From Free Life, Issue 23, August 1995
ISSN: 0260 5112

The death of Murray N. Rothbard in January of this year, at the age of 68, came as a shock to me. Since the mid-1960s his intellectual presence in my life (along with that of Ayn Rand and a few other libertarian pioneers) had been constant and central. What has Rothbard said about this issue or that? What would Rothbard say about this or that? Is he right about this or that? What books, articles, or movies is he reccommending? What is he working on now? What political alliances or tactics is he currently urging? These were questions that engaged me, and most of my comrades, for decades. That there could be a world without Rothbard - well, the possibility never occured to one.

And now we are in a world without Rothbard, and it is a much poorer one for that. "Rothbard is Right" was a slogan on a badge in the late 60s, specifically supporting one of his obiter dicta on the feminist movement. I didn't think he was right (or, at least, entirely right) on that issue, or indeed, on a number of other political, historical or tactical questions. But on virtually all the fundamentals, in the general approach of his work, Rothbard was indeed right. In economics, methodology, political philosophy and so on Rothbard truly established what he used to call the "plumb line" of correct libertarian anlysis. To quibble over whether he always hung it perfectly and without error is beside the point and churlish in an obituary. Even when he was wrong (and there is a touch of lŠse majest‚ in pronouncing a thinker of Rothbard's stature as wrong), what he wrote was clear, unambiguous, tightly reasoned and always worth reading. What a contrast with the pretentious verbiage and obscurantisms of most contemporary scholars, of those upon whom academic honoraria and positions are lavished!

Rothbard's life was one of ideas and intellectual activism. He received his PhD. in Economics from Columbia University in 1956, taught at New York Polytechnic from 1963 to 1985, and from the mid 1980s until his death was Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada. He also latterly served as Vice-President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University. His academic output was prodigious and not simply confined to the discipline of economics in which he was primarily trained: ethics, political philosophy, history, the social sciences, the history of ideas, cultural and artistic topics were all recipients of his attention.

In economics Rothbard further refined the "praxeological" Austrian School economics of his teacher Ludwig von Mises, developing (in, for example, Man, Economy and State), new insights in the theory of capital and interest, competition and monopoly theory, monetary and business theory, and taxation. In Power and Market he extended that analysis even further in a systematic typology and critique of all government intervention in the economy - indeed, of governemnt per se.

In political theory, in For a New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard extended the Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law-natural rights approach (that he shared with Ayn Rand, with whom he was briefly associated in the early 1950s) into a similarly systematic and consistent radical libertarianism. The economic case against the statism and the state was accompanied by an ethical, political, social and historical critique.

Rothbard also wrote a four volume history of colonial and revolutionary America, Conceived in Liberty. Its central theme was, of course, the never ending struggle between liberty and social co-operation on the one hand and statism and coercion on the other. But the historical perspective was not merely confined to such books or essays on history itself. It informed all of his work. One of the grievous failings of modern scholarship, as Professor Stanislav Andreski has pointed out, is a myopic obsession with current scholarship, and a loss of the real discoveries in social studies which have been made. When modern scholarship gets it right it all too frequently is merely rediscovering what had been learnt before (and usually expressing it less clearly, succinctly and accurately). One of the joys of Rothbard's work is his constant citations of his great classical liberal and classical economist forebears and their analytical breakthroughs - individuals and analyses that had frequently been consigned to the memory hole by the academic establishment and forgotten even by libertarians.

Rothbard's knowledge of the history of radical and libertarian thought was amazing, and his reclamation of our intellectual heritage helped to correct the many errors into which the mainstream of classical liberal thought had fallen. Thus, while that mainstream had become dominated by an increasingly rarefied form of value-free economics, Rothbard reunited sound economics with the profoundly radical class, social and historical analyses that had characterised the work of most of the founding fathers of British and French liberalism. Twentieth century liberalism had fallen into a pattern of overly abstract analysis, a certain lack of engagement with the most pressing and concrete problems of the real world. The "left" had appropriated and distorted class and social analyses that were in origin liberal. What strength and purchase on reality various forms of Marxism and socialism possessed frequently stemmed from that stolen work. Rothbard thus reunited the three strands of original liberalism - its economics, ethics and its class and socio-historical analyses - into what radical classical liberalism had originally striven to be: a "science of liberty", that sought both to understand the world and to change it.

Rothbard's historical perspective also led him to examine carefully the reasons for liberalism's decline, reasons that lay not merely in analytical errors but in a failure to think carefully, or even to think at all, about political strategy and tactics. Rothbard wrote and spoke extensively on such matters, and attempted to lead the libertarian movement in line with his favoured tactical and strategic analyses. One's evaluation of the correctness of his analyses - and Rothbard changed his tactics a number of times - can legitimately differ, I believe. I would argue that there was a constant core of validity beneath what appeared as contradictory shifts, but that Rothbard sometimes overstated the mutual exclusivity of particular approaches.

I have heard it said that if Rothbard had not spread his intellectual talents so widely he might have received more established academic recognition; that if he had devoted himself to extending the scope and conceptual understanding of the Austrian School in economics alone, he might have earned himself a Nobel Prize. Somehow I doubt it. Although some of the Chicagoites have ascended to such honours, the deeper and more extensive departure from positivist orthodoxies inherent in the Austrian approach is too strong a meat for the table of most contemporary academics. And anyone with experience of academic life knows that Rothbard's give-no-quarter, wholehearted commitment to justice and liberty also upsets too many academic applecarts and cosy intellectual cartels. We have also yet to see the Nobel Committee rushing to bestow their honours upon, say, a gifted Austrian specialist like Israel Kirzner, or upon a specialist libertarian philosopher like Tibor Machan. The parade of lacklustre and intellectual mediocrities upon whom laureatures are generally bestowed is still a worthy equivalent to the "ex"-terrorists and present despots who receive the "Peace" Prize.

Such comments also ignore the true intellectual significance of Rothbard. Certainly, he could have distinguished himself as an ultra-specialist within one discipline, but consider the limits of such specialisation. The bane of contemporary social sciences (and arguably the physical ones too) is the lack of unifying principles. The common view that modern specialisation or the "difficulty" of various sciences makes it impossible to be a "Renaissance Man", an able generalist with a grasp of the whole world of knowledge is, I believe, wrong. Fundamental principles of human nature and scientific methodology make a coherent understanding of all the social sciences accessible. Truly scientific principles are currently swamped by the contemporary obsession with publish-or-perish specialisation and intellectual fragmentation. It doesn't have to be that way and it should not be. Basing his scholarship upon an Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical foundation meant for Rothbard, and rightly so, that the science of liberty was not at root divorced from science as a whole. The philosophy of man, including the normative values that derive from our natures, is as much part of true knowledge as any laws of physics or chemistry. The errors of "scientism", the mistaken understanding of the nature of science, are in Rothbard's work swept aside. True knowledge, as an integrated, hierarchical whole - the goal aimed at (and often closely approached) by many of the great but neglected Thomists - was once more put at the centre of the intellectual agenda by Rothbard.

The "Rothbardian system" was not completed by Rothbard. Alas, his history of economic thought only reached up to Smith (albeit in two volumes!). His history of America reached only the revolutionary period (in four volumes!). Sorely missed is the study of the pivotally important Progressive period in America, upon which he was working. One wishes too that he had written extended treatments of his insights into the philosophy and methodology of history and the social sciences, and on the history of sociological thought. But the key foundations stones, and much of the structure, of the Rothbardian system is there. How many others could boast of such an achievement?

I have said little about Rothbard the man. My own contacts with him, whether in agreement or disagreement, were fairly few and far between. It must be left to others to testify to his dauntless wit, his wide-ranging and jovial friendships across the political spectrum, his political manoevres and rivalries. But at the end of the day what is important is Rothbard the thinker, the intellectual heritage which will educate and inspire for countless generations. The grand system, the vision of a science of liberty based on praxeological economics, methodological individualism, class analysis, and natural law ethics, will be completed by others. That work is even now continuing, at the Von Mises Institute, in The Journal of Austrian Economics and in the ongoing scholarship of numerous individuals at other institutions or working independently. If humanity is to have any sort of decent future, perhaps even a future at all, it will be because Murray Rothbard's vision of liberty and justice for all will have triumphed.