11. Politics in Theory and Practice

POLITICS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Rothbard modified the famous dictum of Marx: he wished both to understand and change the world. He endeavored to apply the ideas he had developed in his theoretical work to current politics and to bring libertarian views to the attention of the general public. One issue for him stood foremost. Like Randolph Bourne, he maintained that “war is the health of the state”; he accordingly opposed an aggressive foreign policy.

His support for nonintervention in foreign policy led him to champion the Old Right. John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett and other pre-World War II “isolationists” shared Rothbard’s belief in the close connection between state power and bellicose foreign policy.

The situation was quite otherwise with postwar American conservatism. Although Rothbard was an early contributor to William Buckley’s National Review, he rejected the aggressive pursuit of the Cold War advocated by Buckley and such members of his editorial staff as James Burnham and Frank S. Meyer. He broke with these self-styled conservatives and thereafter became one of their strongest opponents. For similar reasons, he condemned their neoconservative successors.

Rothbard made clear the basis of his opposition to National Review foreign policy in an essay, “For a New Isolationism,” written in April 1959; the magazine did not publish it. To those who favored a policy of “liberation” directed against the Communist bloc, Rothbard raised a devastating objection:

In all the reams of material written by the Right in the last decade [1949–1959], there is never any precise spelling-out of what a policy of ultrafirmness or toughness really entails. Let us then fill in this gap by considering what I am sure is the toughest possible policy: an immediate ultimatum to Khrushchev and Co. to resign and disband the whole Communist regime; otherwise we drop the H-bomb on the Kremlin.... What is wrong with this policy? Simply that it would quickly precipitate an H-bomb, bacteriological, chemical, global war which would destroy the United States as well as Russia.²⁴⁷

To this dire picture, proponents of “rollback” would of course respond that the Communists would surrender: Rothbard dissents, for reasons that will be discussed in detail later. Suffice it to say here that he thought it obvious that since “the destruction of the United States would follow such an ultimatum, we must strongly oppose such a policy.”²⁴⁸

If “liberation” leads to national suicide, what is the alternative? Rothbard suggests a return to “the ancient and traditional American policy of isolationism and neutrality.” But is this not open to a fatal objection? “But, I [Rothbard] will hear from every side, everyone knows that isolationism is obsolete and dead, in this age of H-bombs, guided missiles, etc.”²⁴⁹ How can America shun involvement in European power politics if Russia has the ability to destroy us? No longer can we retreat to Fortress America.

To this Rothbard has a simple response: “a program of world disarmament up to the point where isolationism again becomes militarily practical.”²⁵⁰ If this policy were carried out, America would be safe from foreign attack: no longer would we need to involve ourselves in foreign quarrels. Mutual disarmament was in Russia’s interest as well, so a disarmament agreement was entirely feasible.

Ever alert for objections, Rothbard anticipates that critics will charge that a Fortress America would have crushing military expenses and be cut off from world trade. Not at all, he responds:

this argument, never very sensible, is absurd today when we are groaning under the fantastic budgets imposed by our nuclear arms race. Certainly ... our arms budget will be less than it is now.... The basis of all trade is benefit to both parties.²⁵¹

Even if a hostile power controlled the rest of the world, why would it not be willing to trade with us? Unfortunately, Rothbard’s arguments did not have any effect on his bellicose antagonists.

He followed a pragmatic policy of temporary alliances with whatever groups were, at a given time, opposed to militarism and foreign adventures. He set forward the basis for his political stance in a key essay, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty.”²⁵² This appeared in an important scholarly journal, Left and Right, which he established. This contained major essays on revisionist history and foreign policy, but unfortunately lasted only from 1965–1968.

The key essay just mentioned is available in the collection Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, which contains some of Rothbard’s most important work on political theory.

In the book’s initial essay, whose title has been adopted for the whole book, he raises a basic challenge to the schools of economics and politics that dominate current opinion.²⁵³ Almost everyone assumes that equality is a “good thing”; even proponents of the free market like Milton Friedman join this consensus. The dispute between conservatives and radicals centers on the terms of trade between equality and efficiency.

Rothbard utterly rejects the assumption on which this argument turns. Why assume that equality is desirable? It is not enough, he contends, to advocate it as a mere aesthetic preference, in the style of Frank Knight. Quite the contrary, egalitarians, like everyone else, need rationally to justify their ethical mandates.

To Rothbard, as we have seen in the discussion of The Ethics of Liberty, ethical justification requires attention to the requirements of human nature. Judged by this standard, the results are devastating for the egalitarian view. Everywhere in nature we find inequality. Attempts to remake human beings so that everyone fits into the same mold lead inevitably to tyranny.

The great fact of individual difference and variability (that is, inequality) is evident from the long record of human experience; hence, the general recognition of the antihuman nature of a world of coerced uniformity.²⁵⁴

Rothbard broadens and extends his criticism of equality in “Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor.”²⁵⁵ Not only do biology and history make human beings inherently different from one another, but the division of labor springs from the fact that human beings vary in their abilities.

As we shall later see in the discussion of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought,²⁵⁶ Rothbard was an exceptionally keen critic of Marxism. Beginning with Marx’s juvenile Manuscripts of 1844,²⁵⁷ Marx and his successors have prated endlessly about the supposed horrors of the division of labor. In a capitalist economy, workers normally have only one specialty: plumbers, for example, are usually not doctors as well. Does not this specialization ensure that people in a capitalist economy are narrow and stunted? But socialism will change all that. In the millennium to come, everyone will be able freely to pursue a wide variety of careers: “the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all.”²⁵⁸

In response, Rothbard does not hesitate to call nonsense by its name. The very phenomenon that Marx deplores, the division of labor, is the condition of all civilized advance. Absent the division of labor, with its attendant specialization, we would not inhabit the utopia limned in the Manifesto²⁵⁹ and the Critique of the Gotha Programme;²⁶⁰ we would instead quickly descend into barbarism.

Why, then, do many intellectuals continue to claim that the division of labor dehumanizes?

In large part, Rothbard argues, these intellectuals have fallen victim to a myth popular in the Romantic Era. The Romantics conjured up primitive men who, untouched by the division of labor, lived in harmony with nature. Rothbard will have none of this. In a few well-chosen words, he excoriates Karl Polanyi, an influential panegyrist of the primitive: “This worship of the primitive permeates Polanyi’s book, which at one point seriously applies the term ‘noble savage’ to the Kaffirs of South Africa.”²⁶¹

In an “Introduction” dated February 1991 to a reprint of the essay, he refines his critique even further. He notes, following M.H. Abrams, that the Romantic myth of primitivism rests upon a yet deeper layer of myth. According to the “emanationist” view, which has influenced both neo-Platonism and Gnosticism, creation is fundamentally evil. Human beings must be reabsorbed into the primitive oneness of all things. Rothbard sees this strange doctrine as “constituting a heretical and mystical underground in Western thought.”²⁶²

It is clear that Rothbard views Romanticism in decidedly negative terms, at least so far as its impact on politics is concerned. He makes clear the nefarious consequences of Romanticism in the aforementioned article, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty.”²⁶³ The exaltation of the primitive, which characterizes the Romantics, is by no means confined to the Left. Quite the contrary, it underlies apologies for what Rothbard terms the “Old Order” of feudalism and militarism. Both European conservatism and socialism reject the free market. Accordingly, Rothbard argues, a task of lovers of liberty is to oppose both these ideologies.

In doing so, he maintains, libertarians must adopt a revolutionary strategy. Not for Rothbard is the path of compromise: all statist ideologies must be combated root-and-branch. He notes that Lord Acton, long before Leon Trotsky, advocated “permanent revolution.”²⁶⁴

Rothbard, incidentally, disconcerted American Romantic conservatives by arguing that Edmund Burke’s early Vindication of Natural Society²⁶⁵ was not a satire but a seriously intended defense of anarchism. If Rothbard is right, the chief icon of the American traditionalists was once a libertarian. The article, “A Note on Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society,” appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas.²⁶⁶ It aroused much controversy, but the eminent Burke scholar Isaac Kramnick speaks highly of it in his The Rage of Edmund Burke.²⁶⁷

Society, Rothbard has argued, rests on the division of labor. Given the manifest advantages of peaceful cooperation that uses human differences in abilities to the greatest extent possible, what blocks human progress? Rothbard, in his essay “The Anatomy of the State,”²⁶⁸ identifies the chief obstacle to human betterment. Unlike voluntary exchange, which by its nature benefits those who freely choose to engage in it, the State rests on predation. Following Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, Rothbard contends that the State cannot create wealth: it can only take from some and give to others. Like them, he contrasts the “political means” with “the economic means.”

If Rothbard is right, we now stand in no doubt as to our main obstacle in defending liberty: the Leviathan State. In “War, Peace, and the State,”²⁶⁹ Rothbard narrows the target, in order to enable defenders of liberty to wage their struggle more effectively. One activity more than any other marks the State as the enemy of liberty, and it is here that supporters of liberty must concentrate their efforts.

The activity, of course, is waging war. Besides the death and destruction directly incident on war, nations engaging in armed conflict pay a heavy price in liberty. Accordingly, Rothbard calls for nations to engage in a strictly defensive foreign policy. Crusades “to make the world safe for democracy” stimulate him to opposition: how can the chief agency of predation, the State, serve as a means to secure freedom? In “National Liberation,”²⁷⁰ however, he refuses to extend his condemnation of war to revolution. Often, revolutions manifest a drive against the State and merit support.

Unfortunately for the cause of liberty, political philosophers have not rushed to embrace Rothbard’s revolutionary challenge to the foundations of their discipline. One of the characteristic objections mainstream theorists have to natural rights libertarianism goes like this: “Even if one concedes that self-ownership applies to rational adults, what is to be done with children? Surely the rights of these dependent human beings, and our duties toward them, cannot be encompassed within the confines of Rothbard’s framework.”

Rothbard was well aware of this objection, and in “Kid Lib,”²⁷¹ he offers a cogent response. He sensitively balances the rights of children, which increase as they become capable of exercising self-ownership, with the powers of parents to set rules for those living in their home and under their support.

Rothbard continually alternated between elaborations of principle and applications to particular issues. In “The Great Women’s Liberation Issue: Setting It Straight,”²⁷² Rothbard applies a principle to which we have already made frequent reference. People differ in their abilities, a fact that egalitarians neglect at their peril. But do not men and women also differ in abilities? The unisex dreams of radical feminists contravene nature and must be rejected.

Rothbard’s own stance on the women’s movement characteristically stresses freedom.

I do not go so far as the extreme male “sexists” who contend that women should confine themselves to the home and children and that any search for alternative careers is unnatural. On the other hand, I do not see much more support for the opposite contention that domestic-type women are violating their natures.²⁷³

Rothbard, like Nock, could speak of “our enemy, the State.” But it does not follow that he viewed all anarchists with sympathy. Quite the contrary, in “Anarcho-Communism,”²⁷⁴ Rothbard makes evident his distaste for anarchists who seek to combine opposition to the State with communism. Often the advocates of this position straightforwardly embrace irrationalism. Norman O. Brown, a Freudian classicist much in favor with the New Left, contended that socialists, in the face of Mises’s proof that a socialist system cannot calculate, should abandon economic calculation for a world of polymorphous perversity.

Like his Marxist adversaries, Rothbard stressed the unity of theory and practice: philosophy is a guide to action. In “Why Be Libertarian?”²⁷⁵ he asks the most basic question of all: why should libertarian theorizing matter to us? The answer cannot be found, he contends, in the narrow pursuit of individual advantage. Only the love of justice suffices.

In an effort to widen the influence of libertarian thought in the academic world, Rothbard founded the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977. The journal began auspiciously with a symposium on Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Down to the present, it has remained the most important journal hospitable to libertarian ideas.

Rothbard established in 1987 another journal, the Review of Austrian Economics, to provide a scholarly venue for economists and others interested in Austrian theory. It too is the key journal in its area of specialty. It has continued to the present, after 1997 under the new name Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

In his comments on current events, Rothbard displayed an amazing ability to digest vast quantities of information on whatever subject interested him. Whether, e.g., the question was competing factions in Afghanistan or the sources of investment in oil in the Middle East, he would always have the relevant data at his command. A sample of his columns, taken from the Rothbard-Rock-well Report, is available in The Irrepressible Rothbard.²⁷⁶

This indispensable collection contains a key statement of Roth-bard’s views on foreign policy, which explain in more detail the rationale for the noninterventionist policy we have already seen he favors. In a few paragraphs, he eviscerates the prevailing doctrine of twentieth-century American foreign policy.

According to the accepted picture, totalitarian powers twice threatened America during the twentieth century. Germany, under the maniacal leadership of Hitler, aimed at world conquest. After the United States and her allies succeeded in halting the Nazis, a new menace demanded attention.

One of our allies in World War II, the Soviet Union, was itself a militantly expansionist state; it had to be contained during the protracted Cold War. At various times during the Cold War, and continuing after it to the present, hostile and aggressive dictators presented America with problems. Saddam Hussein ranks as perhaps the most notorious of these tyrants.

The accepted picture draws a lesson from all these events. An aggressive power, almost always led by a dictator, must be dealt with as one would handle a neighborhood bully. Only firm dealings with the dictator can stave off war.

Since bullies generally are cowards, dictators will back down if directly challenged. The Munich Conference, September 29 and 30, 1938, perfectly illustrates how not to handle a dictator. Britain and France appeased Hitler; the result was war one year later. Had Britain and France acted when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, the Nazis could have been overthrown virtually without cost.

Rothbard at once locates the fallacy in this oft-repeated line of thought.

Answer me this, war hawks: when, in history, when did one State, faced with belligerent, ultra-tough ultimatums by another, when did that one State ever give up and in effect surrender—before any war was fought? When?²⁷⁷

Rothbard’s rhetorical question rests upon a simple point of psychology. The supposed “bully” cannot surrender to an ultimatum lest he be overthrown.

No head of State with any pride or self-respect, or who wishes to keep the respect of his citizens, will surrender to such an ultimatum.²⁷⁸

The Gulf War perfectly illustrates Rothbard’s contention. Faced with an overwhelming show of force, Saddam Hussein did not back down. Rothbard’s generalization explains Saddam’s seemingly irrational response.

But have we not forgotten something? What about World War II? Does not the failure to confront Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938 prove conclusively the thesis of the antiappeasers? Rothbard’s response illustrates his ability to counter an opposing argument at its strongest point.

Neither was World War II in Europe a case where toughness worked. On the contrary, Hitler disregarded the English guarantee to Poland that brought England and France into the German-Polish war in September 1939.²⁷⁹

A belligerent foreign policy, then, will most likely lead to the wars it professes to deter. But who urges us toward this course? Rothbard arraigns the social democrats and their successors, the neoconservatives. These he accuses of support for statism at home and war abroad.

Rothbard tersely sums up the credo of social democracy in this way:

on all crucial issues, social democrats stand against liberty and tradition, and in favor of statism and Big Government. They are more dangerous in the long run than the communists not simply because they have endured, but also because their program and their rhetorical appeals are far more insidious, since they claim to combine socialism with the appealing virtues of “democracy” and freedom of inquiry.²⁸⁰

For Rothbard, the State always ranks as the principal enemy. The battle against the “massive welfare-warfare State” to him was no mere clash of abstractions. Quite the contrary, he aimed at particular targets who embodied the statist doctrines he abhorred. Sidney Hook occupied a place near the summit of his intellectual foes. A precocious communist theorist in the 1920s, Hook found the Soviet Union insufficiently revolutionary and soon beat the drums for militant anticommunism, though of a distinctly socialist cast. Throughout his long life, he called for war, first against Nazi Germany and then against Stalin and his successors. According to Rothbard, “[o]ne’s attitude toward Sidney Hook ... provides a convenient litmus test on whether someone is a genuine conservative, a paleo, or some form of neo.”²⁸¹

The struggle against the State needed to be waged on many fronts. Rothbard saw a disturbing trend among certain left-libertarians. Although libertarianism quintessentially opposes state power, some doctrinal deviants allowed the enemy to enter through the back door.

They did so by holding that public agencies must observe rules of nondiscriminatory treatment. These rules have nothing to do with the free market, but everything to do with the slogans of the contemporary Left. Rothbard expertly locates the central fallacy in the argument of the libertarian heretics. Since nearly everything today partakes to a degree of the State, the new doctrine leads to total government control.

Rothbard states his point with characteristic panache:

But not only literal government operations are subject to this egalitarian doctrine. It also applies to any activities which are tarred with the public brush, with the use, for example, of government streets, or any acceptance of taxpayer funds.... sometimes, libertarians fall back on the angry argument that, nowadays, you can’t really distinguish between “public” and “private” anyway.²⁸²

Left-libertarianism is of course not for Rothbard the main problem that faces America: we confront an all out statist attack on liberty, conducted by the “opinion leaders” in academia and elsewhere. How has this assault managed to do so well? Rothbard’s answer exposes the philosophical roots of the problem. No longer does the academic elite believe in objective morality, grasped by right reason. Lacking a rational basis for moral values, our supposed intellectual leaders readily fall prey to statist fallacy.

The beginning stage of nihilism, Rothbard maintains, occurred in art.

First, the left-liberals preached l’art pour l’art in aesthetics, and as a corollary, in ethics, trumpeted the new view that there is no such thing as a revealed or objective ethics, that all ethics are “subjective,” that all of life’s choices are only personal, emotive “preferences.”²⁸³

Rothbard strongly opposed modern art, and he thought highly of the critical account of it in the book by the Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis: The Lost Center.²⁸⁴

The denial of objective standards in the name of freedom has led to death and destruction. Rothbard maintains that ethical nihilism results in the overthrow of the most basic human rights, including the right not to be murdered. He has not the slightest sympathy for the rampant pro-euthanasia movement.

No, the mask is off, and Doctor Assisted Death and Mr. Liberal Death With Dignity, and all the rest of the crew turn out to be Doctor and Mister Murder. Watch out Mr. And Mrs. America: liberal humanists, lay and medical, are ... out to kill you.²⁸⁵

What can be done to combat statism and nihilism? Rothbard views populism with great sympathy. As so often in his work, he rethought and deepened his position. He determined that the common libertarian strategy of looking to the courts to enforce rights was mistaken.

Even in cases in which courts enforce the “correct” position, the imperatives of states’ rights and local control should not be overturned. Thus, Rothbard favored a “pro-choice” position on abortion. But he was loath to have courts enforce abortion rights on recalcitrant states.

“No, libertarians should no longer be complacent about centralization and national jurisdiction—the equivalent,” he writes,

of foreign intervention or of reaching for global dictatorship. Kansans henceforth should take their chances in Kansas; Nevadans in Nevada, etc. And if women find that abortion clinics are not defended in Kansas, they can travel to New York or Nevada.²⁸⁶

Although Rothbard found great merit in populism, he did not defend the movement uncritically. He saw danger in leftist populism; a true populist movement must not abandon the free market in favor of crackpot panaceas. In one of the last articles he wrote, he warned Pat Buchanan against this danger:

In this murky and volatile situation, the important thing for us paleo-populists is that we find a candidate as soon as possible who will lead and develop the cause and the movement of right-wing populism, to raise the standard of the Old, free, decentralized, and strictly limited Republic.²⁸⁷

Another journal that he founded, The Libertarian Forum, provides his topical comments for the period 1969–1984. He presented a comprehensive popular account of libertarianism in For A New Liberty (1973).²⁸⁸ He worked actively for many years as a leading member of the Libertarian Party. In an effort to resist the abandonment of libertarian principles by factions within that party, he led the Radical Caucus. Justin Raimondo has discussed Rothbard’s political activities in great detail in his Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard.²⁸⁹ Raimondo was a member of the Radical Caucus and writes from the perspective of an activist in sympathy with Rothbard. At the end of the 1980s, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party.

Some professed to find a contradiction in Rothbard’s political activities. He often criticized other libertarians for deviating from the correct “line”; yet he himself sought alliances with divergent groups, both on the Left and the Right. There is in fact no contradiction here: Rothbard held libertarians to a much stricter standard than outsiders. For those within the fold, doctrinal orthodoxy was a must; but alliances with outsiders were another matter. Here tactics were all important, and a general agreement on principles was neither required nor expected.

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²⁴⁷Unpublished manuscript, “For a New Isolationism,” April 1959; emphasis in the original.

²⁴⁸Ibid.

²⁴⁹Ibid.

²⁵⁰Ibid.; emphasis in the original.

²⁵¹Ibid.; emphasis in the original.

²⁵²“Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Left and Right 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965). Reprinted in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (1974; Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000).

²⁵³The essay first appeared in Modern Age in 1973; Robert Nozick made exactly the same point in his article “Distributive Justice,” which appeared in the same year, and in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which appeared in the year following.

²⁵⁴Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, p. 8. The pursuit of absolute equality, it will be recalled, Rothbard has shown in Power and Market to be conceptually impossible.

²⁵⁵“Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, pp. 247–303.

²⁵⁶An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, 2 vols. (1995; Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006).

²⁵⁷Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961).

²⁵⁸Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Long, 1848), close of chap. 2.

²⁵⁹lbid.

²⁶⁰Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International Publishers, 1938).

²⁶¹“Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, note on p. 64.

²⁶²Ibid., p. 298.

²⁶³Reprinted in ibid., pp. 21–53.

²⁶⁴Ibid., p. 29.

²⁶⁵Edmund Burke, Vindication of Natural Society (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1982).

²⁶⁶“A Note on Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society,” in Journal of the History of Ideas (January 1958).

²⁶⁷Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

²⁶⁸“The Anatomy of the State,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, pp. 55–88.

²⁶⁹“War, Peace, and the State,” in ibid, pp. 115–32.

²⁷⁰“National Liberation,” in ibid, 195–98.

²⁷¹“Kid Lib,” in ibid, pp. 145–55.

²⁷²“The Great Women’s Liberation Issue: Setting It Straight,” in ibid., pp. 157–73.

²⁷³Ibid., pp. 162–63; emphasis in the original.

²⁷⁴“Anarcho-Communism,” in ibid., pp. 199–204.

²⁷⁵“Why Be Libertarian?” in ibid, pp. 239–45.

²⁷⁶Llewellyn H., Rockwell, Jr., ed., The Irrepressible Rothbard (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2000).

²⁷⁷Ibid., p. 170.

²⁷⁸Ibid., p. 170.

²⁷⁹Ibid.

²⁸⁰Ibid., p. 23.

²⁸¹Ibid., p. 25.

²⁸²Ibid., p. 103.

²⁸³Ibid., p. 296.

²⁸⁴Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (London: Hollis and Carter, 1959).

²⁸⁵Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., ed., The Irrepressible Rothbard, p. 303.

²⁸⁶Ibid., p. 306.

²⁸⁷Ibid., p. 141.

²⁸⁸For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, 2nd ed. (1973; Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006).

²⁸⁹Justin Raimondo, Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (New York: Prometheus Books, 2000).