Today — March 2nd — is Murray Rothbard’s birthday. Had he lived, he’d be 84 years old today. And there’s sadness in that, because 84 in the world of today, though still a “ripe old age,” is not really all that old. Lots of people live to be 84. Even libertarians do it. Both Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek lived to be 92. Milton Friedman lived to be 94. Henry Hazlitt lived to be 98. In Radicals for Capitalism, his important 2007 book about the history of the modern American libertarian movement, Brian Doherty centers his story around what he describes as “[f]ive thinkers … without whom there would have been no uniquely libertarian ideas or libertarian institutions of any popularity or impact in America in the second half of the twentieth century … Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Milton Friedman.”
“Four men and one woman,” Doherty writes, “four Jews and one Catholic; four economists and one novelist; four minarchists … and one anarchist … two native-born Americans and three immigrants; two Nobel Prize winners and three who remained not only aloof from most professional and intellectual accolades but generated a heated hostility from cultural gatekeepers.” Doherty makes no mention of it, but there’s yet another facile point of comparison he might have used in discussing his five major figures — their longevity. For of his five major figures, three (Mises, Hayek, and Friedman) lived into their 90s. The other two — Rand and Rothbard — never made it to 80. Rothbard never made it to 70. It’s almost as though radicalism makes you die young. Mises, Hayek, and Friedman were minarchists — classical liberals, to be more precise.
Rand was a minarchist, too, but of a more radical stripe. She required that her limited, night-watchman State get along without any power of taxation, which she rightly regarded as theft. And Rothbard, who lived the shortest life of them all, was, of course, an anarchist, the only writer among them with the courage to assert boldly that the State didn’t need limiting, it needed abolishing.
Another way of putting this would be to say that Rothbard was the only pure libertarian among Doherty’s Big Five — not a classical liberal or even a more radical minarchist like Ayn Rand, but a thinker who saw the implications of the libertarian axiom, the nonaggression axiom, and unflinchingly accepted those implications, the only one among Doherty’s Big Five who was unafraid to follow his thinking where it must inevitably lead him. Brian Doherty calls Rothbard “the most uniquely and characteristically libertarian of libertarians; the one whose influence explains most about what makes the ideas, behavior, and general flavor of American libertarianism unique; the most illustrative and paradigmatic of the foundational figures of modern libertarianism.” It’s not for nothing that during the 1970s Rothbard came to be widely known as “Mr. Libertarian.”
listen (23:26)
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.
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