NOTES INTRODUCTION: LAW AND NATURE IN THE WORK OF MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

¹ Murray N. Rothbard, “Review of Lionel Robbins, The Great Depression” (London: Macmillan, 1937); see p. 79 in this volume.

² Murray N. Rothbard, “Letter on What is Political Philosophy? by Leo Strauss”; see p. 91 in this volume.

³ This theme comes up in later works. See, for example, Murray N. Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Cheltenham, U.K.: Eward Elgar, 1995), pp. 313–14, 339.

⁴ Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1959), p. 49. At the heart of Strauss’s idea is the critical reconstruction of modernity as a break with the ancient and medieval politico-philosophical tradition. See also Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Raimondo Cubeddu, Leo Strauss e la filosofia politica moderna (Naples: ESI, 1983).

⁵ Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1953] 1965), p. 248.

⁶ Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? p. 12. See also Raimondo Cubeddu, Giovanni Giorgini, and Flavia Monceri, “Leo Strauss sui diritti naturali e il liberalismo,” Élites 2 (2004): 118–24.

⁷ Leo Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989; New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 220–22.

⁸ Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 144.

⁹ Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982), p. 5. The reference is to Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves, La dottrina del diritto naturale (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1954), pp. 51–52. It has recently been pointed out that the continuity between natural law and natural rights in the thought of Passerin d’Entrèves probably refers more to the function historically carried out by natural law rather than to a doctrinal continuity. See Raimondo Cubeddu, “La concezione del diritto naturale in Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves,” in Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves pensatore europeo, edited by Sergio Noto (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), pp. 179–210.

¹⁰ Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective, vol. 1, pp. 313–14.

¹¹ Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 21.

¹² See Strauss, Natural Right and History; Michel Villey, La formation de la pensée juridique moderne (Paris: Editions Montchrestien, 1975); and Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1997). See also Annabel S. Brett, Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

¹³ John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980).

¹⁴ Henry B. Veatch, Human Rights: Fact or Fancy? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 104.

¹⁵ For an examination of these distinctions, see Raimondo Cubeddu, “Legge naturale o diritti naturali? Alcune questioni di filosofia politica liberale,” Quaderni dell’Istituto Acton 15 (2004).

¹⁶ It seems that Rothbard owes this idea to Ayn Rand. Cf. Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964).

¹⁷ Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 213.

¹⁸ The conference papers were published in H. Schoeck and J.W. Wiggins, eds., Relativism and the Study of Man (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1961).

¹⁹ Rothbard, “The Symposium on Relativism: A Critique”; see p. 103 in this volume.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 103 in this volume.

²¹ See Strauss, Natural Right and History (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978) and Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).

²² Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, scholar’s edition (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998), pp. 18–19.

²³ Mises, Human Action, p. 174. On the different positions of Mises and Rothbard on these questions, see David Gordon, “Le implicazioni etiche e politiche della Scuola austriaca di economia,” in David Gordon and Roberta A. Modugno, eds., Individualismo metodologico: dalla Scuola austriaca all’anarco-capitalismo (Rome: Luiss Edizioni, 2001), pp. 36–71.

²⁴ In Power and Market Rothbard expresses some uncertainties about a position attempting to defend freedom solely on the basis of value-free positions—an attempt lacking any persuasive force for those who intend to impose their own values by coercion and who persist in their intentions even when they have been shown the probable disastrous economic consequences of abandoning the free-market economy. See Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), p. 209.

²⁵ Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 10.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 5.

²⁷ Rothbard, “The Symposium on Relativism: A Critique”; see p. 103 in this volume.

²⁸ Murray N. Rothbard, “On Freedom and the Law,” New Individualist Review 1, no. 4 (1962): 37–40.

²⁹ Murray N. Rothbard, The Logic of Action II: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 3–4. Originally prepared for the Symposium on Human Differentiation, for the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin, 1970, and sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies.

³⁰ See Veatch, Human Rights.

³¹ Murray N. Rothbard, “In Defense of ‘Extreme Apriorism’,” in The Logic of Action I: Method, Money and the Austrian School (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 105–06.

³² Veatch, Human Rights, p. 122.

³³ Ibid., p. ix.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 39.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 46.

³⁷ Veatch does, however, include Rothbard’s volume in the bibliography.

³⁸ In Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard quotes the following works by Veatch: For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical Theory (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971) and Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1962).

³⁹ On the historical role of the notion of natural law, see Passerin d’Entrèves, La dottrina del diritto naturale, and Guido Fassò, La legge della ragione (Milan: Giuffrè, 1999).

⁴⁰ This particular reference is to Louis de Molina. See F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1982).

⁴¹ F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 143.

⁴² The term rationalism indicates an attitude of unshakeable faith in the creative capacities of human reason in the field of social and political institutions. This attitude leads to the belief that any institution and any order are the result of an intended and conscious plan, in the belief that reason can control and plan everything that man does. Hayek writes that “human institutions are made by man. Though in a sense man-made, i.e., entirely the result of human actions, they may yet not be designed, not be the intended product of these actions.” Constructivism consists in “the belief that since all ‘institutions’ have been made by man, we must have complete power to refashion them in any way we desire.” See F.A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952). The “spontaneous order” school of thought maintains that a large part of human institutions did not necessarily derive from a mind that planned and directed them, i.e., institutions, law, and customs are the result of human action but not the result of a human plan; rather, they are the consequences of spontaneous collaboration among individuals. This is the great theme found in Bernard de Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, right up to the main exponents of the Austrian School of economics, Menger, Mises, and Hayek. It was in fact Hayek who, on the basis of a different attitude to constructivist rationalism, introduced the categories of true and false individualism into the history of liberal thought. True individualism highlights the limits and the fallibility of human reason, while false individualism holds that reason is able to plan everything and leads to the claim of infallible social engineering. See F.A. Hayek’s “Individualism: True and False” in Individualism and Economic Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949). Awareness of the limits to reason and to all that rationality could intentionally achieve in the field of political and social institutions, and thus the impossibility of a totally rational way of acting in the Cartesian sense, derives from the inevitable limitations of our knowledge. In other words, it would not be possible to have total knowledge of all the relevant facts regarding social structure and human activities. As Hayek explains, “A designer or an engineer needs all the data and full power to control or manipulate them if he is to organize the material objects to produce the intended result. But the success of action in society depends on more particular facts than anyone can possibly know.” It is important to remember “the necessary and irremediable ignorance on everyone’s part of the particular facts which determine the actions of all the several members of human society” (F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1, Rules and Order [London: Routledge, 1973], p. 29). Scattered and fallible knowledge encourages holding both the gradualism and the experience of the past in high esteem. Awareness of the existence of the inevitable, unintentional consequences of intentional human actions leads to severe criticism of rationalism or constructivism. Criticism of the constructivist presumption is further extended by Karl R. Popper. Popperian epistemology—claiming that the study of society necessarily depends on one’s perspective, as is the case when studying any subject—explains that infallible social engineering is impossible. Popper makes a distinction between utopian social engineering and step-by-step mechanics: “The piecemeal engineer knows, like Socrates, how little he knows. He knows that we can learn only from our mistakes. Accordingly, he will make his way, step by step, carefully comparing the results expected with the results achieved, and always on the look-out for the unavoidable unwanted consequences of any reform.” See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 67. On this subject, see also Dario Antiseri, Liberi perché fallibili (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1995) and Trattato di metodologia delle scienze sociali (Turin: UTET, 2000).

⁴³ Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1, p. 29.

⁴⁴ Nicola Matteucci, Lo Stato moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), pp. 135–36.

⁴⁵ Edward Coke, Institutes of the Laws of England, vol. 1 (London: Society of Stationers, 1628), lib. 2, fol. 97b, sect. 138. The complete passage from Edward Coke is as follows:

And this is another strong argument in law, nihil quod est contra rationem est licitum, for reason is the life of the law nay the common law itself its nothing else but reason; which is to be understood of an artificiall perfection of reason, gotten by long study, observation, and experience. ...This legal reason est summa ratio. And therefore if all the reason, that is dispersed into so many several heads, were united into one, yet could he not make such a law as the law of England is; because by many successions of ages it hath been fined and refined by an infinite number of grave and learned men, ...and by long experience growne to a such perfection.

⁴⁶ Charles Covell, The Defence of Natural Law: A Study in the Ideas of Justice in the Writings of Lon L. Fuller, Michael Oakeshott, F.A. Hayek, Ronald Dworkin, and John Finnis (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. xiii.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. xiv.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 3.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 143.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 128.

⁵¹ Rothbard, “Memo to the Volker Fund on F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty”; see p. 61 in this volume.

⁵² Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1, p. 29.

⁵³ Rothbard, “Memo to the Volker Fund on F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty”; see p. 61 in this volume.

⁵⁴ Ralph Raico, “La tradizione liberale francese dell’Ottocento,” Federalismo e libertà 5–6 (settembre-dicembre 2001), pp. 171–207. According to Raico, the Hayekian distinction actually introduces a fair amount of confusion. Raico notes that, among other things, Molinari proposed a conception of the evolution of society that was very close to Hayek’s (p. 191). Raico thinks that it is Bastiat’s and Molinari’s tradition that had a decisive influence on the Italian liberals after the mid-nineteenth century and, through them, on the Public Choice School of thought. It is, however, worth recalling what Hayek writes about Tocqueville in “Individualism: True and False”:

In the nineteenth century I find it represented most perfectly in the work of two of its greatest historians and political philosophers, Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton. These two men seem to me to have more successfully developed what was best in the political philosophy of the Scottish philosophers, Burke, and the English Whigs than any other writers I know.

See F.A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 4.

⁵⁵ F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 31.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 29.

⁵⁷ Rothbard, “Letter on The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek”; see p. 71 in this volume.

⁵⁸ Rothbard, “Memo to the Volker Fund on F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty”; see p. 61 in this volume.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Norberto Bobbio, The Age of Rights, trans. Allen Cameron (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 4–6.

⁶¹ Fassò, La legge della ragione, p. 217. (All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.) Dario Antiseri, regarding the possibility of establishing absolute values, poses the following questions:

Absolute values for whom? Absolute on the basis of which arguments? Absolute because they are experienced as such or because they are based on absolute reasons? ...And is it not true that nothing is more cultural than the idea of nature and, therefore, also of human nature? And then, is it not precisely the awareness of the fallibility of human knowledge and of an inevitable pluralism of different values that provides the safest garrison for liberty and the constitutional state?

See Antiseri, “Ius quia iustum. Sed quid iustum? Considerazioni in margine a ‘La dottrina del diritto naturale’,” in Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves pensatore europeo, p. 111.

⁶² Fassò, La legge della ragione, p. 217

⁶³ Murray N. Rothbard, in The Logic of Action I, p. 141. This work was first presented on the occasion of the Tenth Anniversary Austrian Scholar’s Conference. In it, Rothbard highlights the differences within the Austrian School of economics regarding the dichotomy between the Hayekian paradigm and that of Mises on the subject of unintended consequences which would, in effect, undermine the importance of the intended consequences of an individual’s rational plans. If, as Mises maintains, all human actions have a purpose, in Rothbard’s opinion it would be much better to make intentional and known all that which is at the unintentional level. Rothbard criticizes the Hayekian theory of spontaneous order since, from his point of view, it implies a lack of awareness on the part of human beings. Besides, accepting such a theory would mean holding a conservative and uncritical attitude towards those institutions that had simply developed spontaneously, the state included. It is necessary, however, to emphasize that in this paper Rothbard does not address the subject of the criticism of the value-free defense of the market sustained by Mises. In order to understand the divisions between the Austrians, it is instructive to read the article by Joseph T. Salerno, “Ludwig von Mises as Social Rationalist,” Review of Austrian Economics 4, no. 1 (1990): 26–54. Salerno contrasts Mises’s “rationalism” with Hayek’s “irrational” emphasis on spontaneous order. Salerno’s idea is that to achieve social change, we cannot rely on spontaneous and unintended consequences (pp. 50–51).

⁶⁴ Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1, pp. 88–89

⁶⁵ Covell, The Defense of Natural Law, p. 132.

⁶⁶ Raimondo Cubeddu, Introduction to La libertà e la legge, by Bruno Leoni (Macerata, Italy: Liberilibri, 1994), p. xiii.

⁶⁷ Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, pp. 399–400.

⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 399.

⁶⁹ Sergio Ricossa, Introduction to La società libera, by F.A. Hayek, trans. Marcella Bianchi di Lavagna Malagodi (Florence, Italy: Vallecchi Editore, 1969), p. 10.

⁷⁰ A.M. Petroni and S. Monti Bragadin, Introduction to F.A. Hayek, Legge, legislazione e libertà, trans. Pier Giuseppe Monateri (Milano, Italy: Il Saggiatore, 1989), p. xxii.

⁷¹ Rothbard, “Memo to the Volker Fund on F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty”; see p. 61 in this volume.

⁷² Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, p. 11; F.A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 348. Here Hayek replies to the criticisms made by Ronald Hamowy in a 1961 review. Cf. Ronald Hamowy, “Hayek’s Concept of Freedom: A Critique,” New Individualist Review 1, no. 1 (1961): 28–31. Hamowy’s reasoning was very close to that of Rothbard. Hayek’s many concessions to the role of government led to numerous criticisms on the part of libertarian thinkers. See Ronald Hamowy, “Freedom and the Rule of Law in F.A. Hayek,” Il politico (1971–1972): 355–56; “Law and the Liberal Society: F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 2, no. 4 (1978): 287–97; John N. Gray, “F.A. Hayek on Liberty and Tradition,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 4, no. 2 (1980): 119–37. Rothbard’s criticism of the Hayekian concept of coercion can be found in “Hayek on Coercion and Freedom,” Literature of Liberty (Winter 1980): 53–54. See also Ethics of Liberty, pp. 219–29.

⁷³ Rothbard, “Memo to the Volker Fund on F.A. Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty”; see p. 61 in this volume.

⁷⁴ Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, pp. 20–21, 133.

⁷⁵ Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 220.

⁷⁶ Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p. 350.

⁷⁷ Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, p. 21.

⁷⁸ Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 224.

⁷⁹ Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p. 349.

⁸⁰ Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, p. 261.

⁸¹ F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 54–55.

⁸² For the management of natural parks and the cultural heritage, Hayek gives the example of the famous and very efficient English National Trust.

⁸³ Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, p. 380.

⁸⁴ Ibid., pp. 378, 381.

⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 205.

⁸⁶ Ibid., p. 161.

⁸⁷ Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, p. 350. Hayek responds to Hamowy’s article mentioned above, “Hayek’s Concept of Freedom: A Critique.”

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY NEWTON ROTHBARD

¹ G.B. Cutten, “Rugged Individualism,” in Vital Speeches of the Day (November 5, 1934). This was a paper given by George Burton Cutten, president of Colgate University on the occasion of a university meeting, September 20, 1934.

² The “Road to Serfdom” refers to the work by F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1944).

³ Rothard notes, A.J. Nock, Our Enemy, the State (New York: William Morrow, 1935), p. 20.

⁴ Paul Douglas (1892–1976) was a U.S. senator (Democrat); Chester Bowles (1901–1986) was a U.S. congressman (Democrat) and diplomat; Hubert Humphrey (1911–1978) was vice president of the United States from 1965 to 1969; Harold Stassen (1907–2001) was a U.S. senator (Republican). In 1948 and many times thereafter, Stassen ran for the Republican presidential nomination, but he was always defeated; Leverett Saltonstall was a U.S. senator (Republican).

⁵ Cutten, “Rugged Individualism,” p. 70.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid., p. 71.

⁸ Ibid., p. 70.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Cutten, “Rugged Individualism,” p. 70.

¹¹ This is a shortened version of Juvenal, Satires VI, line 347: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

¹² Cutten, “Rugged Individualism,” p. 70.

¹³ Ibid., p. 71.

¹⁴ F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). In this Memorandum, Rothbard refers to the first fourteen chapters of Hayek’s manuscript. The Volker Fund had provided a grant for Hayek’s work and Rothbard was asked to give his opinion of it.

¹⁵ Robert A. Taft (1889–1953) was a U.S. Senator from 1939 to 1953. Known as “Mr. Republican” for his frontline role in the eponymous party, he was a strong opponent of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In 1947 he supported the Taft-Hartley Labor Relations Act. He was against the United States’ entry into the Second World War and he further opposed many of the measures adopted during the Cold War period. The Wagner Act (1937) took its name from Senator Robert F. Wagner (Democrat), who was responsible, as a result of the law that bore his name, for the United States Housing Authority, a government agency with the responsibility of providing low-cost housing. In 1949, the question of the right to housing was addressed once again, and the Housing Act was passed—extending the legislation on public housing—with Taft’s support.

¹⁶ Richard Price (1723–1791), a dissenter of Arian convictions, was a great supporter of both American Independence and the French Revolution (it should be noted, however, that he died before the end of the latter). In 1758 he became a minister of the Presbyterian Church in the Newington Green community. He was a member of the Royal Society and of the Pennsylvania Society for Abolishing Negro Slavery. He was also part of numerous intellectual circles; one of his favorites was the Honest Whig club. Price’s political philosophy came directly from the moral theory of the autonomy of the individual, according to which an individual, in order to be virtuous, had to be free; and any constraint whatsoever on individual conscience was an arbitrary exercise of power. One of his famous speeches was “On the Love of Our Country,” given in 1789 to the Society for the Commemoration of the Glorious Revolution, in which he expressed his unreserved approval for the French Revolution. This speech led Burke to publish his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and it opened a wide debate on the events in France. Amongst Price’s works worthy of note are A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (1758) and Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776).

¹⁷ Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) was orphaned at the age of nine and then raised by relatives. Sometime later he became involved in the family’s exporting business. He then went to Spain and Portugal to try, without success, to establish an insurance company. In 1825, he returned to France after inheriting his grandfather’s estate. He began his career as a writer, publishing some articles in the Journal des économistes. Among these was the “Lettre ouverte à M. de Lamartine sur le droit au travail,” a criticism of socialist theories. He was enthusiastic about Richard Cobden’s opposition to the Corn Laws in England, about which he wrote Cobden et la ligue, ou l’Agitation anglaise pour la liberté des échanges. He published a series of articles in which he attacked protectionism, highlighting the problem of the unintended consequences of government policies. Some of his writings were published in Sophismes économiques (1845–1848). In 1846, he founded the Association pour la liberté des échanges in Paris. In addition, because of his writings and speeches he was appointed to the finance commission. Also see his Harmonies économiques.

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) was one of the most important proponents of laissez-faire and liberalism in France. Against protectionism, statism, militarism, colonialism, and socialism, he continued to fight for liberal ideals right up until the eve of the First World War, when he was in his nineties. In 1840, he moved from his native Belgium to Paris to start work as a journalist and economist. His liberalism was based on the theory of natural rights. He supported laissez-faire in economics and minimum state intervention in politics. In 1849, in the Journal des économistes, he published “De la production de la sécurité,” in which he maintained that private companies working under a regime of competition, along with insurance companies, could supply policing and national security services more efficiently, more economically, and in a more moral way than the state. He contributed a series of articles to the Dictionnaire de l’économie politique (1852–1853). During the reign of Napoleon III, he returned to Belgium where he became a professor of political economy. See also his works L’Évolution économique du dix-neuvième siècle: théorie du progrès (1880) and L’Évolution politique et la révolution (1884).

¹⁸ Gerald Heard (1889–1971). A historian and philosopher, Heard studied at Cambridge and briefly taught at Oxford before moving in 1937 to the United States. He briefly taught at Duke University before founding Trabuco College in 1941. He was well known for his evolutionary theory of human consciousness. See his works The Ascent of Humanity (1929), The Source of Civilization (1935), and The Five Ages of Man (1963).

¹⁹ Rudolf von Gneist (1816–1895) was a German jurist and liberal politician. He was the author of fundamental works on English constitutional and administrative law. He had a particularly important role in the reform of the Prussian administration (1868–1875) and in building an autonomous administrative justice system in Germany. See Das heutige englische Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsrecht (1857) and Englische Verfassungsgeschichte (1882).

²⁰ F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

²¹ Harold Laski (1893–1950) was an English political theorist and professor of political science at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He was convinced that socialism in England had been more greatly influenced by John Stuart Mill than by Karl Marx, and he taught a kind of modified Marxism. He was a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee between 1937 and 1949 and significantly influenced its policy. He was chairman of the Labour Party from 1945 to 1946. He wrote A Grammar of Politics (1925); Liberty in the Modern State (1930); Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1943); and The American Democracy (1948).

²² Charles Dunoyer (1786–1862) studied law in Paris where he was intellectually tied to Charles Comte. In 1814, together with Comte, he founded the journal Le Censeur, which was then banned by the emperor. Dunoyer was condemned to a year in prison and banned from Paris for five years. From Vitré, he published Le Censeur européen intermittently until 1820. He was opposed to the Bourbon restoration and supported absolute freedom in politics and in social and economic life. He was convinced that the industrial system would develop without any intervention on the part of the state. Among Dunoyer’s works, see Nouveau traité d’économie sociale (1830) and L’industrie et la morale considérées dans leur rapports avec la liberté (1825).

²³ Lionel Robbins, The Great Depression (London: Macmillan, 1934).

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 213–14.

²⁵ Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).

²⁶ Thomas Hollis (1720–1774) made a fundamental contribution to the recovery of the republican tradition in the seventeenth century. A great reader and freethinker, he devoted himself to the republication of the works of Harrington, Milton, Nedham, Sidney, and Locke.

In 1960, Pierre Goodrich founded the Liberty Fund, a private organization for the dissemination of classical-liberal ideas.

²⁷ Robert Molesworth (1656–1725) supported William of Orange on the occasion of the Glorious Revolution and, in 1695, became a member of the Irish Privy Council. He was made a viscount in 1716. He wrote An Account of Denmark as It Was in the Year 1692 (1693).

²⁸ James Foster (1697–1748), a keen collaborator on the liberal paper The Old Whig, was a Dissenting chaplain in the house of Robert Houlton. In 1724 he moved to London where he became a famous nonconformist preacher of liberal ideas. His thought was characterized by an emphasis on the dignity and freedom of the individual, and on freedom of thought. His speeches were published in Discourses (1749–1752) and in Sermons (1736).

John Campbell (1653–1728) was a Scot who immigrated to Boston, where he published the Boston Newsletter, helping to disseminate English liberal ideas in the colonies.

Between 1774 and 1775, James Burgh (1714–1775) published Political Disquisitions, one of the political tracts that significantly influenced radical thought in the 1780s. See Burgh, Political Disquisitions; or, An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, 3 vols. (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1774–75). Looking at the first part of the eighteenth century, Burgh regretted the degeneration of the country and with the “spirit of a true independent whig,” he hoped for the restoration of the constitution to control the authoritarian tendencies of the government (General Preface, p. xvi). He wrote,

All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. Power in the people is like light in the sun, native, original, inherent, and unlimited by anything human. In governors, it may be compared to the reflected light of the moon, for it is only borrowed, delegated, and limited by the intention of the people, whose it is, and to whom governors are to consider themselves responsible, while the people are answerable only to God.

Central to Burgh’s thought was his criticism of the electoral system, which he considered to be corrupt and unrepresentative. Burgh wanted the right to vote to be extended to all those who paid taxes, because only in this way could the balance in favor of the great landowners be redressed and trade and manufacturing interests be represented. It is worth noting that Burgh advocated extending the right to vote to anyone who paid taxes—he was not talking about universal male suffrage. While maintaining the need for wider representation, Burgh did not question the link between property and political representation.

John Jackson (1686–1763) wrote The Grounds of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government, in which he maintained that the state should be limited by natural law and the resulting civil laws. Jackson criticized the theory of the divine right of kings and maintained that the citizens were bound to the sovereign as long as the sovereign acted justly; otherwise the power was dissolved.

John Lee (1733–1793) was part of the circle of Rational Dissenters and a member of the Club of Honest Whigs together with Price and Burgh. A friend of Joseph Priestley, he was solicitor general in the Rockingham administration.

²⁹ Francis Blackburne (1705–1787) published The Confessional (1766) anonymously in defense of the Unitarian faith and against the restrictions imposed on religious dissenters.

³⁰ Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was considered to be one of the main exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment. In 1729, he succeeded Gershom Carmichael (see note below) in the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and Adam Smith was one of his students. Hutcheson placed at the basis of any moral judgment a feeling grounded in the notion that human nature produced approval for virtuous actions and disapproval for vicious actions. This instinct explained the possibility of moral judgments independent of any considerations dictated by immediate interest, i.e., judgments formulated in view of the public good. Hutcheson thought that it was the right of any individual to enjoy the fruits of his own labor and therefore that society had to guarantee private property in the public interest. An equally important idea of his was the division of labor as a form of cooperation. Among his works, see An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good (1725) and A System of Moral Philosophy (1755).

³¹ Gershom Carmichael (c. 1672–1729) was an early figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. After his studies at the University of Edinburgh, he became rector at the University of St. Andrews and later at the University of Glasgow. Then, in 1727, he became the first professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. He inaugurated the teaching of economics and introduced into Scotland the study of the theorists of natural law, including Grotius and Pufendorf. As an assigned text, he employed De officio hominis et civis by Pufendorf, editing two editions, one in 1718 and another in 1724. In his comments, Carmichael gave ample attention to economic questions relating to money, prices, and taxes, in particular supporting the theory that it was the scarcity of a good that determined its value.

³² Charles Stanhope (1753–1816) supported the campaign for parliamentary reform, the extension of suffrage, and the abolition of discriminatory laws against religious dissenters. He joined forces with radicals such as Jebb and Cartwright. He was known for his republican ideas, and sympathized with both the American and French Revolutions.

John Cartwright (1740–1824) was part of the movement of radicals and dissenters in favor of parliamentary reform. The aims of the movement were the abolition of the Test Act and the Corporation Act, which, by requiring religious conformism for those in public office, were in practice discriminatory laws against religious dissenters. At the center of the debate on the reforms were the extension of suffrage, an increase in the frequency of elections, and the abolition of the so-called “rotten boroughs.” The reform campaign was led by Charles James Fox from inside Parliament, and by Christopher Wyvill and Cartwright from the outside. Cartwright, in 1776, published the famous Take Your Choice! His main ideas were the introduction of universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, annual elections, and equality among electoral districts. He influenced radical thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. Cartwright’s influence was evident in the six points of the Chartists, a sociopolitical movement that developed in England between 1838 and 1850 that aimed to improve the terrible conditions of the working class and to introduce, at the political level, such fundamental rights as universal suffrage.

John Jebb (1736–1786) was a Unitarian who studied at Trinity College. He taught mathematics, but various colleges prohibited their students from attending his lectures because of his nonconformist religious ideas. He was in favor of independence for the American colonies and he condemned English policy towards America.

Capel Lofft (1751–1824) joined the radical movement for parliamentary reform in the second half of the eighteenth century. He was the author of An Argument on the Nature of Party and Faction: In Which Is Considered the Duty of a Good and Peaceable Citizen at the Present Crisis (1780).

³³ John Trenchard (1662–1723), a political writer and polemicist, was known for, among other things, his writings against a standing army. He was elected to Parliament and in 1719 he began to work with Thomas Gordon, with whom he published Cato’s Letters in the London Journal from 1719 to 1723. This was a series of articles criticizing government activities in general. Among his works, see A Short History of Standing Armies in England (1698).

Thomas Gordon (c. 1692–1750) was a lawyer in Scotland who later moved to London, where he began his work as a political writer and polemicist. Among Gordon’s works, see The Conspirators, The Case of Catiline (1721); A Learned Dissertation Upon Old Women (1720); Three Political Letters to a Noble Lord, Concerning Liberty and Constitution (1721).

Trenchard and Gordon helped to disseminate the thought of Locke, applying his ideas to the concrete problems of the government of the day. Their most important writings, in this regard, were Cato’s Letters, which came out in various editions in the American colonies where they were widely distributed. It seems that they were very important in forging the theoretical basis for the American Revolution. Gordon and Trenchard gave a particularly radical turn to Locke’s thought. While Locke justified rebelling against the government when the latter violated the natural rights of individuals, the two authors maintained that the government always tended to destroy individual rights rather than protect them. According to Cato’s Letters, the history of mankind was none other than the history of conflict between power and freedom. Power, i.e., the state, was always ready to violate the rights of its citizens and take away their freedom; therefore the state should be reduced to the minimum and be constantly controlled. See John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, in The English Libertarian Heritage: From the Writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the Independent Whig and Cato’s Letters, ed. David L. Jacobson (San Francisco, Calif.: Fox and Wilkes, 1994). Gordon and Trenchard also published The Character of an Independent Whig (London: J. Roberts, 1719–1720).

³⁴ Thomas Bradbury (1677–1759) congregationalist dissenter, known for the polemic content of his political writings.

³⁵ Sylas Neville (1741–1840) kept a diary that is useful in understanding the thought and politics of the republicans in the first twenty years of the reign of George III. See The Diary of Sylas Neville, 1767–1788.

³⁶ William Pitt (1708–1778) was a famous English statesman and, from 1766, the first Earl of Chatham. He played a frontline role in the Seven Years War (1756–63), which ensured the transformation of England into an imperial power. He opposed the Treaty of Paris (1763), which concluded the war.

³⁷ Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Irish writer and politician, first politically on the side of the Whigs and then of the Tories. In reality, he was more of an Old Whig, defending traditional English freedoms and rights although he feared democratic and egalitarian offshoots. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he described the paradox of a kind of ethics and politics following nature and reason, applying them in the kingdom of the philosopher horses and another kingdom based on injustice and the abuse of men reduced to slaves.

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was an English novelist and playwright who wrote Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749).

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was an English writer of Unitarian origins and a friend of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and John Keats. Author of An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), he worked for the Morning Chronicle, and his articles appeared in the collection A View of the English Stage (1818). See, among others, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817) and The Spirit of the Age (1825).

James Boswell (1749–1795), a Scottish lawyer, attended Adam Smith’s lectures at Glasgow University. During a trip to Europe in 1764, he interviewed Rousseau and Voltaire. He is most well known as the biographer of the famous man of letters Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).

³⁸ Robert Wallace (1697–1771), a Scottish Presbyterian minister, was the author of Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence (1761), a communitarian utopia. In this work, Wallace described the idea of a world government that eliminated private property and imposed equality. In his ideal world, the raising of children would be delegated to the state.

Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), a Scottish philosopher and historian, taught moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1764 to 1785. He was one of the most important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Author of An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), he was one of the exponents of the spontaneous order tradition. According to Ferguson,

Like the winds that come we know not whence, and blow whithersoever they list, the forms of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise, long before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the speculations of men. ...This is the simplest form under which we can consider the establishment of nations: and we ascribe to a previous design, what came to be known only by experience, what no human wisdom could foresee, and what, without the concurring humour and disposition of his age, no authority could enable an individual to execute. (An Essay on the History of Civil Society [Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004], pp. 75–76)

One of the characteristic aspects of his thought was a profound criticism of commercial society, which, he claimed, through the division of labor, alienated man, depriving him of his humanity. For Ferguson, the development of the mechanical arts and the growth of production and trade did not automatically lead to moral and political progress. The division of labor in the sphere of the state, furthermore, had led to the establishment of a standing army that, in Ferguson’s opinion, was yet another instrument of oppression in the hands of government. Ferguson therefore proposed the republican ideal of the citizen soldier. This explicitly recalled the values and ideas of the modern republican tradition. He thought that freedom could be kept alive not so much by constitutions and laws but rather by the active participation of citizens in civil life.

³⁹ William Ogilvie (1736–1819) taught philosophy at the Aberdeen University and was a supporter of the theory of the joint property of the earth.

⁴⁰ Thomas Spence (1750–1814), an English radical, maintained that all land should be public. In 1792 he moved to London where he earned his living selling copies of The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine on street corners. He was arrested on several occasions for distributing seditious texts. In 1793, for a short time, he published the journal Pig’s Meat. He opened a shop selling books with radical ideas. He supported women’s rights.

Thomas Pownall (1722–1805) was the author of Administration of the Colonies (1764), in which he supported the idea of a union of all the British dominions on the basis of common commercial interests.

⁴¹ Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959).

⁴² Russell Kirk, an exponent of American conservatism, was editor of Modern Age, a journal published in Chicago by the Foundation for Foreign Affairs, founded in 1957. He is the author of The Portable Conservative Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1982); The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Regnery, 1953); Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997); Prospects for Conservatives (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989); Rights and Duties: Reflections on our Conservative Constitution (Dallas: Spence Publications, 1997).

⁴³ Peter Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958). The author places Edmund Burke within the Thomist and late Scholastic tradition of natural law rather than in that of natural rights.

⁴⁴ John Wild, Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

⁴⁵ Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958).

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 47.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 52.

⁴⁸ William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Chicago: Regnery, 1951).

⁴⁹ Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 295.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 296.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 298.

⁵² Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: An Interpretation of Xenophon’s “Hiero” (New York: Political Science Classics, 1948).

⁵³ The proceedings of the Symposium on Relativism were edited by Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins and published in 1961 under the title Relativism and the Study of Man (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand).

⁵⁴ Bruno Leoni, “Some Reflections on the ‘Relativistic’ Meaning of the Wertfreiheit in the Study of Man,” in Schoeck and Wiggins, eds., Relativism, pp. 158–74.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 163.

⁵⁶ Ludwig von Mises, “Epistemological Relativism in the Sciences of Human Action,” in Schoeck and Wiggins, eds., Relativism, pp. 117–34.

⁵⁷ Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) were the most prestigious representatives of the School of Baden. Exponents of neo-Kantianism, they saw philosophy as a theory of values. The task of the philosopher was to establish which were the values at the base of knowledge, morality, and art. Another important contribution of Windelband and Rikert was their reflections on the foundation of history as a science.

⁵⁸ Mises writes, “He who disagrees with the teachings of economics ought to try to refute them by discursive reasoning, not by abuse, insinuations, and the appeal to arbitrary, allegedly ethical standards.” (“Epistemological Relativism in the Sciences of Human Action,” in Money, Method, and the Market Process (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1990), p. 51. First appeared in Relativism and the Study of Man, Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds. (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1962).

⁵⁹ Mises, “Epistemological Relativism,” p. 119.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² Leo Strauss, “Relativism,” in Schoeck and Wiggins, eds., Relativism, pp. 135–57.

⁶³ Arnold Brecht (1884–1977) was a civil servant in Germany. Under the Nazi regime he was arrested in 1933 and then released, after which he escaped to the United States. He began his academic career in the field of political science at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he remained until 1953, when he retired. At the center of Brecht’s work was the development of political studies as a scientific discipline. He was the author of Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), in which he maintained, among other things, that values and ultimate aims could not be defined scientifically. He also wrote various works on themes relating to the institutional and constitutional problems of federalism and totalitarianism. Among others, see Prelude to Silence: The End of the German Republic (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1944), Federalism and Regionalism in Germany (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1945), and The Political Education of Arnold Brecht: An Autobiography, 1884–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970).

⁶⁴ Strauss, “Relativism,” p. 144.

⁶⁵ Ibid. p. 145.

⁶⁶ Eliseo Vivas, “Reiterations and Second Thoughts on Cultural Relativism,” in Schoeck and Wiggins, eds., Relativism, pp. 45–73.

⁶⁷ Julian Victor Langmead Casserley (1909–1978), was professor of theological philosophy, author of Morals and Man in the Social Sciences (London, New York: Longmans, Green, 1951), The Christian in Philosophy (New York: Scribner, 1951), Graceful Reason: The Contribution of Reason to Theology (Greenwich, Conn.: Seabury Press, 1954), Retreat from Christianity in the Modern World (London: Longmans, Green, 1952), and Toward a Theology of History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965). Casserley was one of the participants of this symposium.

⁶⁸ Leonard Carmichael, “Absolutes, Relativism, and the Scientific Psychology of Human Nature,” in Schoeck and Wiggins, eds., Relativism, pp. 1–22.

⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 4.

⁷⁰ Ibid., pp. 6–7.

⁷¹ For the purposes of this book, I have only included Rothbard’s critiques for five of the articles that he considered first rate. The sixth is Mario Pei’s “Relativism in Linguistics.”

⁷² Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1944). Polanyi’s great transformation was the degeneration into authoritarianism of the liberal institutions in the 1920s and ‘30s. He denied the liberal axiom according to which a market society was a natural historical outcome; he therefore tried to demonstrate the artificiality and the pathological nature of the liberal market, which could only end in a violent crisis. The processes leading to fascism refuted the economic theory of a market able to regulate itself, which, for Polanyi, was only a utopia. As a result, Polanyi criticized the classical economical school and the free market. In Polanyi’s opinion, the free market could only produce a dangerous individualism and social disaggregation. Therefore “society,” in order to defend itself, had to regulate the market by introducing control and redistributive mechanisms. Fascism and Communism were the historical proof of the impossibility of the self-regulating market.

⁷³ A South African tribe.

⁷⁴ Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 202. Rothbard notes, “For an excellent discussion of Rousseau, primitivism and the Romantic Movement, see Irving Babbit, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).”

⁷⁵ Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) was an American anthropologist whose work had a strong influence in the field of cultural anthropology. She studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University, where she later taught. After eleven years of study in the field among Native Americans, she published Tales of the Cochiti Indians (1931) and Patterns of Culture (1934), emphasizing how the attitudes of a particular culture contributed deterministically to defining an individual’s personality. In 1940, to combat Nazi racial theories, she published Race: Science and Politics. She was recognized as one of the most important anthropologists in the United States and was president of the American Anthropological Association.

Margaret Mead (1901–1978), an American anthropologist, studied with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. Author of the famous Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), her numerous works also include Growing up in New Guinea (1930) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). She worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Franz Boas (1858–1942), a German anthropologist, was founder of a school of anthropology based on the concept of cultural relativism. He spent a large part of his career at Columbia University in New York. He specialized in the culture of the Indians of North America and had numerous students who continued to develop cultural anthropology. Author of The Mind of the Primitive Man (1911), Primitive Art (1927), and Language and Culture (1940).

⁷⁶ Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 210.

⁷⁷ In England in the eighteenth century, vast areas of the country were common land and were cultivated under the open field system. From 1830 on, the development of crop growing techniques made the large farms more efficient and almost all agricultural land was enclosed. According to Polanyi, this led to a mass exodus of small farmers from the countryside.

⁷⁸ Rothbard, it would seem, was referring to the story of Hannah More, mentioned by Polanyi, from Joseph Palmer’s The Lancashire Colliery Girl (1795). In this story, the author praises a Lancashire girl who worked in a mine from the age of nine with her younger brother. Hannah More stressed the fact that the two children were very useful members of society, and that the girl’s qualities were recognized by her employers (Hannah More, Cheap Repository Tract, described in Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 220). The story has an “edifying” ending because the girl manages to raise herself to a level of greater independence by finding work with a family as a servant.

⁷⁹ Rothbard notes, “For a refutation of the enclosure myth and a recognition of the key being increase of population, see W.H.B. Court, A Concise Economic History of Britain from 1750 to Recent Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).”

⁸⁰ Rothbard notes, “For an inspiring and scholarly discussion of the enormous growth of a market and exchange economy among illiterate natives of West Africa, I strongly recommend P.T. Bauer, West African Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).”

⁸¹ Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 63.

⁸² Ibid., p. 65. Kula trading is typical of the archipelago of the Trobriand Islands, a group of islands arranged in the form of a circle in western Melanesia. Polanyi describes their form of trading:

Still, it is trade, and large expeditions are undertaken periodically by natives of this approximately ring-shaped archipelago in order to carry one kind of valuable object to peoples living on distant islands situated clockwise, while other expeditions are arranged carrying another kind of valuable object to the islands of the archipelago lying counterclockwise. In the long run, both sets of objects... will move round the archipelago, a traject which may take them up to ten years to complete. (p. 66)

⁸³ Rothbard notes, “Unfortunately, historically, most of humanity has lived and suffered, up until the advent of the free market. See K. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957).”

⁸⁴ Rothbard notes, “See Isabel Paterson’s profound work of political theory, The God of the Machine (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943).”

⁸⁵ Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 310.

⁸⁶ The second part of Part 2 of Polanyi’s volume was entitled “Self-Protection of Society.” Cf. Polanyi, The Great Transformation pp. 167–280. He deals with the movements that tried to limit the market, Owenism, Chartism, unionism, and other social-protection movements of various types.

⁸⁷ Franz Oppenheimer, The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically, John M. Gitterman, trans. (New York: Vanguard Press, 1922).

⁸⁸ Polanyi writes, “But while we assert that the application of the absurd notion of a self-regulating market system would have inevitably destroyed society, the liberal accuses the most various elements of having wrecked a great initiative.” These accusations, in Polanyi’s opinion, created “the myth of the anti-liberal conspiracy which in one form or another is common to all liberal interpretations of the events of the 1870s and 1880s.” See The Great Transformation, pp. 185–86.

⁸⁹ In Rothbard’s analysis, the Fabians were supposed to have encouraged the birth of imperialism in England at the start of the twentieth century. The small group founded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1902, the Coefficients, was said to have the aim, among others, of creating an alliance with Tory imperialism in order to realize Fabian ideas concerning the welfare state. See Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1 (1965).

⁹⁰ Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 175; emphasis added.

⁹¹ Rothbard notes, “On this crucial distinction, always blurred by collectivists, see F.A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944).

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

¹ Books and articles that Rothbard references in his correspondance with the Volker Fund.