The Worldview of Murray Rothbard

0:00Let me first introduce you, Jared Casey, and you teach at the University College Dublin. University College Dublin. University College Dublin, and your profession is? Philosophy. Okay, and you're having a book out on Rothbard. I do indeed. Let's just jump right into that. Murray Rothbard. That's what everybody cares about. Right now, we love you, but let's hear about you. You want to hear the book? Yeah. Well, what can I say? I wish it were called The Worldview of Rothbard as per the advertisement in the ASC guide, but actually it's just called Murray Rothbard because the series it's part of is called The Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers.

0:52So there are 20 volumes, and so it's had the names of the people, Locke, Hume, von Mises, Rothbard, and so it's in there, so it's one of those. I see, so do they give you a word limit? Yes. And did you have an outline? Yeah, they want a kind of intellectual bio, then they want a substantive chapter which deals with thought critically. They want a contemporary relevance and then current sort of affairs. So we've got Strauss, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, whatever, Rothbard, right? That's one of the... Well, it's important to get him in there. Right. It wasn't a given that he was going to be in there. Did you have to lobby for this? No, but the general editor is a guy called John Metacroft from University College London. He's a good guy, and it could have been somebody else.

1:41And so he was in touch with me about something else. And you told him to look at you. I'm a fan of this. Well, I think he was looking for somebody. He wanted to know if I knew somebody who could do it. And I said, I'll do it. Me. And so I did. And did you take the approach of introducing the whole Rothbard thought? I mean, how could anybody do that? Well, you can't, so you have to be really selective. So the first is basically life and time, from an intellectual perspective, so it's reasonably short. The second one kind of looks, to some extent, at the praxeology side, so it kind of goes light on the economics. I'm not doing Man Economy and the State, so it's called Rothbard the Libertarian, so I focus on that. and then the third one is really on Rothbard, the historian, which not even, which even people who know a lot about Rothbard don't know, you know, they won't have read the four volumes on American history or they won't have read the two volume economic history and I find Rothbard very interesting as a historian.

2:38Right, historian and historian of thought. Historian of thought, yeah, exactly. So the third chapter, I think, even for people who are aficionados and so on might find something of interest in there, especially because I reviewed the review literature, in other words, the reviews that came out in the journals, as far as I can find them. I see, like Panic of 1819 and... Yeah, from the very earliest work to the latest stuff. Right, Conceived in Liberty and everything. So I put all that in. And the last one then really just takes all of that and applies it to current circumstances. And that's where I kind of let myself go a little bit and had a bit of fun. If Rothbard had not been an economist, had not been a philosopher, he could have been a historian, right? Oh yeah, clearly, clearly. And in the course of the chapter I say that one of the reasons why he didn't go down I think what he did particularly well with the historian establishment was because his approach is so different and so on, he does really call a lot of things into question that they take for granted.

3:32So he adopts the same radical perspective and of course he brings his libertarianism to bear. I mean what he's focusing on, what he's looking for evidence of is stress on liberty and on freedom. Well, sure, it's the same way as you and I, when we pick up the newspaper, we go, oh, well, look, you know, Gaddafi's killing his own people, that's what states do, or whatever, you know, you have this libertarian, so Murray looked back at history and did the same thing, right? There's an intimacy he had with history, I find. But he also has, I think he has a narrative style that many historians would or should die for. It's just like, I don't think the man was capable of writing a dull word, you might disagree with him. You might think he goes over the top, but the one cardinal saying he never commits is being tolerant, boring.

4:21Well, he's excited to tell you about what he knows. He's evangelical. He's got news to tell and he's a person to tell you. Yeah, he can't wait. And he never runs out of it. He's the kind of guy, you know if you met him in the corridor, you wouldn't escape. It would be 45 minutes and you'd be saying, I've got to go to an appointment and so on and he'd be still telling you and you'd still be interested. Yeah, until about 4 a.m. as I recall. I never knew him personally and it's my one regret. I'd love to have known him. Now you had finished all your academic studies and got your present teaching position and everything and then you bumped into Rothbard and the Austrian tradition. Yeah, yeah. I'm a very late convert and so on. So I was well, I came as a real shock to me. I was always interested in the phenomenon of money and what it was. It seemed a very mysterious sort of

5:10Obviously you could show pieces of paper or coins and so on, but it seemed a very odd sort of thing that people were willing to exchange goods and services for crumpled, dirty pieces of paper. So a friend of mine who was interested in German philosophy was on a sabbatical and he brought me home a copy of Mises' Theory of Money and Credit. I see. Which is like, wow. Yeah, it explains everything. Okay, and it does. And it does in such a way, I mean, again, Mises doesn't have the same kind of touch as Rothbard does in terms of being sort of popular and appealing on the surface and so on. But because I was turned on to this particular question, for me, it was like the answers and then not only persuasive in the sense that, yes, it may well be true, but there are others, but persuasive in the sense that it kind of wrestled me to the ground, cut me in half, Nelson, and I couldn't move.

5:58But it's so systematic. It's brilliant. Yeah. But as I said before, it's not where you'd normally start, but you need to start where your interests are, and those were mine, and I'm sure people have told you the same story, once you start, you're on a slippery slope, is that where you go, whew, and you know, human action. And yet it's a credit to you, I mean it's a credit to you that you had a teachable spirit, even as a mature academic, that's a little unusual. I don't know, but yeah, my kids often wonder what I'm going to do when I grow up and I feel the same way, you know, it's, I just, I'm not like the Athenians always on the lookout for something new necessarily, but I do have questions and those are the kind of things which were motivating me and it just happened that at the right time when these questions were live, to use a kind of Jamesian sense for me, the book came and the result was, you know, putting a detonator in something.

6:59Now do you feel that Rothbard has been, you read a lot of reviews of his book and you see that he's variously criticized from the left, from the right, from all. Do you feel the need to come to his defense? I think you have in several papers. Yes, I have. Look, nobody's perfect, right? And that includes Rothbard. So nobody gets everything right all the time. but the one thing and you could you could make accusations of various kinds you know people have accused him of perhaps not being a scholarly at times as he needed to be and that may well be right okay but in the sense he was producing so much material and and I'm very happy to forgive him because of the liveliness of what he's got and somebody else can fill in the details and cross the T's and dot the I's and so on but the one thing you can't criticize him for is raw All Intellectual Integrity And that comes to me shining through the page

7:52I mean, he's the guy who could be completely wrong I'm not saying he is, but he could be completely wrong on something but he clearly believes and is passionately interested in what he's talking about and is not afraid to change his mind if he needs to do it and so on But he always comes across, he has the sort of passion of a very good teacher This is what you always look for in a teacher is somebody who not only knows the stuff, but is really passionately interested in it and manages to communicate that. It's like lighting a torch, it's like lighting a fire and passing it on to the students. And he does that. And in his writings all the time, however, I mean people have remarked that it was contrary and he was hard to get along with and so on. That may be so. I didn't know him, but I can tell you, if I'd known him, we wouldn't have had any problem getting along. He's just my kind of guy. If only because of that absolutely

8:43and the outrageous cackle that he had, which I've heard on the recordings. I mean, anybody who laughs like that is my kind of guy. So, so, you know, so I would I would have killed to be the kind of guy who was stuck in his apartment in New York until four o'clock in the morning. I would have been there until six. He would have he would have had to throw me out. That's how part of the part of the revolutionary band of five people. Yeah, I would have been there to sign up. So that that really comes across. And I'm not saying other people don't have intellectual integrity, but he has it and he has it in a way in which and he lives it out he lives it out in his writings he lives it out in his polemical work he lives it out in in the engagements that he had practical engagements what he did and what he didn't do and yeah okay so he might be a little bit prickly and all of the

9:28rest but hey so am i i mean human beings are like that i must prefer them like that right with a few rough edges and right and so on rather than be all smooth and polished and how did you uh how did in your book how do you assess his well let me ask it this way i was going to ask about his is anarchism. But let me just ask it more broadly. What do you think Rothbard's major contributions to the world of ideas really are? I mean, if you're going to name two, three, or four, what would they be? Okay, I'm not going to comment on the economic stuff because I'm not really that confident. So my not mentioning doesn't mean that those aren't important. I think they are probably. economists had better comment on that. I think his major contribution is his, well probably twofold. One is taking the idea of liberty really seriously and he has the virtues of a logician. I'm a logician myself by training and I

10:22recognize it. So that he takes the idea and he's prepared to follow it wherever it takes him. He's not saying oh this would be unpopular or this would might I think that might be inexpedient or this might upset somebody. I might not get promoted. Yeah. Well, he didn't, right? But he didn't seem to worry, right? So he has that, and I love that. I mean, okay, even if the guy is completely wrong, at least you can sit and you're working all night, but I don't think he is, but he takes that, okay? And the other really interesting thing for me from the point of view, because this appeals to me as a Catholic to some extent, Catholics often tend to think that sort of the natural law is something which is sort of Catholic doctrine or something. And it isn't, of course, right? But nonetheless, it has received probably its greatest development and most of its adherents would be in the Catholic tradition. Rothbard's not in that

11:10tradition and yet he discovers that himself and it has an immediate appeal to him. So he manages to combine his libertarian views and he gives it a grounding in natural law, which I think is probably the only way it can be grounded. In other words, okay, I know I know there are people who do it through a utilitarian perspective, people like David Rieben and others. But apart from the fact that if you ever do that, you're always giving hostages fortune because it's always open to somebody to come up and say, well, if we go down the liberty route, it's not actually going to be productive of the greatest good for the greatest number or whatever it might be. And that's something you'd have to take into account. But I think in the end, it's not principled. And Rothbard's account is principled. So he tries, especially in the Ethics of Liberty, which I use as the textbook for a course I'm doing, and students find it incredibly exciting.

12:02But it's just one chapter or two on natural law. Oh, he throws it away. It's almost like he's saying, well, I'm doing this because it's kind of obvious and so on, so I take a bit longer to do it. But he does. He just kind of throws it away. But he exhibits it. He instantiates it in the rest of the book. So you get this grounding in natural law in a fully Thomist tradition and then a quick movement into a kind of an enlightenment style embrace of human rights and then a little further down the trajectory you end in anarchism. So I mean this is a gigantic apparatus. It's a little book with an almighty charge. Okay, I mean, it's the kind of book that probably should probably take about a thousand pages.

12:49Sure, but Murray slotted it out quickly so he can get it. That's what I'm saying. And then you fill it in. But the great thing from a pedagogical point of view is because it's relatively short, because the chapters are brief, because he writes so well and engagingly, even if there are questions that are not answered and roughnesses and so on, it's precisely the right kind of text to give to an undergraduate with an inquiring mind, because there are lots of things you can latch onto. And not only does he, it's not a stuffy piece of philosophical work, all polished, so nobody can engage with it, and you have the application chapters. And there are things in there that I just find slightly outrageous myself, but that's fine. It's great. It's challenging. It's engaging. It's annoying. It's wonderful. It's all of these things. Well, I think you make a good point about his applications, and I'm not sure I've entirely thought about it this way, but sometimes people say, well, Rothbard had his conclusion in mind, and then sort of patched up his argument to arrive at it.

13:43But you're saying really the opposite. He had an argument in mind and wanted to see where it would go. Yeah. Look, I mean, let's be frank. If I were to take a minimal government position, I would have many more converts. I would have many more people who'd be prepared to buy it. If I said, look, let's take off all this stuff about communications and we don't need the government. Let's take off health, education and welfare might be more difficult, but let's get rid of all that and let's just say we need the government for provision of loan order, legal services and so on. And so we're stuck with that. And they'd probably go, yeah, it's that last one. That's the real sticking point. Okay, so when I'm doing my class, I tell the students how it works and I go, and I'm going all the way. I'm not stopping here. I'm going all the way. I mean, this is the this is the this is the pons as a neuron. This is the one, you know, that really tests whether you want to take it all the way.

14:40That's the hard core. You recall how power and market opens, right? First chapter, boom, national defense. So you get that one, at least in Rothbard's mind, that's the first one. And of course, I mean, even to the publishers, this was something like a scandal. It was a nervous breakdown. So they subverted it, basically. And yet you look around the world today. I mean, what is the power that the state has that's the most potentially deadly? Yes, absolutely. I mean, if you do the numbers, I mean, how many people have been killed in the 20th century? And I say to my first-year class, I was saying the other day, this is not in the libertarian class, but saying, count up the number of people who have been killed by the state or those who aspire to control the state. Okay, put that in one column. And I said, on the other column, put the number of people who have been killed by ordinary, decent murders.

15:28In revenge or in crime. Duel. Well, start from the ground and you come up to here with this one and you're barely half an inch off the ground on the other one. And what was the function of the state again? To preserve the peace and order and to protect us and so on? Hmm, I wonder, we might have a slight problem here, don't you think? Now, did you find that you had reflected on the nature of the state before you had read Rothbard? Not really. I would have probably accepted it as a sort of an unpleasant necessity. I was doing a job that somebody had to do, not that I particularly wanted to do it. But yeah, I wouldn't really have thought about it. Political philosophy wasn't something I was particularly interested in.

16:14But Murray identifies the state, right? I mean, he says this is the state, and he puts a circle around it, he investigates it closely and helps the reader understand it as something special, unique, pervasive, more so than you thought, and unclouds the mind. It does, yeah. Well, the other thing, since I've started down this road, I've been investigating the historical antecedents, I've been reading a lot of stuff. There's a huge amount of material on there. And the one very interesting thing is, it wouldn't be true to say that the state is a 17th century invention, but the state as we know it is a 17th century invention. In other words, more or less, the essential components of the state have been present in all coercive governments, in empires and so on. But the particular kind of state that we now have, which most people simply take for granted, the first thing I have to do in my class is to impress upon the students the contingency, the sheer raw contingency of the state.

17:11The nation state as we know it. Yeah, I just say, look, there was a time when it did not exist. There will be a time, please God, soon, when it will not exist. And people will look back and talk about the age of the state. But for us, the nature of human beings is that when we look around the world, we tend to see not only that things are so, but without reflecting on it too much, we conclude from this that they must be so, it must be this way. So, and I give a hackneyed example to say when I was growing up in Ireland, Telephones were provided by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. You know, you had to apply for one. It took two years in order to get one. You had no control over the color of the apparatus. They put it wherever they wanted to, usually in a drafty hall.

17:58And they charged you whatever you like. OK, but but this was the natural order. This was the way it was and the way it had to be to move forward 50 or 60 years. and now there are rival phone companies and you can have a telephone on the top of your roof if you want and you can have a Mickey Mouse one dangling from your ceiling and you can you know you can have different services or none at all and just use one of these so it's quite yeah i mean so you see again and so i try to use examples like these to to shift to to unsettle the idea that things must be so and once and and so for example in terms of the anarchy thing instead of coming straight at the I use examples that I've got from the BBC recordings of programs where they talk about the removal of traffic lights.

18:45Oh, of course. And so that's not contentious, okay? That doesn't raise any questions about force or crime and so on, where people are involved. But you can actually see graphically what happens when you actually remove the traffic lights. It's better. And then you realize, and the guy tells you, there are 48,000 sets of traffic lights in the UK. and then they show it and then you see the photographs and there's a whole bunch of people sitting at traffic lights spew fumes spewing out and on the other side and nobody's moving they're all just sitting there and nobody's moving and then you see a village where they took deliberately took out the traffic lights and one woman predicted chaos she said this place is mad enough you take out the traffic lights it's gonna be ten times worse came back to her three days later and she said I can't believe it looked around the camera there's nobody there the car an occasional car whizzing by it's just you know and so that those

19:36Those are the kinds of things, and of course Rothbard would have approved of these, because these are the kinds of things that again show, because when you come into the big ones, you've already, as it were, softened the students' mind up so that they're now receptive to thinking about it. Now, Murray, I wonder if Rothbard's writing is clear enough on the distinction between the nation-state as we know it and something like a medieval personal state. Probably not. What is essentially the Weberian definition of the state, which is probably correct, it's that organization which claims, bracket rightfully, the monopoly of force within a given territory. That's why I say that the state as we know it originated in the 17th century, because it's a product of the breakdown of the medieval synthesis, the product of the reformation, it comes from that period.

20:30So when the church breaks up and you've already had the empire broken up, then that's when And you get the nation-state. But elements of the state, at least in empire, they claim the monopoly of force, but strictly speaking, they weren't able to enforce it. They hadn't got the means. The populations were too diverse. And sorry, just to finish, even in the Middle Ages, of course, you had overlapping authorities. You had vertical and horizontal and you had merchants and so on. So it was a complicated legal and political structure. The fun of that, if you like, for somebody was that there were cracks, there were crevices, there were gaps you could slip in and out of, you could move around. It wasn't ideal, I don't want to make it sound idyllic, but at least you didn't have what I suppose in the 20th century became the totalitarian claims of the state to be all in all, to determine ultimately every feature to be the final legal port of call. That didn't work in the Middle Ages, so there is a transition.

21:30That is very interesting. I guess I didn't entirely understand that that was your view, that the Rothbardian view of the state really comes into being as a modern thing. And the state of the 12th century, the state of the 19th century. Well, you can hardly call, in fact, in that book by what I can't think of his name, the legal scholar, Lowen Revolution, Harald Berman. Berman argues, in fact, that the state, the first state, was the church. It's an interesting thesis. He says they were the first ones to develop a central organized authority, a bureaucracy. You need a bureaucracy in order to organize a state. That's why a personal rule, that's why in others, in the move, for example, in Rome from the Republic to the Empire, really only begins to take shape about 200 AD when the emperors begin to develop a bureaucracy, right?

22:19And that's when you begin to exercise something like this, the permanent aspect of the state and the control. And of course, Frederick, Frederick the Great, again, so this period of time, the 11th, 12th century, is really the beginnings of Western civilization as we know it. It's from that that we get the universities, it's from that that we get the beginnings of the modern state. Frederick attempted to, but wasn't in a position to control the empire in the way that he wanted. But he did, he did, he set up the University of Naples as a training institution for his civil servants. He wanted these people and of course the University of Bologna was started by and run by students again with an idea that they would go into the public service. I mean there were guys on the make just like they are now lawyers, lawyers then lawyers now we know what they're like.

23:05So you have the beginnings of that but the nature of society at that period was such that it simply wasn't possible even for somebody as strong will say as the emperors to impose their rule in the way that they wanted to. It took the breakup of the religious unity of Europe before that became available. I have to ask you a last question. I think I could sit here all afternoon with you. This is so fascinating. But just one last question on this issue of the state. I think my impression is that today when people think of the state, they think of politicians. Yes. Who are we going to elect? Who's the face? And you're saying that's just completely wrong. Yeah, the state you see is an institution and institutions always have to be served by particular individuals.

23:55In other words, you can't have an institution that doesn't have people if you like pulling the levers. But the whole point about an institution is that any individual can come or go. No individual is indispensable. So, in other words, say in Britain you've got a prime minister, you're always going to have a prime minister. It'll be this guy, it'll be that guy. But it doesn't really make too much difference as we see. So once you have set up the state, you've set up what is, if you like, a complicated apparatus of levers and so on, and then you can more or less slot anybody in to pulling those particular levers. The politics games we played here in the United States and in the UK and in Ireland simply involve shuffling the lever pullers around. You can have this group of lever pullers or that group of lever pullers. Even more profoundly, you could even put all of the political figures on a boat to China and the state, but still.

24:47Well, we have a spectacular case. Belgium. Belgium, at the moment, hasn't had a government for almost a year. They had an election about a year ago, as we speak, and they have not been able to form a government. And by and large, the Belgian bureaucracy and so on has been continuing to do the kinds of things. Now some decisions are going to come up that are going to cause problems because they will need executive action. There's no way to change the system. But isn't it astonishing that the government can disappear for nine, ten months and nobody seems to notice that. But it's not anarchy, it's a state. It's exactly the same thing. The bureaucratic structures are all in place and they all get administered and everything gets turned over Professor Casey, we have so much to learn from you. I'm glad that you used this interview to teach us a little bit. I hope we're going to hear much more from you in the future. Thank you for all your wonderful work and for coming to Auburn and for sitting down here with me. It's my pleasure.