Rothbard vs. Strauss: Libertarianism, Rights, and Reason

0:00So I'll read some selections from my paper just to give you a sense of where it comes down. It's compare and contrast, Rothbard and Strauss. Murray Rothbard says that Leo Strauss deserves praise because he is on the forefront of the fight to restore and resurrect political philosophy from the interment given it by modern positivists and adherents of scientism, in short, that he wants to restore values and political ethics to the study of politics. Nevertheless, Rothbard rejects Strauss' call for a return to the ancients as the only sane step in the face of the crisis of modern subjectivism and relativism. Rothbard will not follow Strauss in the direction of the classic natural right doctrine in its original form and with it the doctrine of the best regime. This is the case despite or precisely because Rothbard's Rothbard thinks that Strauss is at his best on one fundamental point, and that is when he is criticizing ethical relativism and advocating a grounding of ethics on natural law, as he

1:16Strauss did in his famous paper on relativism. Nevertheless, Strauss' reservations about the whole philosophical basis of modern liberalism and the doctrine of modern natural rights, with an S, means for Rothbard that Strauss takes away with one hand what he giveth on the other. On more specific topics, Rothbard says, on the detailed content of natural law or historical discussions of political philosophers, Strauss simply shows himself, quote, to be a fallacious

2:15Let's look further at Rothbard's differences with Strauss, especially on Western thought. Strauss is at one with Rothbard in emphasizing the individualism of John Locke's philosophy and the expansion and purification of natural rights theory following on from Locke, although he pays no attention to Spencer and Spooner as Rothbard does these types. But unlike Rothbard, Strauss is manifestly unsympathetic to the development of modern and Natural Rights. For his part, Strauss defines the ideal of modern civilization as a tendency of a particular intellectual development, in which in due course, referring to Hunt's paper, exploded in the French Revolution of 1789, that Locke in due course leads to the guillotine and all of that.

3:08Strauss sums up this tendency in the following terms, Locke and natural rights. It sought to lower moral standards, the moral claims which previously had been made by all responsible teachers, but to take better care than those earlier teachers for the putting into practice, into political and legal practice of the rules of human conduct. And how was such a massive reorientation of the Western mind made possible? It was most effectively achieved, Strauss says, by the identification of morality with with an attitude of claiming one's rights or with enlightened self-interest or the reduction of honesty to the best policy or the solution of the common interest and private interest by means of industry and trade.

3:53Here Strauss quotes Locke's claim that where there is no property, there is no justice. At this point, Strauss allows himself a little editorializing. He says that his own country, Germany, the thought of Germany stood up against Lockeanism and its debasement of morality and against the concomitant decline of a truly philosophic spirit and such a negative stance towards this new ideal of civilization as represented by Locke was to the everlasting honor of Germany. It was Schelling, in fact, who said, je méprise, Locke, I hate Locke, Schelling, the great idealist philosopher. Not surprisingly, given Rothbard-Strauss contrast on Locke, we see Rothbard focusing on Hume and not on Locke as the thinker supposed by modern philosophers to have effectively demolished the theory of natural law. This supposed demolition of natural law was based on Hume's view that reason is and only can be a slave to the passions. It is not in modern posthumian philosophy In this philosophy we see reason bound to be a mere slave to the passions.

5:03It is in this human philosophy that reason is a slave to the passions, cranking out the discovery of the means to the end sought by those passions. Man's reason can discover the proper ends for man to follow. That's possible. Rothbard, Thomas Hobbs of Momsbury, For the thoughts are the desires of scouts and spies In other words, it's Hobbes who reduces reason to a passion or the tool of the passions.

5:55So what Rothbard describes as posthumian philosophy is in fact posthobzian philosophy. It all goes back to Hobbes, everything, especially if you take Strauss' view. It was Hobbes who first stressed the point Rothbard associates with Hume, that reason is but the tool of the passions. But what explains this oversight in the history of thought on Rothbard's part? I think the explanation is somewhat obvious. It is to do with the fact that between Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, there is one pivotal philosophical figure and that is none other than America's philosopher, John Locke, the father of life liberty and property liberalism. If Rothbard dates the rise of anti-rational National Passionism to Hume, then Locke cannot be implicated in it. But if it started back with none other than Hobbes, then Locke is very clearly implicated in the rise of passionism to the extent that the two thinkers share certain fundamental assumptions. The debate over the relation between Hobbes' monarchical absolutism and Locke's parliamentary Whiggism goes on, but the affinity between the two thinkers has long been noted and it has been

7:04and strongly argued that Locke took his basic principles from Hobbes and sanded down their rough edges in order to make them more palatable to a wider audience. Rothbard himself says at one point that current scholars ranging from Marxists to Straussians considered Thomas Hobbes rather than John Locke as the founder of systematic individualist natural rights theory. On the nature of Hobbes' thought then, the whole disagreement between Rothbard and This is because if Rothbard is right, then the man who Strauss insists is the founder of the doctrine of natural rights is in fact their biggest enemy. On the other hand, if Strauss is right, then Rothbard will not be able to account for liberal society's dependence on statism, which for Rothbard is what Hobbesianism represents.

7:56Rothbard considers the refutation of the view that Hobbes is the father of liberalism to be final. to be final. Indeed, he says that the older view of Hobbes as the statist and totalitarian has been vindicated by Williamson M. Evers. Rothbard also considers the sympathy which the pro-Nazi German political theorist, Karl Schmidt, expressed for Hobbes' absolutism as indicative of the latter's illiberalism. But Strauss argued in effect that Schmidt had gotten Hobbes backwards in his famous critique of the Nazi theorist. Schmidt thought Hobbes Rothbard pointed the way to a solution to the problem of liberalism, but Strauss insists that Hobbes is in fact the source of the problem. Rothbard, however, fails to consider Strauss's critique of Schmitt as relevant to the whole Hobbes debate, distracted as he was by Professor Evers' account. Strauss's case then is that Schmitt had made a mistake similar to the one we later see in Rothbard, i.e. taking Hobbes to be an intensely anti-liberal statist.

9:01Thus Hobbes is attractive to Schmidt for the same reason he is an anathema to Rothbard. Hobbes represents to Schmidt an alternative to classical liberalism, which liberalism by contrast is eminently defensible in the view of Rothbard. In arguing with Schmidt and by implication Rothbard, Strauss asserts that Hobbes is to a very high degree the originator of the ideal of civilization and it is by this very fact So, if we follow Strauss's path, we must conclude that the philosophical source of modern individualism so beloved by Rothbard is not by Rothbard himself acknowledged, rather this founder of modern Anglo-American individualism is maligned by him as being a statist.

9:49But Strauss's Hobbes is the philosopher of the individual or the classic exponent of Anarcho-Capitalism to speak anachronistically, it is Hobbes who announced that in all kinds of actions, by the laws pretermited, men have the liberty of doing what their own reason shall suggest for the most profitable to themselves, such as liberty to buy, sell and otherwise contract with one another to choose their own abode, their own diet, their own trade of Life and to Institute their Children as they themselves think fit. Rothbard is very clear in his argument that contrary to modern thought as Strauss presents it at least, man definitely has a nature. He is certain that we can say with absolute assurance not only that certain methods and means are irrational, but also that certain ends are irrational.

10:40But he does not interpret this to mean that there is a metaphysically transcendent or or Sacred Canopy under which man must live and of which the political order should be a reflection. Nowhere do we see in Rothbard the kind of eschewing of modern thought's fundamental principles under the attraction of the classical alternative that we do see in Strauss. It is the claim of this paper that Rothbard elides what in Strauss is a fundamental opposition. For Strauss it is not possible to have the modern notion of rights rooted as it is in and the subjectivism of modern philosophy, together with the classical idea of a given nature or human pattern following at the same time. Either one sees the human will as the origin of that pattern, or one sees this pattern as existing outside and independent of the human will and as something with which we need to comply if we are to have the good life.

11:36Rothbard's version of the objective order comes down to the notion of absolute rights In other words, what Strauss sees as the problem, the rights of the individual against all claims, is seen as the solution by Rothbard, who says, stand on your individual rights against the collectivists and the statists. Rothbard not realizing that both individual rights and the collectivist state are two The two boats which, while repeatedly bumping into each other, nevertheless launched their respective journeys in the same headwaters and ever since have been sailing down the same stream. Rothbard is still prepared to assert, even though he insists on the radical primacy of rights, with absolute assurance that torture and love of torture is contrary to the nature of man and to what is required by that nature for man's true happiness.

12:35Rothbard can be demonstrated that such perversions of man's nature are profoundly irrational. Such a conclusion, he says, is not just my or your subjective point of view, but is the product of an objective absolute insight into the discoverable nature of man. Surely such a statement brings Rothbard close to the naturalism of Strauss. But the question remains, should this objective absolute insight into the discoverable nature of Man be enforced in the sphere of personal ethics? Should the fact that a practice is contra naturum be warrant for breaking down the wall between personal ethics and political philosophy? Should nature be supported in the sphere of personal ethics by the authority of political philosophy? Surely there is a legitimate question as to whether or not love of torture, as distinct from actually torturing somebody, is a matter of personal ethics or or one on the one hand or of political philosophy on the other.

13:36If indeed the love of torture was a matter of right, it would come under the aegis of political philosophy and so could be refereed. But how on Rothbard's showing can two consenting adults wishing to inflict pain on each other come under the aegis of political philosophy unless one abandons the distinction between political philosophy and personal ethics? Rothbard's crucial distinction breaks down in the crunch. Rothbard's conclusion that there is in fact a sphere of personal ethics within which moral judgment may apply but upon which the law must above all avoid imposing external principles involves him in the difficulty of insisting that we can definitely know what is good for man but that society must refrain from promoting this good where it most likely would count In contrast to Rothbard, Strauss is clearly dubious about the special claims made for a sphere of personal ethics.

14:56The principles of any particular regime, he says, pervade the societies throughout, in the sense that there are no recesses of privacy which are simply impervious to that pervasion. If there were such recesses of privacy in modern society, then there would be much less talk about democratic personality, to say the least. Contrary to Rothbard, Strauss suggests that the notion of a sovereign sphere of personal ethics, free from what we might call regime pressure, is a myth. At the end of the day there can be no shelter from the regime, or in Rothbard's terms from political philosophy, and thus a widespread belief in the right to life, liberty and property is in fact evidence of, in this case, the liberal regime's dominance over the private sphere rather than a sign of its limitation.

15:44For Strauss there is no way the ordinary citizen will not be fundamentally shaped by the regime whatever his or her private rights. The moral pressure from the outside world is final in some sense, but it should not be concluded for a minute here that because Strauss was skeptical of the capacity of personal ethics to withstand the pressure of the surrounding regime that he was indifferent to its importance. For Strauss there can be no doubt that the private sphere should be protected against the outside regime in certain decisive respects, but his reasoning here is indeed for private Life to be protected from succumbing to the forces unleashed by external freedom. In other words, the outside regime is pushing in on the private sphere and that's the problem Strauss is addressing.

16:34If the outside regime was dedicated to the primacy of virtue and was pro the rational ends of man, a pious wish at all times one might say, then the strengthening of the walls Privacy is a bad thing in a good regime and a good thing in a bad regime, but if the prevailing regime has no concept of the rational ends of man, a good bet most of the time, and represents only such values as life, liberty and property, then the protection of the private sphere as a possible haven for higher values, values higher at least than those of life, liberty and Property would be a definite good, however this might be Strauss certainly leaves us with the impression of the regime as the central term of his political science.

17:27In conclusion, the answer to the question of individual privacy versus regime pressure is very much tied to the problem of equality. Rothbard, committed to the equality of rights as he is, sees the threat of the outside regime pressure as equally present to all citizens. It follows naturally enough from this starting point that each citizen should have an equal right to be free of this outside pressure determining them. For freedom's sake, I would close my door tightly against the outside world in the hope that the outside world will have no impact on my willing of my preferred lifestyle or value choices. But for Strauss, the possibility that there is a nature of man, if anything, suggests a hierarchy of human types rather than natural equality.

18:14Strauss is not an egalitarian, that's clear. For Strauss natural right is about inequality and this means that the pressure exerted by the dominant regime or political philosophy as Rothbard calls it on the individual citizen will have a varying impact according to the intelligence and capacities of that individual. So from Strauss' point of view to the extent that we opt for the modern doctrine of natural rights we must assume the irrelevance for for Natural Right of Men's Natural Inequality. To be sure, Rothbard, like all decent men, wishes to advance the cause of natural right or basic human justice, but from Strauss's perspective, Rothbard is implicitly defeating his own purpose by adhering to the modern version of natural right, which is premised above all on the notion of pre-civil natural rights with an S. For Strauss, it must never Never be forgotten that the modern, egalitarian, natural rights version of natural right is strictly at odds with the older, inegalitarian, natural right version of natural right.