The Murray Rothbard I Knew

He was a model intellectual with an irrepressible desire to understand and tell what is true. No scholar with such an outlook can fit comfortably in any establishment in any age.

BY JEFFREY TUCKER

View original article at Brownstone.org.

[I wrote the following essay for a book celebrating the 100th birthday of Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). He was a dear friend and I’m proud to be part of this thrilling book, which will appear later in print. For now you can download it: Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Houston: Papinian Press, 2026)]

My introduction to Murray Rothbard came when I was 20 and sitting in the office of my political philosophy teacher. The professor had on his shelf a two-volume blue book called Man, Economy, and State (1962).^[1] The title was so stark that I asked about it. He warned me not to read it because the author is an anarchist. Fascinating. I excused myself and hurried to the library to get the book. It consumed my evenings for weeks.

Far from being an anarchist rant, it was a detailed defense of classic economics as it existed before John Maynard Keynes, alongside insights from Ludwig von Mises and some innovative theories concerning monopoly, utility, and other matters. It was sweeping, a real treatise on economic theory for which I had become intellectually desperate.

I learned later that this book was commissioned as a commentary on Mises’s own book Human Action (1949)^[2] but took on a life of its own. Reading it from the first page to the last was the beginning of a journey that would consume my entire career.

Having only known him from these early works, I had this vision of Rothbard as a towering, all-knowing, and probably terrifying intellectual force. I was beside myself with nerves when I met him some three years later (1985 or so). I was astounded to meet a short man with a huge smile who seemed to find humor in everything. Though we had never met, he greeted me like an old friend.

From then on, I treated him as a friend, and we remained close for the next ten years before his death in 1995. The phone calls were nearly daily, and the letters back and forth frequent. He remains my muse to this day. (Ironically, my time knowing him overlaps almost exactly with Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s ten years with Murray over the same time period.)

Far from being a dogmatic preacher of deductive truths—he came across this way in his earlier theoretical writings—the man I knew was liberally minded, radical and curious enough to entertain a huge range of ideas, broadly tolerant of a diversity of opinion, and endlessly and creatively curious. He was an absolute joy in any social framework, like a light that illuminated the entire room. To say something that sent him into uproarious laughter was a deeply satisfying achievement. And as Hoppe and others have pointed out, he had a singular genius, unlike any other I have encountered.

Rothbard was a voracious speed reader, inspired by his unquenchable desire to know. I once dropped him off at a university bookstore to search for a parking place. Finding none, I was back at the front entrance in 20 or so minutes. I found him on a bench reading, sitting next to a stack of books. Getting in my car, he sat down in the passenger seat and was speaking excitedly about what he had found. Stopping at a light he showed me some passages, and I was astounded to see a third of the book already marked up. He had done this already with several books. I simply could not believe my eyes. He read books the way others eat fast food.

He was often on deadline with my various projects. Once the fax machine came along—he loved it once he figured out how it worked—he would send in impressive works in under an hour. I can imagine his typing ferociously to get his ideas on paper. His mind worked far faster than any technology could record his thoughts. He always had long papers already composed in his head, complete with citations, and the only limit was finding the time to type.

As for his social interactions, he had this way of extracting knowledge and information from every source. If he knew you to be an expert on mathematics or biology, he would suck away from your mind all the information you had. He was a scavenger of knowledge, and flattered everyone with his deep interest in your ideas.

For example, I had a curiosity on the history of the Christian religion, and he pressed me hard to explain the sociological implications of how Eastern churches had rejected the filoque clause in the creed, such that they failed to affirm that the spirit proceeds from the son. His intuition had told him that led the Eastern branch of Christianity, having rejected this idea, a lessened enthusiasm for incarnational features of economic progress. I don’t know if it is true but this is how Rothbard’s mind worked. He took ideas exceedingly seriously and wanted to understand the implications of them all on the evolution of human society.

Here for me was the model of a wildly curious man of incredible instinct in a huge variety of fields from economics to history to philosophy to theology. Nothing was out of range for him. His passion for truth wanted it all. He feared nothing: no thinker, no taboo, no facts, no powerful orthodoxy, no settled conclusion, no presets on mandatory ways to think about anything. To be with him even for an evening led one to believe that everything was open, anything was thinkable, all things could be wrong, and all truth remained both undiscovered and yet discoverable. This is why his adventurous spirit was infectious and why he had such a huge personal as well as intellectual influence.

Looking back, Murray had three major barriers to overcome in his life.

First, there was no way he was going to make it in conventional academia. By the time he had finished his PhD, conventional thinking was too much prized as the ticket to success, and no amount of intelligence, productivity, or scholarly diligence would overcome that. He realized early on that he would have to accept a position far beneath his merit or seek out some other path. From his letters, which I had the pleasure of reading after his death, I learned that during graduate school he tried writing for encyclopedias for a while but his entries, despite their breadth and erudition, were never accepted. Of course not. He was seeking to discover new ways of understanding, not sum up conventional banalities suitable for an encyclopedia.

He was fortunate to be noticed by the Volker Fund, which paid him as a manuscript reviewer and critic until the gig ran out.^[3] He ended up taking a position far beneath his status as a professor of economics at New York Polytechnic—just as Mises had to take positions far beneath his status when he emigrated to the US. He had a tiny shared office but hardly cared. He was mostly just thrilled for a small income and chance to teach. This position suited him most of his career before he finally took a teaching post at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It goes without saying that he should have been in the Ivy League but, even then, there was never a chance for such a creative thinker in conventional academia.

Second, he had to put food on the table by earning a living, which caused him variously to seek out benefactors, to whom he was not naturally inclined to defer if they pushed him in a direction that contradicted his principles. The Volker Fund treated him well until it went in a new direction. In the early 1970s, he gained the attention of Charles Koch, the oil magnate who became the benefactor of what turned into a movement largely shepherded by Rothbardian ideas. Matters turned south when a new institution called Cato Institute plotted a move to Washington, D.C, for purposes of policy influence. Rothbard intuited exactly where this effort was headed. The break with the board happened early on. Looking at that institution today—this is an organization that came out for lockdowns, mask mandates, tax-funded pharmaceuticals, and social distancing as enforced by the police^[4]4—there can be no doubt that Rothbard had been correct.

Third, Rothbard wanted serious intellectual colleagues, people who would contribute to the edifice he was building and from whom he could learn and by whom he could be inspired. This was not easy given his stature and range of knowledge. There were credible standouts among his friends in the newly minted libertarian world—Ralph Raico, Ralph Hamowy, George Reisman, and Leonard Liggio. But this movement quickly developed a problem after Rothbard’s For a New Liberty was published in 1973.^[5] Marketed as an entirely new and politically viable way to understand the world—rather than a restatement and clarification of traditional liberal ideas—the movement tended to attract lesser minds, illiterates, sloganeers, scamsters, hucksters, and influence peddlers who had little to no interest in serious scholarship, history, theory, or anything else of any substantial meaning.

Rothbard’s estrangement from the movement he had founded was gradual and painful, and explained in great depth in his own publication, The Libertarian Forum, which ran from 1969 to 1984.^[6] Most issues had detailed documentation of some apostasy and an explosion of the rationale. This was an attempt to keep together what was clearly falling apart. After that had ceased publication, Rothbard had largely given up on the libertarians, not in theory but in sociology and culture. I recall there was some effort to publish a libertarian yellow pages of liberty-minded businesses. Rothbard quipped that this would be highly useful in order to know for sure with whom not to trade to avoid getting ripped off.

People often wonder how it came to be that in 1989–1990, Rothbard began hanging out with the paleoconservative intellectuals at the Rockford Institute. He clearly did not agree with their outlook, for, as he told me at the time, these people do not believe in individual rights. For Rothbard, that was a real test of intellectual commitment. Why, then, did he stick around, form the John Randolph Club, and eventually become the prophet of what he called right-wing populism?

From my perspective, there was one big reason and several smaller ones. First, they were intelligent. They actually read books. They had solid educations. They cared about ideas and details of history. They were interested in philosophy. That is to say, Rothbard found this gang intellectually stimulating, even if he did not accept their core intellectual framework, which was quite the departure from the liberty crowd he had left. He felt enlivened by the intellectual challenge they presented.

He had a close partner in these efforts with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, one of the (or perhaps only) intellectuals Rothbard found interesting and provocative from his time with the Mises Institute. Hoppe had read Rothbard during his graduate studies in Germany and came to the US to study under him. With a background in philosophy, Hoppe was able to speak to Rothbard on his level and introduce him to a range of thought with which he had been previously unfamiliar.

Second, these people opposed forced globalization and war, giving Rothbard hope that the pre-Buckley right wing movement could be reconstituted after the Cold War and get back to the business of defending liberty. Rothbard was nostalgic of the days before the American right became war-happy and had hoped that it could find its way back to the old-fashioned Americanism he had documented in his five-volume history of Colonial America.^[7]

Third, Rothbard himself has long believed that a robust liberty required more than non-aggression rules and permissions for anything and everything that human beings wanted by virtue of raw egoism. It also required a bourgeois culture that revered settled principles, deferred to natural hierarchies, and sought maturity in outlook and behavior. Yes, Rothbard had certainly warmed to what came to be called cultural conservatism. This was not really that much of a departure from his past: he never showed any interest in the new-found affection for feminism roiling around the libertarian world.^[8]

This “paleo” period proved intellectually fruitful for Rothbard. Finally freed from the increasingly shabby (and scammy) world of libertarian organizing, Rothbard was able to strike out on his own and rethink long-held positions without the social burdens that come with adherence to an industrial machine of intellectual and policy priorities. The years 1990-1995 proved to be some of his most thrilling for this reason. It was during this period that he wrote his two-volume history of economic thought, one of the most remarkable and neglected books of his career.^[9] The sheer breadth and depth of these volumes were astonishing in part because he worked rather quietly on them in the backdrop of all his other popular writings.

One of the most powerful pieces from this period—one that represented a striking departure from his previous work—was “Nations by Consent: Deconstructing the Nation-State.”^[10] Rothbard here had already come to terms with the reality of nationhood and its implications for human society—quite a step for an anarchist. He explains how he learned a crucial point from the opening of the Soviet archives. He learned how Josef Stalin had used forced demographic movements to shore up the Russianness of the Soviet empire, by, for example, sending Russian speakers into the farther reaches of the empire. Here was the great clue: how the state can use demographics as a tool for power. From this, he provides an early hint to what would later become a pressing reality in the politics of the West:

The question of open borders, or free immigration, has become an accelerating problem for classical liberals. This is first, because the welfare state increasingly subsidizes immigrants to enter and receive permanent assistance, and second, because cultural boundaries have become increasingly swamped. I began to rethink my views on immigration when, as the Soviet Union collapsed, it became clear that ethnic Russians had been encouraged to flood into Estonia and Latvia in order to destroy the cultures and languages of these peoples. Previously, it had been easy to dismiss as unrealistic Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, in which virtually the entire population of India decides to move, in small boats, into France, and the French, infected by liberal ideology, cannot summon the will to prevent economic and cultural national destruction. As cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail’s concerns any longer. [6–7]

In this piece, Rothbard comes around to Hoppe’s position that there are conditions under which a policy of open immigration—one that libertarians had long embraced—was inconsistent with property rights and the ideals of self-government (just as he came around to Hoppe’s view of libertarian rights and argumentation ethics).^[11] It can amount to a form of invasion, a force easily manipulated by malefactors in government.

On rethinking immigration on the basis of the anarcho-capitalist model, it became clear to me that a totally privatized country would not have “open borders” at all. If every piece of land in a country were owned by some person, group, or corporation, this would mean that no immigrant could enter there unless invited to enter and allowed to rent, or purchase, property. A totally privatized country would be as “closed” as the particular inhabitants and property owners desire. It seems clear, then, that the regime of open borders that exists de facto in the U.S. really amounts to a compulsory opening by the central state, the state in charge of all streets and public land areas, and does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors. [7]

Twenty-five years later, following the Biden administration’s policy of flooding the country with immigrants as a way of gaming the vote, as an explicit tactic to maintain and tighten control of the country, Rothbard’s prescience should be clear. He was willing to revisit a long-standing doctrine in light of empirical reality. Thanks to an insight of Hoppe, he was further able to weave these empirical considerations into a larger theoretical apparatus.

Of course this article mortified his legacy followers who were never able to keep up with Rothbard’s dazzling capacity to re-examine theoretical foundations in light of events.

This approach characterized Rothbard’s entire career. When I first suggested to Rothbard that I work to reprint his Man, Economy, and State, he was simply astonished that anyone should care. In his mind, he had long ago advanced in his thinking. I went ahead anyway and have no regrets. That said, he was certainly correct that he had moved beyond this period rather quickly after the book had been published. Early Rothbard worked out a clean binary between the forces of the market and the forces of the state: a distinction summarized by the title Power and Market.

Even as he had put the final touches on those books, he was already exploring complications. His famous book What Has Government Done to Our Money?^[12] was a presentation of a topic that would consume him for many years. In real life, there was no strict separation between the state and industry: banking reveals that truth most obviously. In the many sectors in which both industry and state are driving forces, it is not always clear which is the hand and which is the glove.

Already by the outbreak of the Vietnam War, Rothbard had concluded that the main builder of the death machine was not the state but the munitions manufacturers pressing their agendas on the state. It was this insight that drove him out of what was called the right and toward the left, complete with a treatise on intellectual history which argued that the left were the real friends of liberty in history.^[13] Note that this monograph (which, in my view, is misguided in crucial respects) appeared only two years following a time when he had been writing for National Review.

In “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” published in The Libertarian Forum, June 15, 1969,^[14] he wrote:

How then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the “private property” of General Dynamics? All this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution. Thus, how could the ownership of General Dynamics be transferred to the deserving taxpayers without first being nationalized en route? And, furthermore, even if the government should decide to nationalize General Dynamics—without compensation, of course—per se and not as a prelude to redistribution to the taxpayers, this is not immoral or something to be combatted. For it would only mean that one gang of thieves—the government—would be confiscating property from another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government. I do not often agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, but his recent suggestion to nationalize businesses which get more than 75% of their revenue from government, or from the military, has considerable merit. [book p. 27; original p. 3]

Is this a defense of nationalization? It certainly reads like one. This is certainly a departure for the author of Power and Market. I have no idea whether and to what extent he would have continued to believe this during the period in which I knew him. ^{[15] 14} I never asked. It hardly matters. What we have here is the development of a thinker who had long let go of his earlier and arguably naive position that pits markets against states in an eternal Manichean struggle. Real life presents messy complications in which the bad guys and good guys wear different hats and hence call for counterintuitive measures.

This view kept developing over the years, culminating in Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy from 1984, originally written in parts and published in an obscure hard-money newsletter.^[16] In this monograph, Rothbard goes the full way of showing industry as the malevolent force in manipulating states toward the benefit of the ruling classes. Here is a position that is far developed beyond his writing in his early years, and one in keeping with the unfolding empirical reality he saw all around him.

A frustration I’ve long had about attempts to sum up the thoughts of great thinkers like Rothbard (but the point applies to Hume, Locke, Calvin, Jefferson, Mises, or anyone) is the attempt to divorce theory from biography. The way to understand Rothbard’s contribution is to follow his thought as it unfolds in the course of his life. Serious thinkers evolve in their thought as events unfold and new influences find their way into a growing apparatus of ideas.

As he advanced beyond graduate school, he deployed his fertile and wildly curious mind to an ever more granular understanding of the real world. Never did he fear the criticism that he was contradicting his past writings. Nor did he fear being wrong. His driving passion was to know and present the truth as he understood it, always with the goal of contributing to a better basis for the idea of freedom and individual rights. It was his intellectual honesty that prevented him from being used as the guru of anyone’s movement, much less an intellectual totem around which lesser minds and movements can rally.

A word of caution in understanding Rothbard. There is a grave temptation to render his life in terms of shifting political alliances and white-hot editorial commentary. Those always gain more attention than scholarly works. If you really want to understand the depth and breadth of his work, it is best to look at his more academic work: The Logic of Action,^[17] Conceived in Liberty, History of Economic Thought, Egalitarianism, and The Progressive Era.^[18] Here was where he poured his heart and soul. The rest was fun and provocative. A genius like this was capable of wearing many hats, and he did.

In a related point, the memory of Rothbard is not well served by uncritical hagiography. Such attempts would have disgusted him. He never sought the status of an infallible guru or totemic oracle. His goal was to serve the great cause of human freedom. His scholarship was dangerous and reckless for a reason: he dared to think thoughts others would not and desperately desired the engagement that such thoughts should engender. An institution devoted to rendering his writings as an extraordinary magisterium is one with which he would have disassociated in a heartbeat. Indeed, Rothbard would have been quick to repudiate any such attempt.

Murray Rothbard was not only a sweet, dear, and wonderful human being. He was a model intellectual with an irrepressible desire to understand and tell what is true. No scholar with such an outlook can fit comfortably in any establishment in any age. Nor can such a thinker be summarized in easy ideological categories. Thank goodness for that. We need many such thinkers at all times but they so rarely appear. We are all deeply fortunate that Rothbard and his ideas grace us with their presence in our lives.

Endnotes

[1] Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, with Power and Market, Scholar’s ed., second ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2009 [1962]).

[2] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar’s ed. (Auburn, Ala: Mises Institute, 1998).

[3] These were collected and published in 2010 under the title Strictly Confidential(Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2010).

[4] Thomas A. Firey, “Government in a Pandemic,” Cato Institute, Policy Analysis No. 902 (Nov. 19, 2020; text): “Ideally, a public information campaign promoting distancing and mask-wearing would be sufficient government intervention to promote broad public adoption of these practices and reverse the virus’s spread. Government could also provide law enforcement support of businesses and other property owners that choose to require visitors to follow the practices.” (Emphasis added.)

[5] Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty, 2d ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2006 [1973]).

[6] The Complete Libertarian Forum: 1969–1984 (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2012).

[7] Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, single-volume ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011.

[8] Murray N. Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays,Roy Childs, ed., 2d ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2000).

[9] Murray N. Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2006).

[10] Murray N. Rothbard, “Nations by Consent: Deconstructing the Nation-State,” J. Libertarian Stud. 11, no. 1 (Fall 1994; pdf version): 1–10.

[11] An early presentation of argumentation ethics, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Ultimate Justification of the Private Property Ethic,” Liberty (September, 1988): 20–22 attracted a good deal of attention in a symposium, “Breakthrough or Buncombe?” in following issue, including Murray N. Rothbard, “Beyond Is And Ought,” Liberty(Nov. 1988): 44–45, in which Rothbard wrote (p. 44): “In a dazzling breakthrough for political philosophy in general and for libertarianism in particular, he has managed to transcend the famous is/ought, fact/value dichotomy that has plagued philosophy since the days of the scholastics, and that had brought modern libertarianism into a tiresome deadlock. Not only that: Hans Hoppe has managed to establish the case for anarcho-capitalist-Lockean rights in an unprecedentedly hard-core manner, one that makes my own natural law/natural rights position seem almost wimpy in comparison.”

[12] Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money?, 6th ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2024).

[13] Murray N. Rothbard, Left, Right, and the Prospects for Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2010), originally published in Left and Right (Spring 1965): 4–22.

[14] Murray N. Rothbard, “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” in The Complete Libertarian Forum, originally published in The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 (June 15, 1969): 3–4.

[15] But see Stephan Kinsella, “Rothbard on the ‘Original Sin’ in Land Titles: 1969 vs. 1974,” StephanKinsella.com (Nov. 5, 2014).

[16] Murray N. Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011; pdf); originally published in World Market Perspective(1984) and as by the Center for Libertarian Studies (1995).

[17] Murray N. Rothbard, The Logic of Action, vols. I and II (Edward Elgar, 1997); later republished under the title Economic Controversies (Auburn, Ala: Mises Institute, 2011).

[18] Murray N. Rothbard, The Progressive Era (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2017).

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