40. To Be Conceived in Liberty

40

PETER KURRILD-KLITGAARD

TO BE CONCEIVED IN LIBERTY

AS A TEENAGER YOU ARE usually an ideological accident waiting to happen: You are either so eager to conform to your surroundings that you may end up supporting anything mainstream, or you are so rebellious that you are willing to advocate basically any odd-sounding idea as long as it will make your family and teachers go nuts. In my case, being a 14-year-old in the welfare state of Denmark A.D. 1981, I guess I was plenty of both.

Looking back, I probably had it coming somehow. In the big picture, Denmark in the early 1980s was—as was most of the western world—an odd mix between the remnants of ancient bourgeois values and the after-shocks of 1968. In the small picture, everyone in my family was (to cut a long story short) either extremely right wing or considerably to the left.

My father had always been a rugged individualist, who did not give a damn about what other people thought about him. If anything he seemed to almost enjoy the very outrage he could create in others. He was a fundamentally conservative, self-made industrialist, who in 1973 had been one of the early supporters of Danish tax-protester Mogens Glistrup’s populist and (then) quasi-libertarian Progress Party. My mother was largely apolitical, but liberal in a broad sense even if bourgeois in her manners. She had in the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-30s, had a late flirt with the radical chic, quit her day-job, gone back to school and experimented with her life.

Add to that my parents were divorced and that I grew up without siblings, and then you may picture why I always had an ambivalent attitude toward authority. On the one hand, I always sought recognition from authority figures; on the other hand, there was no surer way to make me adamant than to tell me what I ought to do.

I still clearly remember a summer in the early 1970s, when my mother had moved the two of us to a hippie commune on a countryside farm. There we had to share bathrooms and kitchens and everything with everyone else, and the grown-ups applauded enthusiastically when we kids lined up and shouted “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!, Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!” as we had been taught in the municipal kindergarten. I do not know how long we were there, but it seemed like years and I hated every moment of it. If there ever was a politically defining moment for me, it was when a longhaired, bearded guy scolded my mother for letting me play with a plastic toy gun. This was “aggressive, imperialistic toys, produced for profit” or something similar. We left soon after, and since then I have loved guns. Go ahead, make my day.

So in 1981, at age 14, I was a raging radical with reactionary leanings looking for a rebellious cause to join. What particular rebellion probably did not matter, as long as it was outrageous. I can still remember—to my own present embarrassment—that in the summer of 1981 I went to the offices of the youth organization of the Danish Socialist People’s Party (my mother’s favorite party that year), but the office was closed and I—fortunately—left, in search for another rebellion.

Well, not perhaps just any rebellion; I clearly had some leanings. First, many of my friends at that time belonged to the punk and mod crowds so characteristic of larger European cities in the early 1980s. With them I shared a certain disregard for “the establishment,” hippies and the 1970s. Whereas the hippie-types at school always were demanding more attention, more this, more that, we just wanted to be left alone. The pinkos wanted “participatory student democracy,” we wanted freedom. For us, fashion wise and otherwise, the creed was “anything goes”—and so it did.

Second, in the early 1980s there was hardly anything more rebellious you could do than dress up in a blue blazer and a tie, praise Reagan and Thatcher, and attack the modern state. And so I joined the Danish Young Conservatives. This was in early December 1981, and before Christmas I was driving my 9th grade school teachers and family crazy. (Some of my mother’s leftist relatives even called a family meeting over the phone in order to discuss the matter. They finally accepted my mother’s judgment that it was not quite as bad as if I had been a juvenile delinquent.) However, in search for something truly outrageous, I initially became a rabid statist conservative of the Central-European Bismarckian persuasion. For me the ideal became something like the 1880s Europe: A strong Christian government to enforce traditional values, defend the nation, keep out the foreigners and smooth over social tensions.

So, I was, in other words, a teen, who was a punk by night, dressed in black, doing the pogo and screaming the lyrics of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy for the U.K.” with my friends, while in daytime I was a conformist neo-conservative, dressed in blue, handing out leaflets for local conservative candidates and praising God, King, and Country. As Dave Barry says: “I am not making this up! It was a fascinating time, but clearly not a stable equilibrium.”

And then I became a libertarian, a classical liberal, a market-liberal, or whatever you might want to call it. Free minds and free markets. It really began when two libertarians among the Danish Young Conservatives, Palle Steen Jensen and Villy Dall, sent me a thick package of photocopied translations of various classical-liberal and libertarian tracts. A few months earlier Palle had, in a long late night discussion involving lots of cheap port, convinced me first that church and state should be separated and second that hospitals could be private. That in itself had been two large mental steps for a statist conservative, and pretty soon the dominos started rolling faster and faster.

I now felt that I needed more “answers.” Among the readings Palle and Villy sent me was F.A. Hayek’s essay, “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (from The Constitution of Liberty). I read it in January 1983 on a two-hour train ride from Odense to Aarhus, and when I arrived, I had been on an ideological ride, from statist conservatism to classical liberalism.

And so I wanted more. I hastily acquired copies of first Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia and then Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty. At age 16 these were just about the worst possible places to learn more about classical-liberal/libertarian ideas, although Nozick’s analysis made me focus on individual rights of freedom and the legitimacy of government activities.

Shortly after that I read an obituary of Ayn Rand, and in my mother’s bookshelves I found We the Living and Anthem. While these did not rock me, the latter certainly tickled my individualistic tendencies further, and so much that I later devoured Rand’s other works. I also read some excerpts from Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, which brought me further down the road of a radical individualism.

Then it was Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose, their TV-series had been broadcast the previous summer. I liked it, but while it was good at showing how capitalism worked better than we were taught in high school, and how governments often produced perverse results, it somehow did not get to the basics and the really tough questions. My next step came from the succeeding generation: some excerpts from David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, which was fun and radical but still did not address the most basic questions about why freedom is good, what it is, etc.

By the summer of 1983, I had basically bought most of the classical-liberal/libertarian package, but for a 16 year old this was still pretty difficult stuff to comprehend, swallow, and digest. Some of it obviously still is for adults! In this process, one long night stands out with particular clarity: I was at a café drinking beer with my high school chum and ideological comrade-in-arms from the Young Conservatives, Nikolaj Hauberg Mortensen, and he and I were discussing the “acceptable” size and functions of government in a semi-dialectical fashion: I would be defending government intervention in one area, and he would apply free-market logic against me. It was a long night, and there were so many unsettling thoughts. Suffice it to say, that many a fence was moved that night, if not simply torn down and destroyed.

At this time I had been asked by the national organization of the Danish Conservative High School Students to write a policy report on privatization together with one of the organization’s young, radical turks, Morten Holm. Morten, who was a first year law student and an in-your-face-take-no-prisoners libertarian, sent me a draft of his sections, which included some rather hefty suggestions for how far to take privatization. In order to win me over to his ideas Morten also sent me a photocopied copy of Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty.

Kapow!

Suddenly everything started coming together. It just seemed my entire new world was right there in that little, unknown book. The premises. The arguments and counter-arguments. The logical implications. Natural law philosophy. A political philosophy of rights and liberty. Economic analysis of market solutions to tough problems. Sophisticated replies to the most prominent counter-points. Aristotle meets Aquinas meets Ayn Rand meets the Austrian School of economics. The works.

Within a year and a half I had gone from being an ideological loose canon as a statist conservative to embracing hard-core Rothbardian libertarianism. As in most conversions, night had been turned to day and chaos to order. Good guys had become bad guys, and new heroes and friends had been found on the way.

Soon I devoured everything by Rothbard I could get my hands on, and within the next ten years I gathered what I still believe may be the most comprehensive collection of Rothbardiana existing in Scandinavia; I even bought Marty Zupan’s Liberated Cooking just to find out what Rothbard’s favorite dessert was. But Ethics will always have a very special place in my collection (even if I have come to think that the title is slightly misleading), and in 1989 the author dedicated a fine, new copy to me, to replace my worn-out photocopy.

During these years a distinct libertarian environment began to emerge in Denmark several years after this had happened in most other West European countries. But while the Danish environment had (and has) its conservative-leaning Hayekians, Misesian and Benthamite utilitarians, Milton Friedmanite gradualists, David Friedmanite anarcho-capitalists, Buchananite contractarians, Randians and Randroids, Stirnerite anarchists, Georgists, etc., what has always surprised non-Danish libertarians is how distinctly Rothbardian it is. This was probably not least due to my mentor and good friend, Otto Brøns-Petersen, who as a young economics student in 1980 had become what was no doubt Denmark’s first Rothbardian. He then had converted Villy Dall and Palle Steen Jensen. If one could somehow make a genealogy of Danish libertarians, Otto would be its Adam.

In 1985–86 many of us, who were active within the Danish Conservative Party and a few with memberships in the Liberal Party and the Progress Party (or no parties at all!) decided to form a forum dedicated exclusively to classical-liberal ideas. I called a meeting, wrote a largely Rothbardian platform, Otto designed the organization, and the result was Libertas, still a vibrant debate forum, with several hundred members and a journal.

Meanwhile, I had entered university as a student of political science. University life was initially a disappointment. When I arrived for my first classes, I had read all the Austrian economics I could get my hands on, a lot of classical-liberal stuff and a little public-choice theory. This was my life, but obviously not a life shared by the university. The political science department at the University of Copenhagen at the time was extremely left-wing. It still is, and—in all fairness—it was not as left-wing as it had been in the 1970s, but it is not unfair to say that most students and many professors alike were slightly to the left of Pol Pot. However, what was unbearable was not that my fellow students or teachers were offended by my views (which I actually, for once, did not parade too much). It was much worse: they just had no idea about what I was saying. No clue. I could tell them the difference between praxeology and thymology, and they would go on about the differences between Poluantzas, Offe, and Balibar. I could argue the differences between the conception of rights in the works of Rand, Rothbard, and Nozick, and they would answer by discussing the characteristics of late-capitalism and the relative autonomy of the state. What planet were they living on?!?!?

Rothbard’s writings and ideas had made a big impact on a small group in far-away Denmark. Alas, the man himself we had never met.

We heard from friends that he now rarely traveled abroad, and we did not have the guts to contact him directly. At some point some of us in Libertas discussed how we should use $10,000 that we had accumulated from various sources, and Otto and I fantasized about spending all the money on a round-trip ticket and a honorarium for Rothbard, and the rest on renting a seaside cottage and buying food and then just have him there for a few weeks, quizzing him from one day to the next. Is natural law the best foundation of self-ownership? How do states arise? What would a libertarian do given the choice between two alternatives which both go in the right direction on some issues, but in the wrong direction on others? Does Austrian economics presume that actors maximize utility or not? Does Austrian economic analysis not presuppose that actors are presumed to exercise self-ownership? etc., etc., etc. Unfortunately—for us at least—nothing ever came of the plan.

My first (almost) personal encounter with Rothbard came in a hotel jacuzzi in Stockholm in 1986. Well, no, not quite Murray himself, but Walter Block, who was there as a speaker at the Libertarian International Convention. Over the bubbles, Walter spent hours trying to answer all of Otto’s and my questions as to, “What does Rothbard think about abortion?” “Are there two and only two axioms in the libertarian political philosophy?” “If so, how can Rothbard . . .?” While Otto was an advanced economics student, I was a freshman, barely out of high school, but Walter was exceedingly helpful and encouraging—and entertaining.

My interests were now gradually shifting away from the mostly political side of libertarianism to the more philosophical. Having also met Leonard P. Liggio in Stockholm in 1986, I went to the U.S. to attend the 1987 Institute for Humane Studies “Liberty and Society Summer Seminar” at Marymount. In addition to Leonard, I also met there some truly great people like Walter Grinder, Ralph Raico, Sheldon Richman, Randy Barnett, George H. Smith, Tom Palmer, and Lawrence H. White. And while Rothbard was not on the program—in person or readings—his ideas and influence certainly were. That summer changed my life in so many ways, including deciding not to pursue a career in diplomacy or journalism but instead going for a Ph.D. in political science and an academic career, softly pushed along—across the Atlantic—by Liggio, Grinder, and Palmer. If Rothbard was my ideological compass, the IHS was certainly the ship, the sails, the crew, the map, and the nautical training.

In particular, when I look back I can see that the IHS taught me two crucial pieces of advice that were useful supplements to my Rothbardian premises. First, with opinions like these, you have almost everyone against you, so if you want to do well academically, you need to be at least as good at the mainstream stuff as the others. Second, you do not have a moral obligation to shock and offend everyone else all the time. In fact, you can be both radical and a nice guy. Not a bad thing to learn when you still have hormones and zeal raging in your body and mind.

Eventually, I did meet Rothbard a handful of times at various Mises Institute events, but alas far too few. The first was in 1989 at the Mises Institute Summer University at Stanford, which I attended with my two Danish comrades, Otto Brøns-Petersen and Mikael Bonde Nielsen. At the conference I circled around Rothbard for days but did not actually talk with him; he was constantly under siege by a swarm of mostly younger acolytes, and I was too much in awe to approach him. Then Sheldon Richman introduced me to the Man, who was extremely friendly while I was a bumbling, star-struck neophyte. Much more successful was one evening, when Pat Barnett and Hans Hoppe took Rothbard and a couple of us kids out for dinner in Palo Alto and then eventually along to the local Denny’s. There I enjoyed seeing, listening to, and quizzing the Man for hours. I still regret never having asked him all the questions I had for him, but I shall always appreciate his friendliness, humor, and patience for the questions I did get to ask.

By the late 1980s we in Denmark were a growing bunch of graduate students, who had all become dedicated Rothbardians. In 1988 we launched the (unfortunately now defunct) series of conferences and conference proceedings entitled Praxeologica. Two of us, Nicolai Juul Foss and I, subsequently edited Etik, Marked og Stat: Liberalismen fra Locke til Nozick (1992), in which Otto published the first lengthy, academically published review of Rothbard’s ideas in Danish. We even founded a dinner-club, acronymed ABC, where we would meet on Rothbard’s birthday, all wearing bow-ties, and include a toast in his honor. Hey, if we were nerds, why not be radical nerds?!?!?

Our projects were fairly modest ones, but given that we were all in our early- to mid-twenties and the first of a breed, we almost felt we were walking on water, and we certainly broke some ground. My own 1996-dissertation, published as Rational Choice, Collective Action and the Paradox of Rebellion (1997), while not very libertarian and certainly more public choice oriented than Austrian, quite visibly owes a great deal to Rothbard, who is one of the most cited authors in it. His understanding of why some political movements succeed and others do not is, I believe, one of the most overlooked aspects of his thought.

Let me also mention that I once wrote an outline for a science-fiction novel that I never finished and which takes places in a penal colony in a galaxy far, far away. It was probably all for the best that I never finished it, but it bears mentioning that one of the central characters is a bow-tie-dressed intellectual rebel by the name of Mayer Aristotle Rosenbawm.

The things I like most about Rothbard’s work are these:

• His fundamental premise that it is always restrictions on individual freedom that are in need of justification, not the reverse.

• His consistent use of the rational actor premise as the fundamental axiom of the social sciences.

• His ability to integrate and systematize seemingly disparate ideas into larger wholes. While economics, ethics, philosophy of science, sociology, political philosophy, politics, etc., all are separate disciplines, they should also be approached as a unified whole. Rothbard’s original and unique blend of different traditions came closer to doing that than any other.

• His Menckenesque, joyous disrespectfulness for political authority (although certainly not for genuine authority).

• His clear prose, even when writing about very complex matters. How can a world that has the writings of Rothbard have so many who think highly of Foucault, Žižek and the post-modernists?

This has been Rothbard’s enduring legacy for me. Much else has happened since I was first inspired by him, not least due to my professional research into constitutional political economy, public choice and social choice theory, and the necessity to address more empirically oriented research than currently done by most Austrians. Yet should I ever pick some thinker’s name to use as a specific adjective for describing myself, I would doubtlessly favor “Rothbardian” above all others.

Nonetheless, I would be dishonest if I did not also add that over the years I came to disagree with Rothbard on some issues. Some of these were policy issues—usually areas where I found Rothbard came to deviate from what I thought the truly Rothbardian position should be (e.g., on immigration). Other issues are those where I am inclined to agree with Rothbard’s conclusions, but where I do not find his specific arguments convincing (e.g., on the issues of abortion and restitution).

More fundamentally, I have over the years come to be increasingly skeptical about how far we can go in political philosophy with just the two Rothbardian axioms of self-ownership and non-aggression. For me these will always be sine qua non, but there are important issues in social and political philosophy, which simply cannot be answered without (implicitly or explicitly) relying on further assumptions. (And for the record, I still think that a neo-Aristotelian foundation of rights is superior to the alternatives!)

But what the heck! If there is an afterlife, I hope to be able to go to the big Denny’s in the sky and have a chat with Murray about those issues, medieval Europe, Gothic cathedrals, his encounters with Ayn Rand, his views of Woody Allen’s and Clint Eastwood’s best movies, and whether Adam Smith really was that bad. That would be fun. Until then, I have his portrait over my office desk and his works close at hand, and that ain’t so bad.

Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard is professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen and columnist at Berlingske Tidende.