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An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard

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I first heard of Murray Rothbard in 1970 when I was a high-school student researching the Depression. My kid brother pulled Rothbard's "America's Great Depression" off the shelf of our local public library and suggested I might find it useful.

I was at the age where I was exploring a variety of political perspectives, from John Kenneth Galbraith to Ayn Rand, but I soon recognized that Rothbard was unique.

It was only in the late '70s, as a graduate student at Stanford, that I actually had a chance to meet Rothbard in person. At the time, the national libertarian movement (the Cato Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, the Institute for Humane Studies, etc.) had, for various reasons, come to be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, near Stanford, and I had a chance to meet not only Rothabrd but a number of other leading figures in the movement, including Justin Raimondo, the author of this biography of Rothbard.

I was thus peripherally involved in some of the incidents described in this book -- for example, I was a member of the "Radical Caucus," founded by Rainmondo and led by Rothbard. I can therefore testify that, as far as my personal knowledge is concerned, Raimondo has reported accurately, even where he himself differed from Rothbard (for example, on the 1984 Presidential campaign, when Rothbard and I were on the opposite side from Raimondo).

Above all, Raimondo paints an accurate picture of Rothbard as a person: Rothbard was joyously ebullient, voraciously curious, and, while politically passionate, always a gentleman. Over the years, I myself differed from Rothbard on a number of issues -- ranging from intellectual property law to policy in Central America -- but I know of no case in which Rothbard ever behaved in a dishonorable manner.

Rothbard reoriented the thinking of those in our generation who had a serious interest in issues of political philosophy and government. He differed from other advocates of individual rights and limited government in that he combined a rigorously logical understanding of the structure of human rights with an unflinchingly detailed empirical understanding of human history.

He taught us three central lessons:

1. Government -- all governments everywhere -- exists to enable some human beings to control and manipulate other human beings. While an occasional purpose of government is to interfere with others' private lives and control their ideas and/or values, the overarching purpose of government is to enable some people to live at the expense of others via taxation, forced labor, etc.

2. The history of humankind is therefore the record of the struggle between Liberty and Power, between those humans who simply wish to be left alone to live their lives in peace and those who wish to control other human beings. Historians who portray the past as primarily consensus rather than conflict or as the inevitable triumph of impersonal, progressive social forces are lying apologists for tyranny.

3. War is, above all, the means by which government expands its power, not simply by seizing the population and territory of other states but, more importantly, as a means of intensifying and deepening its control of its own populace -- curtailing civil liberties, whipping up nationalist hysteria, increasing the burden of taxation, etc. You cannot favor individual rights, private property, and free markets and also favor war.

Of course, these lessons were, to a large degree, as Rothbard himself recognized, simply a matter of relearning the lessons of the radical liberals of the nineteenth century, of the Jeffersonian wing of the American founding, and of the founding libertarians (such as John Lilburne and the American Roger Williams) of the seventeenth-century English Revolution. But Rothbard presented these lessons in a clearer and more straightforward manner, backed by a wealth of historical understanding, than ever before.

For those of us previously exposed to the "conservatism" of William F. Buckley and his "New Right" circle (Buckley actually advocated, in his own words, a "totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores..." to pursue the war against international Communism!) or the "laissez-faire capitalism" of Ayn Rand (who argued that government was basically legitimate but that government somehow always ended up mysteriously diverted from its legitimate purpose), Rothbard came as a clarifying thunderclap out of the blue.

The Randians did not much care about history (Rand's "history" of philosophy was a cartoonish caricature) and the "conservatives" had little interest in either rigorous thinking or critical history. Rothbard, on the contrary, demanded that we pursue a serious study of economic theory, of the ethics of natural rights, and of the actual events of Western history.

In 1965, Rothbard predicted the collapse of the Soviet empire: based on his knowledge as an economist, he recognized that socialism could not succeed, and, using his knowledge of intellectual history, he predicted that the ideas of Locke and Jefferson, would, in the end, defeat the ideas of Marx and Lenin.

In the final years of his life, after the Soviet Empire had been swept into the dustbin of history, Rothbard correctly foresaw that the struggle over American imperialism would become the primary focus of world affairs, as is now clear to everyone in the wake of the "Bush doctrine" and the American attempt to conquer the Mideast.

As Raimondo discusses in detail, Rothbard pursued a variety of political alliances over the years, always with the goal of advancing his central aim, the freedom of the individual human being. Building on the great legacy of Western liberalism, Rothbard has left us an overarching framework, a powerful set of intellectual tools, for understanding the process of domination and exploitation, and ultimately, for bringing about the triumph of human freedom.

It is now up to us to further hone those tools and to learn to apply them to strip away the mask of Power and restore the natural rights of human beings both here in America and throughout the world.

It can't possibly be an easy job to condense the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers into less than four hundred pages. Indeed, author Justin Raimondo notes in his introduction that he hopes only to offer "what is little more than an extended biographical sketch, to capture the essential Rothbard, not only his ideas but also his personality and some sense of his historical significance."

Raimondo is too modest.

I'll keep this brief since other reviews of this book are available online (and if you write to me I'll tell you where to find them). What Raimondo actually provides in this volume is a cradle-to-grave overview of Rothbard's entire life and career, together with insightful summaries of carefully selected portions of Rothbard's thought. No doubt there is a great deal that Raimondo must omit or curtail. Nevertheless he provides considerably more than a "sketch."

Not that Raimondo's skills as a sketch artist are negligible. But the word "sketch" is better applied to his accounts of the various _other_ persons who populate his account -- from Rothbard's father David to Mises Institute founder Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. His accounts of these others are masterful sketches. But he brings Rothbard himself to life in a well-realized portrait of this giant of libertarianism.

Raimondo provides more: a defense and a vindication. Rothbard was the subject of scurrilous charges from several quarters throughout much of his career and even after his death, including (at the time of this writing) some misrepresentations from the "Objectivist" camp regarding the period of Rothbard's involvement with the Randian inner circle. Raimondo's handling of this topic is typical of his overall approach: he delves into Rothbard's personal correspondence and reveals, deftly and vigorously, what was actually going on -- not at all flatteringly to Rand and the founders of her cult.

In fact Raimondo really ought to be better known than he is as a critic of the "Objectivist" movement in general and of Rand in particular. Not surprisingly, Rothbard's encounter with Rand occupies some twenty-five pages of the present work, and Raimondo's incisive discussion is as penetrating and devastating as his earlier destructive criticism of Rand in _Reclaiming the American Right_. I shall with difficulty resist the temptation to spoil some of Raimondo's surprises; but for these twenty-five pages alone this book should be of interest to anyone even remotely interested in the "Objectivist" movement.

William F. Buckley does not come off well either; nor do the numerous lesser critics who buzzed about Rothbard like gnats. And of course there are fine positive accounts of Rothbard's wife JoAnn ("Joey, the indispensible framework"), his various longtime friends and associates, the great Ludwig von Mises, and the numerous other persons whose paths intersected Rothbard's for good or ill.

Amazingly, Raimondo manages to integrate all of this with an exposition of Rothbard's key economic and political insights. Obviously a good deal has had to be left out, or the book would have become unmanageably long. Nevertheless all of Rothbard's central themes are here, and all of his major works are given at least capsule summaries in their proper biographical context. This is no small feat -- especially since standard economic textbooks have trouble getting straight the Rothbardian views that Raimondo summarizes with apparent ease.

All in all, then, an astonishingly fine book that will be of interest both to those who already know who Rothbard was, and to those who have never heard of him before. "If this modest volume does its part," Raimondo writes in his introduction, "to make [Rothbard's] thought more accessible and readily available to a wider audience, it will have accomplished its purpose."

To that purpose it is admirably suited. Read it at once, and share it with everyone you know. And congratulations to Raimondo for a daunting task surpassingly well done.

Whole books could be written on Rothbard the Economist, or Rothbard the Historian. This book is about Murray Rothbard the Political Strategist and Polemicist. And that makes me happy, because it is *this* Rothbard that I personally recall so fondly from the old libertarian/anarchist trenches in the late '60s, early '70s, then again in the early '90s (when Rothbard and I last met).

Raimondo was there in those years 1978-1989 when I wasn't, when I largely fell away from the libertarian movement, and I enjoyed his coverage of those years in this book.

My only real gripe is that Justin sometimes lets his biases unfairly color his book, especially about periods where he wasn't personally present. One example is his "take" on Rothbard's alliance with Karl Hess in the late '60s. Hess was not quite so wooly or nutty as Raimondo paints him; you need only read Hess's writings in Rothbard's own "Libertarian Forum" newsletter from those days to see that Hess was a thoughtful Rothbardian anarchist during that period.

Anyway, thumbs up for Raimondo's biography of the heroic Murray Rothbard. But there are still more books to be written!

Energetic and well-written, Raimondo�s biography chronicles the life of seminal libertarian scholar and polemicist, Murray Newton Rothbard (1926�1995). Whether writing economic and historical treatises or squabbling with fellow travelers, Rothbard remained a tireless, happy warrior dedicated to fighting the welfare-warfare state.

Raimondo insists that Rothbard was a "thinker of similar importance" to Karl Marx (p. 157), but Rothbard's undeniable genius notwithstanding, this description seems an overestimation. For the moment, Mises, Hayek, and Milton Friedman loom larger in the firmament. What Rothbard did produce, among his many other accomplishments, was a multidimensional argument for anarchocapitalism. In life, he was a happy warrior on behalf of that as yet unrealized vision. He has been proved correct in his assessments of the signal importance of World War I for constructing the modern state and in identifying Hoover's policies as anticipating the New Deal. Perhaps his optimism regarding the feasibility of a stateless society will some day be validated. In the meantime, Raimondo has written an excellent introduction to Rothbard's life's work.

I was so impressed by the AUTHOR of this book and the manner in which he so ably presented in summary form the very complex economic, philosophical, and consequently political reflections of Murray Rothbard that I immediately looked for "About the Author" and did not find it. So let me start with the author rather than the subject.

Justin Raimondo an American author and the editorial director of the website Antiwar.com. He describes himself as a "conservative-paleo-libertarian." In addition to his thrice-weekly column for antiwar.com, he is a regular contributor to The American Conservative and Chronicles magazine. Raimondo also writes two columns a month for Taki's Top Drawer. He has published three other books, the last one only available from Google Books:
Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Background: Essential Texts for the Conservative Mind)
The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection
Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (AFPAC, 1996) via Google Free Online

As someone who appreciates complexity in all its forms, I found the author's intellectual endeavor in this book to be stunningly formidable. Of the over 24 books by Murray Rothbard, the author presented a coherent account of the high points, and particularly of these that merit further study:
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market - Scholars Edition
Economic Depressions
An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (2 Vol. Set)
The Case Against the Fed
Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy

From my nine-pages of notes, respecting the 1,000 word limitation on reviews:

Multiple bottom lines in this include the need to question the role and value of the state; the importance of respecting natural law over man-made law (the latter replete with fraud); the utter divide between intellectuals who are independent (very few) and those who choose to be the kept wards of the state; the difference between liberty for all and the dumbing down effect of egalitarianism in its socialist form; the conflict between individual liberty and organizational power; the vital need to respect non-aggression as a fundamental principle; the equally vital need to keep humanity embedded in all studies, avoiding the "objectivism" that is best summarized in another book I have reviewed, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West; the urgency of educating the public so as to contain the economic elites manipulating state power for their exclusive benefit; and the potential role of religion as a libertarian force (I am reminded of Liberation Theology in Latin America, something the Pope, with his Swiss bank accounts, was never enthusiastic about--so we must distinguish between religious organizations that seek power, and religious intent at the tactical level that is more humane).

In the course of reading this book I felt that I was receiving three different values:

1. A history of Libertarian thought in America;

2. A summary of the reflections of the subject, Murray Rothbard

3. An orientation for the coming war between Middle America and populism, and the corrupt two-party tyranny and its Wall Street masters (cf. Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny and my own book, also free online, Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)

Among the many highlights for me personally:

+ described as the anti-thesis to Marx

+ corrected Adam Smith as well as John Locke, Austrian school focuses on scarcity of resources rather than plentitude of labor, I fall between the two--the human brain is inexhaustible, but we have not applied it to the known scarcity of resources.

+ coherent definition of statism as the common enemy guilty of expropriation, constantly expanding its powers, generally by declaring war without good reason.

+ libertarianism described as a philosophy seeking a policy--as I myself find our federal policies incoherent to the point of being criminally insane or insanely criminal, this resonates with me--this is the philosophy for all of us who are NOT inclined by amorality or empowered by concentrated wealth, to bribe our government.

+ Alan Greenspan was a ringer, who sold out as a member of the Trilateral Commission and on the board of Morgan (Zbigniew Brzezinski is the mind behind most of Obama's mis-steps today in foreign policy--another Trilateralist).

+ Patrick Buchanan and the America Firsters are a significant potential reinforcing force, as are the Reformers. Sadly, the book makes it clear that the Constitutionalist Party is a break-away element that will not play well with others.

Quotes of note:

169. For at least two decades we have been living in a society that has taken on all the characteristics of fascism. At home we have the fascist corporate state economy; an economy of monopolies, subsidies, and privileges....

189. Coercive elites are artificial aristocracies who maintain their power through the office of the State.

196. We now face an America ruled alternately by scarcely differentiated wings of the same state-corporatist system.

The latter was written over a decade before Peter Peterson's Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It or John Bogle's The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism.

The final note for me was the three paths to restoring the Republic:

1. Educatioinalism of the public at large such as the antiwar and 9-11 Truth Movements pursue as well as the natural capitalism, true cost, and sustainable design movments

2. Fabian perssuasion in the halls of power, something CATO Institute gets good marks for

3. Radicalization of Middle America, something that Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden appear to be doing very nicely.

The author, the subject, and I all share one huge big idea: our persistent faith in the average American. I believe that populism, properly understood as average Americans armed with both personal weapons and a rich understanding of reality, is here to stay. It is sweeping across Latin America and now it is here in America. Praise the Lord!

The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover))
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Magnificent compelling biography of our greatest scholar of liberty -- the legendary Murray N. Rothbard -- who spoke truth to power and inspired generations by his courage and humanity.

Justin Raimondo has written one of the finest biographies I have had the pleasure to read.

Highly recommended!

Rothbard was (as I'm sure you already know) an anarcho-capitalist, a foremost American exponent of Austrian economics, as well as "Mr. Libertarian" in the Libertarian movement.

The author states in the Introduction to this 2000 book that "I hope, in what is little more than an extended biographical sketch, to capture the essential Rothbard, not only his ideas but also his personality and some sense of his historical significance. To those readers unfamiliar with the man and his works, this book is meant as a doorway to discovering the most important and interesting development in the modern history of ideas: the Rothbardian system or paradigm of pure liberty." (Pg. 19)

Rothbard was a "night owl" who never rose before noon; he was "4-F" in WWII (pg. 37), but entered the nascent free market movement through reading non-interventionist books (pg. 41, 46-47). A mixture of agnosticism and Reform Judaism (pg. 67), he married a Gentile (pg. 62), and was falsely said to have converted to Roman Catholicism at the end of his life (pg. 325-326).

He actually endorsed Adlai Stevenson for President, and worked for his campaign (pg. 80-81, 105). He was briefly associated with Buckley's National Review (pg. 99), and was for a time part of Ayn Rand's inner circle (pg. 109-113). He admitted that "Almost all of the young people drawn to libertarianism in the 1960s and early 1970s came through the Randian movement." (Pg. 131) He was the one who named the Cato Institute (pg. 218).

The book details at some length the Libertarian Party Presidential candidate squabbles during the Roger MacBride-Ed Clark-David Bergland-Ron Paul era, which "reduced the membership of the Libertarian Party by at least half and destroyed it as an effective political force." (Pg. 240) Ultimately, Rothbard resigned from the party (pg. 268), and devoted his attention to Lew Rockwell's Ludwig von Mises Institute (pg. 260).

This book is a marvelous history (not available anywhere else; at least in book form) of the Libertarian movement; Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement is another book that would be of great interest to those interested in Rothbard and Libertarianism.

When the history of liberty in the 20th Century is written, Murray Rothbard will have pride of place. Raimondo has written a book that is part biography of Rothbard and part discussion of his ideas. While this book isn't completely satisfying on either front, taken as a whole it is quite enjoyable. I learned a great deal about Rothbard that I didn't know. Rothbard's ties to the Old Right is a good example of this.

I say the book isn't satisfying on either front because it could have been fleshed out in certain places and shown a little more critical judgment in others. For example, Raimondo only briefly mentions Rothbard's 4 volume history of early America (Conceived in Liberty), and the first mention of it doesn't even state the name. No where are we told how Rothbard became such a scholar on American history. The discussion of how Man, Economy, and State came to be written could have been clearer as well.

As far as the lack of critical judgment, the best example is Rothbard's acceptance of the Leftist line about the Soviet Union being only concerned about self-preservation. How this squares with USSR's history of expansion from its invasion of Poland in the 1920s to Afghanistan in 1979 is beyond me. Raimondo doesn't attempt to tell us either.

But that being said, I enjoyed this book and recommend it highly.

This author claims that novelist Ayn Rand was a philosophical determinist when she met Rothbard. This is part of his effort to clear Rothbard of the charge of plagiarizing Rand's theory of volition.

Anyone familiar with her "Anthem" (first published in America in 1945) knows better. If that's not enough, her private journals (Harriman, editor, Dutton, 1997), also available to Raimondo before his book came out, are conclusive. Moreover, Raimondo's earlier claim that Rand was influenced by Garrett's "The Driver" has been refuted by Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Stephen Kinsella and Bruce Ramsey.

Oops! The original charge against Rothbard stands. And stands out rather obviously to those familiar with both thinker's arguments.

Raimondo joins the ranks of Jerome Tuccille as a thoroughly unreliable historian on matters related to Ayn Rand.