothbard
noted, with the left-libertarian complaints of anarchists
like Paul Goodman echoing the Nockian analysis of mass education
as a contradiction in terms. Conservatives had criticized
the massification of education and its increasing subordination
to the State for years – yet now that the students were
finally rebelling, the Right could only demonize them. Some
people are just so hard to please, but Rothbard was
clearly delighted with this new upsurge of protest. Left
and Right took off, and wound up in the back pockets of
growing numbers of libertarian activists organizing on campuses
nationwide. Merging the insights of the New Left historians,
such as William Appleman Williams and his students, with the
wisdom of his Old Right forebears, Rothbard evolved a comprehensive
analysis of imperialism as a function of corporate state capitalism.
Using the State as their instrument, "big business, big labor,
and the Big Intellectuals" had entered in a Tripartite Alliance
for the perpetual maintenance of their mutual power and profit.
The Marxist analysis of the state and revolution was a mild,
centrist compromise: the Left recognized the criminal character
of the State, but only wanted to have it "wither away" over
a long period of time – during which, as the Leninists
would have it, we would be subject to the vagaries of the
"dictatorship of the proletariat." Rothbard was fully confident
that libertarians could more than hold their own against this
kind of confused centrism. In view of the fact that ruling
elites never give up their power voluntarily, the prognosis
for the commie State "withering away" of its own accord was
poor, at best: libertarians, on the other hand, insisted that
it be abolished (or at least radically reduced in size) as
soon as possible. Next to libertarianism, the recycled
Marxism of the Maoists, Panther-worshippers, and dime-store
Stalinists was tame stuff indeed. This, at least, is what
Rothbard expected would happen if libertarians entered the
antiwar movement, and joined with the New Left in opposing
the bloody debacle then unfolding in Southeast Asia: that
the Marxists would lose the intellectual competition,
and that libertarians would make substantial headway. And
he was right: hundreds and then thousands were won to the
libertarian movement in this period. Left and Right,
a quarterly, became the Libertarian Forum, a biweekly,
and then the organized libertarian movement really
took off. But then radical movements for social change were
springing up all over the place, and in relation to the others
libertarianism went practically unnoticed for a long time,
until well into the seventies.
MINUS
THE JUICY DETAILS
By
then, the Libertarian Party (LP) had been founded, and I will
leave even the basic outlines of that long story to readers
of my Rothbard biography. But it needs to be said here that,
for years, it was Rothbard and his close friend and colleague
Williamson Evers who – almost alone – successfully
fought the Randians in the party who had inherited Rand's
unreasoning militarism and sought to enshrine their ignorance
of foreign policy in the LP platform. Throughout his long
association with the LP, Rothbard fought to keep Libertarians
in the forefront of any and all opposition to war: it was
an often lonely and difficult fight, but he won it and the
LP – whatever its other problems – has to this day
strictly adhered to noninterventionism. This is also true
in the case of another institution he was in on the founding
of: the Cato Institute, which was born basically in Rothbard's
fertile brain, where the dream of a libertarian thinktank
(properly endowed) had long incubated. Without going into
any of the juicy details, once again, Rothbard's relationship
with the Cato Institute was seminal – and stormy, eventually
leading to a break. While not acknowledging the man who is
for all intents and purposes their founder, the Cato Institute,
like the LP, has stuck to its early noninterventionism with
admirable consistency.
A
STEP AHEAD
Rothbard
was always one step ahead of his followers, often so far ahead
that they lost sight of him: such was the case when his prediction
of the Communist collapse came true and the Berlin Wall came
tumbling down – and, with it, the political boundaries
and labels that had kept him out of the conservative movement
for as long as the cold war lasted. The great Thaw meant that
the isolationist and nationalist impulses of American conservatives
were reawakened – and here Rothbard saw a great opportunity,
one that was not to be missed. Getting back to his Old Right
roots – to a conservative movement that once more had
room for an old isolationist – Rothbard started new periodical,
with his friend and colleague Llewellyn
H. Rockwell Jr., the Rothbard-Rockwell Report,
and announced the formation of a paleo-libertarian
movement, which hearkened back to its Old Right origins and
rejected the cultural nihilism of the counterculture, which
had come to predominate in libertarian circles. He found new
allies: in the paleo-conservatives of the Rockford
Institute, whose brilliant magazine Chronicles
lights up the darkness of our neo-barbarian culture –
and also in the 1992 presidential campaign of Patrick
J. Buchanan.
THE
OLD RIGHT –
TOGETHER AGAIN
Against
the smears of the rabid neoconservatives, who hate any and
all manifestations of "isolationism," Rothbard defended Buchanan
in broadsides of increasing length and passion: Buchanan had
won his support on the basis of his stalwart noninterventionism,
particularly his brave and very public stance against the
Gulf War. He put together an "Encyclopedia of Anti-Buchananiana"
that catalogued all the various smears against Pat, categorized
them by type, and then systematically refuted them. He attended
the 1992 Republican convention as the guest and toast of the
Buchanan Brigades, where he schmoozed with Phyllis Schlafly,
and, although later somewhat disappointed by what he considered
undue emphasis on protectionist economic nostrums, always
had a great admiration and liking for Buchanan.
THE
OPTIMIST
Rothbard's
turn toward the New Left in the sixties had been prefigured
by his support for Adlai Stevenson in 1956 against the far
more ominously militaristic Eisenhower. Stevenson had been
for taking steps toward nuclear disarmament, and the aggressive
behavior of the US during the Eisenhower years – typified
by the infamous U-2 incident, in which an American spy was
shot down flying over Soviet territory and the pilot captured
– horrified Rothbard because it raised the real possibility
of nuclear war. Rothbard's turn toward the revived Old Right
in the nineties was prefigured by his enthusiasm for Buchanan,
who explicitly invoked the spirit of the old America First
Committee and those brave isolationists, of Chodorov's rank,
who had stood up to the War Party in the 1940s. Ever the optimist,
he always gave his champions the benefit of the doubt –
and if he was disappointed, his optimism, based on an inner
certainty, was easily revived.
THE
LEITMOTIF
Of
course, the Murray Rothbard story cannot be told in a single
column – after all, my book is some 360 printed pages,
not including a section of photographs, and it's useless to
try to fit it all into the space of this piece. I can only
add that, if Rothbard was an enemy of the State, then he was
also – as a corollary – an enemy of the War Party;
indeed, among the biggest. And that is why his memory, and
his work, is of interest to today's antiwar movement, and
indeed to anyone who finds our forced march to the New World
Order just a little bit ominous. In his writings, and his
actions, Murray N. Rothbard was an exemplar of the antiwar
activist: his passionate opposition to the mass-murdering
foreign policy of imperialism and New World Order-ism was
the leitmotif of his politics and vital to understanding his
conception of libertarianism.
CHECK
IT OUT
At
this year's fantastically successful Antiwar.com conference,
the question I heard the most was: what inspires you to write
so much, and still be able to organize events like this convention?
I could only shake my head, look tired, and shrug. Now that
An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
is finally coming out, all I have to do is point to
it and ask: "Have you read my book?" Inspiration is hard to
come by, these days, but take my word for it: you won't be
disappointed. Not only libertarians, but antiwar activists
of all hues will be fascinated and charmed by Rothbard the
man and the thinker. Just click on the above title and check
it out.
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