68. Burke, Rand, and Rothbard

68

LARRY J. SECHREST

BURKE, RAND, AND ROTHBARD

IF ONE CAN BE BORN AN anachronism, I was. I first saw the light of day in Detroit, Michigan, and my earliest memory—at the age of three or four—is of being taken to nearby Belle Isle where I was permitted to wander about an old wooden schooner named the J.T. Wing. Ever since I have been fascinated by sailing ships. My childhood fantasy was to be a designer of such ships, but since they were no longer economically viable, there was no demand for that sort of expertise. Therefore, I decided to do the next best thing: become a career naval officer whose sidelines would include designing sailing yachts and writing about maritime and naval history.

By the time I was twelve, my family had moved to Texas, and it was in the Dallas area that I spent four years in the U.S. Naval Sea Cadets, a sort of seagoing Boy Scouts dedicated to preparing boys for naval service. I was well on my way to the U.S. Naval Academy when, as a senior in high school, I decided to pursue a career in theoretical physics rather than join the Navy. I spent my first three years at the University of Texas at Arlington as a physics major, but graduated in 1968 as a history and philosophy major.

This switch caused me to have some strange elective courses. I would imagine that very few history or philosophy majors take courses in abstract algebra, thermodynamics, or quantum mechanics, but I did. Why the radical change? As I grew older, my interest in political philosophy and related disciplines also grew. Therefore, I left the physical sciences and math for the humane sciences.

This may have been a satisfying change from an intellectual standpoint, but I soon found out that there was little in the way of economic rewards offered to someone with my degree. Searching for gainful employment of any kind, I happened to take a job as a hotel auditor. This was the beginning of fourteen fairly lucrative years in the hotel business, during which time I functioned variously as an auditor, controller, assistant manager, and general manager.

In the fall of 1983 I realized that I did not want to spend the rest of my life in the hotel business, so the following spring I returned to the University of Texas at Arlington.

I began as a graduate history student, but soon switched to economics at the urging of two professors in that department (both of whom apparently later regretted that encouragement when they discovered I was a libertarian and interested in Austrian economics). I enjoyed the subject matter, despite the neoclassical formalism, and did very well, so I got my Ph.D. there as well as my MA.

Most of the department was more-or-less hostile to Austrian ideas, but there were three men who were supportive. Peter Lewin was only there for a short time, but while he was he actively encouraged me to pursue my interest in Austrian economics. In addition, and separate from any specific content, I gained a better understanding of how economics ought to be done from the numerous discussions Peter and I had. Eirik Furubotn and Tom Holland both had some sympathies for the Austrian approach and always were at least tolerant of my “eccentricity.” I will forever be grateful to all three.

I should note here that the course of study at UTA was quite mainstream. There were, as I recall, four semesters of econometrics and two semesters of mathematical economics, for example. Moreover, virtually every class in the Ph.D. program required that the student write an econometrically based term paper. I would like to say that I strongly believe all graduate students interested in the Austrian School, despite the reservations they may have about mainstream methodology (reservations I share), will benefit from undergoing a similar course of study. To do otherwise is to shut ourselves off entirely from the rest of the economics profession. And we cannot persuade them of the “error of their ways” if we cannot speak in terms familiar to them.

The foregoing gives a rough idea of some key periods in my life. To that chronology allow me now to overlay some comments about my intellectual development, which of course is closely interwoven with those events. First of all, it is apparently quite common for those who are now libertarians to have once been socialists. That is not true in my case. Instead, in my early teens, I began my intellectual journey as a Burkean conservative, albeit a somewhat unusual one, because I have always been an atheist, and one does not encounter very many irreligious conservatives.

I was much impressed by Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and, later, his A Vindication of Natural Society as well as a number of his speeches and shorter essays. However, my atheism led me to question then, as I do now, whether the status of organized religion as a pillar of civilized society is justified. In other words, does religious belief bring about a net loss or a net gain? Should we nonbelievers follow Hayek’s suggestion in The Fatal Conceit and praise religion as a civilizing force, as a necessary condition for the “extended order” and co-extensive with it, despite what we see as its irrational roots? Or should we condemn religion, even though it often defends private property and the exercise of individual conscience, on the grounds that it also extols self-sacrifice and mystical revelation, and thus ultimately undermines the foundation of a free society?

In short, the combination of conservatism and atheism constituted an uneasy alliance in my mind. I could not abide the proletarian, avant-garde, and libertine sentiments of the Left, but neither could I tolerate the self-righteous religiosity of many on the Right. I longed for a cultural perspective that challenged all the conventional myths without also rejecting the truly civilizing virtues: honor, courage, dignity, grace, sentiment, good manners, good taste. So I searched elsewhere. What I found was libertarianism, first in its Objectivist form and later as anarcho-capitalism. Of course, the seeds of the answer were in front of me all the time, but I failed consciously to recognize them. I say that because as early as 1958 Murray Rothbard wrote an essay identifying and praising the radical libertarian principles that can be found in Burke’s A Vindication of Natural Society. I, however, never saw Rothbard’s essay until many years later. In fact, the first work I encountered that challenged the standard portrayal of Burke was Isaac Kramnick’s The Rage of Edmund Burke in 1977.

I say that I found libertarianism, but it was, in some ways, an accidental discovery. When I was an undergraduate in the mid-1960s there were no professors who mentioned libertarian ideas or writers in class. In 1969, however, there did appear a group of students on the UTA campus who were fascinated by Ayn Rand. They began to hold discussions of her works, and the leader of the group invited me to attend. Here was what I had been looking for. Free market radicalism and atheism, in one package. I first read Rand’s nonfiction, most importantly Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness, and only later her novels. The blend of capitalism and egoism was both daring and exhilarating. The recurring themes of individual rights and of living a life here on earth, of living for one’s own sake, I found enormously sensible and appealing—and I still do. Properly understood, Rand’s work is not, as so many of her detractors claim, the expression of an adolescent mentality. At its core, it is elegantly nuanced. It is the mature expression of a brilliant mind. To see that, however, one must at times look past Rand’s own rhetoric.

The positive references to Ludwig von Mises in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal induced me to read his Socialism and The Theory of Money and Credit. Soon after, I happened across a bound volume of the New Individualist Review, which introduced me to Henry Hazlitt, F. A. Hayek, Harry Elmer Barnes, Milton Friedman, and, most importantly, Murray Rothbard. Inspired by reading Rothbard’s Power and Market and For a New Liberty, I then sought out works by Frank Chodorov, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, and James J. Martin. Martin’s Men Against the State made me aware of the depth of the individualist anarchist tradition in America. His The Saga of Hog Island and Revisionist Viewpoints sharpened my awareness of the corruption and deceit in American politics. Branching out from this Old Right/libertarian core, I also explored such diverse writers as Randolph Bourne, Paul Goodman, Rudolf Rocker, and Max Stirner (whose real name was Johann Caspar Schmidt).

Thus, by the time I began work on my Ph.D. I was already a longtime libertarian, not based primarily on economic analysis, but on ethical, political, and cultural grounds. I then more carefully studied the technical arguments of the Austrian School in parallel with and as counterpoint to the neoclassical approach that I dealt with in class. Before long, it was clear to me that laissez-faire was irrefutably the social ideal from the perspective of any academic discipline. One thing that helped me immeasurably was the contact I had with Murray Rothbard throughout the 1980s. I wrote him somewhere around 1981 regarding some point in For a New Liberty and we periodically exchanged letters and phone calls until his death in 1995. He was always a gracious source of both information and inspiration.

It is fair to say that my approach to any subject, whether economics or not, is rather ecumenical. That, however, can constitute heresy in some persons’ eyes. For example, although I categorize myself as an Austrian economist, I am not averse to the use of econometrics, if employed with great care. The key influences on my thought have certainly been Rand and Rothbard, but I have found value in the works of a number of other people. To synthesize those many insights is a daunting task which I am far from completing, and will never complete alone.

The common thread I am trying to trace is essentially an Aristotelian one. Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School, was a realist in the tradition of Aristotle, as were both Rand and Rothbard. Mises and Hayek represent departures from that thread. Mises was, in at least some respects, a neo-Kantian, and Hayek was an ardent admirer of David Hume as well as of Kant. Insofar as economic theory is concerned, considerable progress along the lines I am pursuing has been made by George Reisman. Reisman’s Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics tries to integrate the ethics of Rand with the economics of the Austrian School, partly by resurrecting various concepts from classical economics and partly by introducing clarifications of his own devising. An important recent development in a related area is the work of another friend, Chris M. Sciabarra. Sciabarra has made the provocative argument in his Total Freedom that libertarianism is best defended using a dialectical method. But this is not the dialectics of Hegel and Marx; it is the dialectics of Aristotle. Ultimately, if the Austrian School is to prosper, I believe it must return to its Mengerian, that is, its Aristotelian, roots and develop further from there.

My range of interests has led me to write on a variety of topics. My book, Free Banking, was published by Quorum Books in 1993. I have also written several journal articles on free banking and the related topic of business cycles. It may be unusual for an Austrian, but I have had two econometric papers published. One dealt with purchasing power parity as a reflection of expected rather than realized price levels. The other investigated correlations between an Austrian measure of the money supply and some common macroeconomic variables. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Fall 1999 and Fall 2000) published my two-part critique of Rand’s defense of limited government, a critique based on Rothbard’s recognition that the distributional effects of taxation are never neutral. Those two papers also gave some of the reasons for my advocacy of anarcho-capitalism. My comparison of Rand and Hayek appeared in Reason Papers in 1998. An essay on the contributions of Jean-Baptiste Say appeared in the book 15 Great Austrian Economists. I am currently completing an 800-page manuscript—the culmination of fifteen years of research—on the performance characteristics of commercial sailing ships. A paper on “Praxeology, Economics, and Law” draws parallels between Rothbard and legal theorist Adolf Reinach and appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. My essay on privateering, the for-profit use of private armed ships in time of war, will soon appear in a book edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. A short version of that essay was published as an op-ed in several newspapers and has been cited not only by various columnists and think-tank researchers but also by Representative Ron Paul on the floor of Congress.

In addition to my publications in academic journals, I have been very pleased to contribute a number of essays to The Free Radical, an outstanding New Zealand magazine founded and edited by Objectivist Lindsay Perigo.

To bring this autobiographical sketch to an end, I would like to offer some hopefully encouraging observations for the benefit of young libertarians and/or Austrians seeking an academic career. It is not necessary that you do your graduate work at an elite university, nor that you achieve a faculty position at such an institution. There can be no doubt that both are helpful, but neither is ultimately essential. I have done neither, and yet I have achieved some reasonable degree of success in my field. Many will also advise you to hide your libertarian sentiments and your interest in Austrian economics, at least until you have obtained secure employment. That might be prudent under certain circumstances, but I did not do that either. What is essential is that you follow your mind and heart wherever they lead you. Treat your own independent judgment as something sacred. And please keep in mind Herman Melville’s admonition: “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”

Larry J. Sechrest was professor of economics and director of the Free Enterprise Institute at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.