Rothbard vs. The Philosophers

0:00In the last several years, I have been working on a set of Rothbard's papers. As a result, thanks to the Mises Institute, they have been published first in Italy, and now, for the first time, they will be available in English in the volume Rothbard versus the Philosophers, published by the Mises Institute. The papers clarify the author's position in relation to intellectuals such as Leo Strauss and Karl Polanyi on topics such as progress, technology, and on what today is termed globalization.

0:45Others, such as the two sets of comments on Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, contain not only the criticism of the Hayekian concept of coercion later found in the Ethics of Liberty, but also some very interesting criticism of the rule of law as a guarantee of liberty and of the absence of references to natural law in Hayek's work. Rothbard's criticism of Hayek's and Mises' ideas dates back to 1958 and 1960 respectively. And it is actually here that for the first time Rothbard extensively expresses dissent on some of the ideas of the two great masters.

1:40The comments on the Symposium on Relativism of 1960 marked the first time that Rothbard distanced himself from some Misesian positions. This is a very interesting set of documents showing how the main line of our Bardian thought were already firmly in place between the late 1950s and the early 1960s as regards subjects such as the possibility of absolute ethical values based on natural law, the non-aggression action and the criticism of the state. As early as 1948, we find comments made by the 22 years old Rothbard on Cotton's paper Ragged Individualism in which, as a result of his methodological individualism that was already mature before he met Mises, The young author was able to demolish the aberrant theories of social Darwinism, allusions to the immorality of the state initiatives for social welfare and criticism of the state were a sign that the development of Rothbard thought already included the idea of the state as aggressor.

3:10One of the basic themes of Rothbard's writings presented here is the possibility of rationally founding ethical value and the constant reference to natural law and natural rights. Rothbard was always very critical of Leo Strauss, but he agreed with him on the need for a rational basis for ethics and absolute values. According to Rothbard, the great virtue of Strauss' work is that he wants to restore values and political ethics to the study of politics. However, Rothbard shows that Strauss' work also contained a great effect.

3:59Quote, the great effect is that Strauss, while favoring what he considers to be the classical and Christian concept of natural law, is bitterly opposed to the 17th and 18th century conception of luck and the rationalist, particularly to their absurd deductive championing of the natural rights of individual liberty, liberty, property and so on. Strauss, in fact, has been the leading champion, along with Russell Kirk and the Catholic scholars in America, of a recent trend in law historiography to sunder completely the bad individualistic natural rights type of natural law of the 17th and 18th centuries from the good classical Christian type, good presumably because it was so vague and so prudential that it offered very little chance to defend individual liberty against the state.

5:04In this reading, Hobbes and Locke are the great villains in the alleged perversion of natural law. To my mind, this perversion was a healthy sharpening and development of the concept. My quarrel with Strauss and Kirk, therefore, is not only valuational, that they are anti-natural rights and liberty, and they are for them, but also factual and historical. For they think that the Lockeans had an entirely different concept of natural law, whereas I think that the difference was a sharpening development rather than a perversion or a diametric opposite. This was where Rothbard's criticism of the Strossian concept of modern natural rights first appeared.

5:57a theme he later took up elsewhere. Strauss argued that modern natural rights were a degeneration of classic natural law that was an expression of civic virtue. In Strauss' view, the individualism of the Lockean tradition with its theory of property broke with the classical and scholastic tradition and represented the decline from the values of the past, placing the individual and his rights at the center of the universe, with consequences such as the solution of political problems through economic means, of which he disapproved.

6:46Rothbard saw Strauss as an icon of conservatism, pressing an invitation to return to the ancient and the critique of modernity. But at the same time, by claiming not only the possibility, but also the right to pass value judgement, Strauss was railing against value-free modern political science and relativism. In both, what is political philosophy and in thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss criticizes modern thinkers and defends classic political philosophy. And so, for Strauss, Machiavelli became the avial genius of modernity, having challenged the ancient Christian teachings and having freed political reality from morality.

7:44Rothbard, on his side, doesn't agree with Strauss' attack on Machiavelli not for being unethical, but for being an atheist and a humanist. By contrast, Rothbard's appreciation of Machiavelli is based exactly on what Strauss condemns in in Machiavelli's thought, quote, that Machiavelli is pro-selfishness of the individual against the older concern of the common good, that he is in favor of competition, material gain and business activity, that Machiavelli favors worldly gain, worldly comfort, the translation of thought into action in this world. Rothbard's conclusion is that the more I read Strauss' attack, the more I concluded that Machiavelli had more good points in his philosophy than I had in Magin.

8:41Rothbard asked himself, must Strauss push me into being a Machiavellian? Rothbard admires Machiavelli for being a humanist and for having placed the human being at the center of the universe. Concerning the Strossian conception of natural rights, Rothbard questioned the thesis that identified the modern theory of natural rights as a break with the past. He plays more emphasis on continuity with the past, rather than a sharp division. According to the continuity thesis, individual natural rights derive from natural law.

9:29Rothbard underlines the scholastic, Thomist and Christian roots of the Lockean doctrine of modern rights. But within this continuity he found in the individualism of the modern natural rights a development and an enrichment in respect of the past, the beginning of a new way of understanding the human being and the ends of politics. Thus, while Rothbard appreciated the social idea of natural law as a battle against the and Prevailing Relativism of Values. On the other hand, he was unable to accept it at the point where Strauss invited his readers to reclaim the classic natural right doctrine in its original form, that if fully developed is identical with the doctrine of the best regime.

10:27In supporting the theory that there was a link between Thomism and the Grotian development in the doctrine of natural law, Rothbard disclosed, among others, to the Italian philosopher, Pazarendo Trev. Within this vision, the Rombardian idea of a link between the laws of nature and natural rights became less distinct, at the point where the author emphasized the enrichment brought by the Levellers and Locke in terms of individualism. Rothbard said that while a versatile vision of man led to the state being seen as the place of the good and virtuous action, Quote, it was in contrast the Levellers and John Locke in 17th century England who transformed classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological and hence political individualism.

11:29The continuity thesis has recently been corroborated by the study of Brian Tierney, who clearly questioned the ideas of Strauss and Villet on the contrast between an ancient Aristotelian doctrine of natural law and the modern theory of subjective individual rights. Rothbard can be counted among those who, like Pasalendon Trev and Henry Vich, founded natural rights on the Aristotelian Thomist theory of natural law. However, Rothbard's position is original for two reasons. First, because from self-ownership he deduced the action of non-aggression, the true cornerstone of the Rothbardian system, which he viewed as a clarification of the classic triad of the natural rights to life, liberty and property.

12:29Second, because of the extreme consequences that Rothbard arrives at regarding natural law and the role of the state. In fact, Rothbard wanted to establish an objective ethics which affirms the overriding value of liberty and morally condemns all forms of status. While the starting points for Ratber and Passerain d'Entrevres were very similar, the two authors differed profoundly as regards the concept of the common good and the role of the state. Passerain d'Entrevres thought that the state should be an instrument, the institutional framework by means of which all the rights to life, freedom and ownership could be guaranteed.

13:19The theme of the Rational Foundation of Ethics and Absolute Values became preponderant in the comments on the Symposium on Relativism organized by the Volcker Fund. The conference, held in 1960, witnessed a contrast between Mises and Bruno Leone on one side and Leo Strauss on the other, in this case Rothbard sided with Strauss. From the time of his prefatory note, Rothbard made it clear he was in favor of absolute values. He wrote that the absolutist believes that man's mind employing reason is capable of discovering and knowing truth, including the truth about reality and the truth about what is best for himself as an individual.

14:15The relativist denies this, denies that man's reason is capable of knowing truth, and does so by claiming that rather than being absolute, truth is relative to something else. Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism and the wider creed of sound individualism, of which libertarianism is a part, must rest on absolutism and deny relativism. This is the position of Rothbard, and this represented a clear and apparently definitive Division within the Austrian School of Economics, with Hayek and the Hayekians on one side, and many of the American disciples of the school led by Rothbard on the other.

15:09The concept of natural law was in some ways extraneous to the origin of the Austrian School of Economics, which favoured an evolutionary conception of institutions and law following the approach of Menger and later Hayek. In this sense, we can say that the concept of natural law has been an enrichment introduced in the Austrian School by the American libertarian tradition of thought. The criticism of Mises was paradigmatic of this division. Rothbard distanced himself from the praxeological and value-free defense of the free market Mises proposed, in support of the opportunity and need for political philosophy to find universally valid basic values.

16:04Mises based his own liberalism on the subjectivity of values and ends, but for Rothbard this made Mises an ethical relativist. Quote, Mises utilitarian relativist approach to ethics is not nearly enough to establish a full case for liberty. It must be supplemented by an absolutist ethics, an ethics of liberty. Failure to recognize this is the greatest flaw in Mises political worldview. The subjectivity of values and ends was the nodal point of Misesian thought and the basis of an open society.

16:50Mises followed Hume's assumptions that it was impossible to derive values from facts. For Mises, value judgments merely express preferences of a subjective nature that can't be considered neither true nor false. Rothbard disagrees with this view of ethics. A problem with it is how to convince others that the best social system is the market, appealing only to subjective values. Besides this, in Rothbard's opinion, there are self-evident truths, able to provide a basis for an objective ethic. The ownership of oneself, of one's own body, would be an example of such a truth.

17:39Mises rejects this position, and according to his way of thinking, criteria for objectively evaluating value judgement did not exist. According to Mises, no man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented. Given his ethical subjectivism, Mises rejects the entire notion of natural law. Quote, the teachings of utilitarian philosophy and classical economics have nothing at all to do with the doctrine of natural rights. They recommend popular government, private property, tolerance and freedom, not because they are natural or just, but because they are beneficial.

18:28In brief, Mises' reasoning did not satisfy the Rothbardian requirement of establishing an objective and rational basis for liberty. Rothbard also reproached Bruno Leone regarding ethical relativism because the latter is scoreful of the very idea that ethical values should be rationally demonstrated. Again, when reviewing Freedom and Law by Leone, Rothbard criticized Leone's theory because it lacked a standard on which to judge the content of laws that had evolved over time. It was not enough to affirm the existence of a spontaneous process from which customs and institutions develop.

19:22It was necessary to subject them to the strictest of reasons in order to judge their conformity with individual freedom on the basis of an objective ethical standard. Rothbard's criticism of Hayek's formulation, both evolutionist and fallibilist, is closely connect to the discussion of natural law. The fact that Hayekian and Rothbardian premises were irreconcilable emerged in the two reviews of the Constitution of Liberty. To explain the reasons for liberty, Hayek starts from evolutionary and for liberalist positions that were in contrast with the doctrine of natural law and rationalism, the latter being the premises for Rothbard's anarcho-capitalist theory.

20:18In Rothbard's opinion, one of the shortcomings of Hayek's work was that he totally ignored the tradition of natural law. Even when discussing theorists who were actually great supporters of the doctrine of natural law, as in case of John Locke, Hayek seemed not to have been aware of a great tradition of thought, natural law, that had played a very important role in the growth of liberal ideas and in limiting the powers of the state. This subject is more complex than first appears. We have to bear in mind that Hayek used evolutionary premises as a starting point for his thinking about the rule of law and the law in general.

21:09He represented one of the greatest expressions of the tradition of spontaneous order, developed by Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment, and which continued by Edmund Burke led to Von Savigny, Menger, and to the Austrian School of Economics. In Hayek's work, the fundamental concept was that of cultural evolution, which had to do with the origin and development of institutions such as, among others, religion, law, the market, and so on. But following the ideas of Charles Covell and of the Italian philosopher Nicola Matteucci, it is possible to conceive an Hayekian position not in direct contrast with the concept of of Natural Law, understood in terms of cultural evolution.

22:03Matteucci underlined the fact that for Edward Coke and the other English jurists, there was no contrast between natural law and common law, because the latter was simply the implementation of the natural law principles from which it had developed historically over the centuries. It was in this sense that Edward Koch was able to write that the common law expressed the perfection reason. In a customary constitution, reason was imminent, but not the absurd reason of the rationalist, rather an historically developed reason. That's why in the English Legal and Political Tradition, there was less of a rigid contrast between nature and history.

22:54In this view, even John Locke's great work on natural law essentially spoke of a tradition that became rationalized and universal. The truly irreconcilable points between the evolutionist theory of law and Rothbard concept of Natural Law were rationalism and fallibilism. One of Rothbard's criticisms was in fact Hayek's continuous and all-pervasive attack on reason. The faith in the rational capacities of man to discover and correctly to interpret the laws of nature and absolute ethical values was not really compatible with the evolutionist and fallibilist position.

23:45The foundations of liberty were completely different for Hayek and Rothbard. Hayek based reason for liberty on our ignorance and fallibility. For Rothbard, on the other hand, human ignorance was too uncertain a basis for liberty. According to the authentic rationalist theory, we should be able to know what is best for man and to found absolute values on human nature. Rothbard dismissed the Hayekian premises as an attack on man's reason. It seems to me that on this point, Rothbard's position is going to originate an interesting debate.

24:31The proposed anchoring of absolute values on an eternal and unchanging kind of human nature can be object of discussion, of course. Thus, the attempt to establish what is absolutely good for man by appealing to human nature demonstrated the great distance between Rothbard and Hayek's evolutionary argument. In this sense, Rothbard's criticism of Hayek is paradigmatic of the split we find today within the horizons of the Austrian School of Economics between the libertarians, who refer back to Locke's version of the idea of right reason that enables an understanding of natural law, and the heirs of the theory typical of the origins of the Austrian School of a limited, fallible and evolutionist kind of knowledge.

25:32This contrast, already evident in the writings under consideration here, was made explicit by Rothbard in 1992 in the article The Present State of the Austrian School of Economics, from which the profound differences between the various paradigms within the Austrian School emerge. In this paper, Rothbard took his distance from Hayek's entire work in that it was devoted to a denigration of human reason. Moreover, Rothbard did highlight one of the more problematic areas of Hayek's work. He rightly pointed out that not all that had evolved spontaneously was consistent with a system of liberty.

26:22It would therefore be a mistake to accept all conventions and customs for the simple reason that they had already been established. To finish, I'm going to say something about Rothbard and Carl Polanyi. Reviewing Polanyi's great transformation, Rothbard points out that the philosophic flow in Polanyi Rothbard recalls to Polanyi that the progress of man and his victory over famines and disease is due to his capacity to alter the end of the world.

27:17and the environment by the use of reason, by capitalism and by the market. He remarks that the life of the savage, as Hobbes put it, is nasty, brutish and short. According to Polanyi, the Great Transformation was the degeneration in the sense of authoritarianism of the liberal institutions. He denied the liberal idea according to which a market society was a natural historical outcome. And therefore he tried to demonstrate the pathological nature of the liberal market. As a result, Polanyi criticized the classical economic school and the free market.

28:03The free market, in Polanyi's opinion, could only produce a dangerous individualism and social disaggregation. On the contrary, society, in order to defend itself, has to regulate the market. As Rothbard notes, in all of his complaining about the free market, Polanyi doesn't mention perhaps the most important aspect of the system, freedom. In a free society, no one compels Polanyi or anyone else to enter the free market. But one thing, and one thing alone, the free society would not permit Polanyi to do, to use coercion over the rest of us.

28:49Rothbard observes that there is no better way of refuting Polanyi's weeping about the lost glories of society than to observe the numberless millions who have chosen the way of the market when they had the free of choice. No, it's not mine. In fact, it is precisely such left-wing intellectuals as Polanyi who are always weeping about the coca-colalization of the rest of the world. But given a choice, almost everyone chooses the market economy and its advanced civilization, even, curiously enough, Professor Polanyi himself, who did not rush off to some tribe or commune.

29:39In all the papers I have discussed, a constant theme has emerged. Rothbard always defends individual freedom, understood in a libertarian way, as including the right to own property. The individual rights that form the basis of anarcho-capitalism can, he holds, be rationally defended as requirements of human nature. Leo Strauss is thus correct to defend the idea of natural law, but in error in thinking that Locke's defense of liberty and property broke with natural law. Mises rightly defends the free market, but mistakenly does so with the subjectivist and relativist ethics.

30:30Hayek wrongly substitutes cultural evolution for a rationally deduced natural law, and Polanyi, an enemy of the free market, fails to see that the market is a natural result of human action, not an imposition by government. Rothbard's defense of freedom represents an important option in political philosophy, and we can safely predict that future political philosophy will have to come to terms with Rothbard, since he touches some vital points within the political-philosophical debate, such as the possibility of a rational foundation of ethical absolute values, A controversial point on which political philosophers, and philosophers in general, are still divided and are still discussing, and I'm sure they will discuss for a long, long time.