A Tale of Two Libertarianisms

The conflict between Murray Rothbard and F.A. Hayek highlights an enduring division in the libertarian world.

Brian Doherty from the March 2010 issue

Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, by Murray Rothbard, edited by Roberta A. Modugno, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 168 pages, $14.

If Murray Rothbard—free-market economist, anarchist philosopher, American historian, and inveterate activist—had never lived, the modern libertarian movement would have nowhere near its current size and influence. He inspired and educated generations of influential intellectuals and activists, from Leonard Liggio to Roy Childs to Randy Barnett. He helped form and/or shape the mission of such institutions as the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cato Institute, the Libertarian Party, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (and wrote a regular column for Reason for more than a decade). His initially unique combination of a Randian/Aristotelian natural rights ethic, Austrian economics, anarcho-capitalism, fervent opposition to war, and a populist distrust of “power elites” both public and private have injected modern libertarianism with a distinct flavor distinguishing it from other brands of pro-market thought. It was a differentiation intensified by Rothbard’s bombthrowing polemical style.

Put it this way: When the likes of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman died, the conservative flagship National Review could and did praise the Nobel Prize–winning economists unreservedly. But when Rothbard died in 1995, his old pal William Buckley pissed on his grave. Rothbard, Buckley wrote, spent his life “huffing and puffing in the little cloister whose walls he labored so strenuously to contract, leaving him, in the end, not as the father of a swelling movement…but with about as many disciples as David Koresh had in his little redoubt in Waco. Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God.”
Things look a little different now when it comes to Rothbard’s influence, though it’s unlikely anyone at National Review will note it—except maybe in the context of yet another attack on Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). The rise of Paul and his young and enthusiastic fan base, which Buckley could not have foreseen, contradicts the contention that Rothbard’s divisive radical intransigence doomed him to irrelevance.
The Paul phenomena, the largest popular movement in the postwar period to be motivated by distinctly libertarian ideas about war, money, and the role of government, has been influenced far more heavily by Rothbard than by the beliefs or style of any other prominent libertarian intellectual. The Paul movement is the sort of mass anti-war, anti-state, anti-Fed agitation that Rothbard dreamed about his entire adult life.