Rothbard vs. Leo Strauss and Hayek

0:00Why are we discussing Rothbard's criticism of Leo Strauss and Hayek? Well, when Rothbard wrote on these topics in his papers for the Volcker Fund, other movements different from libertarianism were prominent. On one side there were the Strossians, and the Strossians were very popular among American conservatives. In this case, Rothbard defended the libertarian idea of natural rights against a conservative interpretation of natural rights. On the other side, there were Hayek and the Hayekians.

0:48And in this case, Rothbard was defending the Misesian Rothbardian paradigm against the Fallibilist evolutionist paradigm. So, the main points of my discussions will be the discussion of Strossian concept of modern natural law, The Criticism of Hayekian Evolutionist Theory of Institutions and The Criticism of Hayekian Phalibidism. So, let's see the criticism of Leo Strauss. According to Rothbard, Strauss' work has a great virtue and a great effect.

1:36The Great Virtue is the searching for a rational basis for ethic and absolute ethical values. The great fact is that Strauss, while favoring what he considers to be the classical and Christian concepts of natural law, is bitterly opposed to the 17th and 18th century conceptions of luck and the rationalists, particularly to their absolute deductive championing of the natural rights of the individual, 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 lock historiography to standard completely the bad individualistic natural rights type of natural law of the 17th and 18th centuries from the good, classical Christian type.

2:32Good, presumably, because it was so vague and so prudential that it offered very little chance to defend individual liberty against the state. In this reading, Hobbes and Locke are the great villain in the alleged perversion of natural law. To my mind, this perversion was a healthy sharpening and development of the concept. This memo of 1960 is where the Rothbard criticism of Leo Strauss first appeared. According to Strauss, modern natural rights are a degeneration of the classical ancient natural law tradition that was an expression of civic virtue and public good.

3:23The modern theory of natural rights plays with its individualism, plays the individual at the centre of the universe, which consequences such as the solution of the political problem through economic means, which throws, of course, disapproved. The main ends of politics with the natural right doctrine, with modern natural rights, the main ends of politics ceased to be wisdom, virtue and public good and became the defense of the property right of the individual.

4:08Rothbard questioned the thesis that identified the break with the past in the modern theory of natural rights. Rothbard underlined the scholastic Thomist and Christian roots of the Lockean doctrine of natural rights, but within this continuity he found in the individualism of modern natural rights a development and an enrichment. The beginning of a new way of understanding the human being and the ends of politics. While Rothbard appreciated the Strossian idea of natural law as a battle against the prevailing relativism of values, on the other hand, he was unable to accept it at the point where Stross 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.

5:13Rothbard said that while Aristotle's vision of man led to the state being seen as the place of the good and virtuous action, it was in contrast the Levellers and John Locke in 17th century England who transformed classical natural law law into a theory grounded on methodological and hence political individualism. So in some way for Rothbard, everything began with the English levelers. Let's see the criticism of Hayek. To explain the reasons for liberty, Hayek starts from evolutionary and fallibilist positions that are clearly at odds with Rothbard's rationalism.

6:13The starting point in Hayek's thought is the false dichotomy between natural and artificial. and the latter term identifying the product of an intended project. There is an intermediate category of phenomena resulting from human action but not from human planning. Following the reasoning of the late scholastic, Hayekian teaching explains that in this sense our traditional, spontaneously evolved morals are perfectly natural rather than artificial and it would seem fitting to call such traditional rules natural laws. So, according to Hayek, something is natural if it had evolved spontaneously over time.

7:08It is important to go beyond this false dichotomy between natural and artificial Because this dichotomy leads us to social constructivism, according to Hayek. So according to a correct understanding of the evolution of political and social institutions, these are the result of a spontaneous order that makes use of the knowledge scattered among different individuals and in which no single mind had a planning or coordinating role. But the truly irreconcilable points between the evolutionary theory of Hayek and Rothbard's theory of natural law are rationalism and fallibilism.

7:59This is why one of Rothbard's criticisms is 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 is not really compatible with the evolutionist and fallibilist position. The foundations of liberty are completely different for Hayek and Rothbard. Hayek bases the reasons for liberty on human ignorance.

8:45The necessary starting point of his theory of liberal society is fallibility, partiality and the scattering of knowledge about particular situations in time and place Among Millions and Millions of People, given these, liberty becomes a necessary condition to use at best the human knowledge spread among millions and millions of people. So, the value of individual liberty, according to Hayek, rests chiefly on the recognition of the ignorance of all of us. But, of course, for Rothbard, human ignorance is too uncertain a basis for liberty.

9:39According to the authentic rationalist theory, we should be able to know what is best for man and to found absolute values on human nature. This is Rothbard's position. This is why Rothbard dismissed the Hayekian premises as an attack on man's reason. The attempt to establish what is absolutely good for man by appealing to human nature, which to Hayek is a cultural idea, 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 Austrian School between those libertarians who refer back to the Lockean idea, the Lockean version of the idea of a right reason and the heirs of the theory of a limited, and fallible evolutionary kind of knowledge.

10:52This contrast was made explicit by Rothbard in 1992

11:00in the present state of the Austrian School, from which the profound differences between the Hayekian and the Misesian paradigms emerged. In this paper, once again, Rothbard took his distance from Hayek's entire work, in that it was devoted to a denigration of human reason. In this work, Rothbard criticized the Hayekian theory of a spontaneous order, since, from his point of view, it implied a lack of awareness on the part of the human being. And moreover, accepting such a theory would lead to a conservative and to an uncritical attitude towards customs and institutions, state included.

11:57Of course, according to Rothbard, it would be a mistake to accept all social institutions just because they had evolved spontaneously over time. Joe Salerno, on his side, already in 1990 contrasted Mises' rationalism with Hayek's irrational emphasis on spontaneous order. Salerno's idea is that to achieve social change we could not rely on spontaneous and unintended consequences. So, to conclude, I would like to say that I think that this analysis, Rothbard's analysis of these philosophers has a great value, has a great value because what Rothbard is suggesting to us is that in spite of the totalitarian outcomes of the abuse of reason and of social constructivism, We can't deny, to human reason, the right to change, to modify unjust social institutions.