Authors Forum: Rothbard vs. The Philosophers

0:00When Murray Rothbard died in January 1995, he left all his unpublished papers to the Mises Institute. Although Rothbard, as you know, published a great deal in his life on economics, history, political philosophy, an amazing amount, It turned out that there was a great deal that new material that had not been published, if you just read his published works, you wouldn't have a complete understanding by any means of what Rothbard had achieved. And particularly important in the unpublished work were certain reports on books that Rothbard had written for the William Volcker Fund, which was a foundation that he was working for in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Roberta Medugno was the first scholar to make use of these reports. She published a number of these reports first in an Italian edition. She translated the papers in Italian, but they're now available in the original English in the book Rothbard versus the Philosophers. The book, in addition to having Rothbard's papers, has a long introduction about 65 pages, so by her, Roberta is a historian of political theory and she discusses, I'll

1:49mention a bit later, certain issues in the collection particularly interest her and she also includes in the papers detailed notes identifying various people and events that Rothbard talks about in the papers. Now, probably in the papers, probably the most dynamite item is a very negative review that Rothbard did of the Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich Hayek. Although Rothbard admired Hayek greatly as an economist, he didn't think very much Such-and-All of the Constitution of Liberty, and he said that this really supported certain political measures that he considered status, such as, he was saying, for example, he said in the report that Hayek had opposed the Supreme Court in the 1930s declaring too much of a New Deal Unconstitutional, Hayek said it was all right that they invalidated the NRA, but they went too far. This is not what you would expect from someone who's a complete free market supporter. But Rothbard also criticized Hayek for what he considered a lack of rationalism.

3:25He was emphasizing social evolution too much and not stressing rationalism. Now Rothbard himself, and this comes out elsewhere in the paper, favored an approach to ethics that placed much greater stress than Hayek did on the importance of reason. In some reports on Leo Strauss, although Rothbard is very critical, say, of Strauss on Machiavelli, he said that some of the arguments Strauss uses smack up numerology, he agrees with Strauss on that certain values can't be separated from certain factual statements, say how we use certain terms in language we can, certain values follow directly from those so we can have an objective ethics based on values just given certain factual statements.

4:35So very important in this collection are these papers on Leo Strauss. There are other very important papers, one is a very critical review of a book called of Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi. This is a book that was very critical of the free market that claimed that the free market was really self-contradictory because it could only come about through certain measures by the state to put it into place. And the Polanyi tended to have a very negative view of the market and the exalted primitive society didn't like trade very much, or at least he thought it was somewhat overrated, and Rothbard isn't very favorable to that view at all.

5:32Now in Roberta's introduction, as I say, she's a scholar of history, political thought, and She's particularly interested in the understanding Rothbard's view of natural law, how it varied from the medieval view of natural law, and sort of put in under lock, put in certain individualist assumptions that were a development of the medieval view, and she wants that she's She's addressing in probably the printable topic I would say of the introduction is she wants to consider is can one come up with a Hayekian version of natural law that will meet Rothbard's criticisms.

6:23She wonders whether one could be somewhat more favorable to Hayek on natural law than Rothbard is and see not as much as an irrationalist as Rothbard did. I'm sorry, I can't answer that now, I'm doing something else. But in, in one thing she had in her, in, she intended to say in her own remarks was that how much she, when she was working on the papers, how much she enjoyed coming in contact with a great mind like Rothbard and how much this meant to her when she was working on the papers and that she hopes in her future research to have a chance to do even more work on Rothbard's papers.