Ethics is the logical-praxeological presupposition — in Kantian terminology: die Bedingung der Moeglichkeit — rather than the result of agreement or contract. The principles of self-ownership and original appropriation make agreement and contract — including that of not agreeing and contracting — possible.
Set in motion and stimulated by the universal experience of conflict, moral discussion and argument can discover, reconstruct, explicate, and formulate the principles of self-ownership and original appropriation, but their validity in no way depends on whether or not this is the case, and if so whether or not these formulations then find universal assent.
Rothbard's distinct contribution to the natural-rights tradition is his reconstruction of the principles of self-ownership and original appropriation as the praxeological precondition — Bedingung der Moeglichkeit — of argumentation, and his recognition that whatever must be presupposed as valid in order to make argumentation possible in the first place cannot in turn be argumentatively disputed without thereby falling into a practical self-contradiction.
As Rothbard explains in an unfortunately brief but centrally important passage of The Ethics of Liberty:. Now, any person participating in any sort of discussion, including one on values, is, by virtue of so participating, alive and affirming life. For if he were really opposed to life, he would have no business in such a discussion, indeed he would have no business continuing to be alive.
Hence, the supposed opponent of life is really affirming it in the very process of his discussion, and hence the preservation and furtherance of one's life takes on the stature of an incontestable axiom pp. As an immediate implication of this insight into the status of the principles of self-ownership and original appropriation as ethical axioms, Rothbard rejected as nonsense all notions of "animal rights. Indeed, it is this inability which defines them as non-rational and distinguishes them categorically from men as rational animals.
Unable to communicate, and without rationality, animals are by their very nature incapable of recognizing or possessing any rights.
Rothbard noted,. There is rough justice in the common quip that "we will recognize the rights of animals whenever they petition for them. Rather than rightful moral agents, animals are objects of possible human control and appropriation.
Thus Rothbard confirmed the biblical pronouncement that man had been given dominion over every living thing, in the sea, on earth, and in the sky. As academia had little to do with Rothbard's success in creating and shaping a political-philosophical mass movement in the first place, its belated mostly negative reactions did little to change Rothbard's growing status as a public philosopher. To the contrary. The course of historical events — the spectacular collapse of the "great socialist experiment" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from —91, and the increasingly obvious crisis of the Western welfare states — provided ever-more support for fundamental libertarian insights.
No one but his teacher Mises had given a more accurate account of the economic inefficiencies of socialism and social democracy than Rothbard, and no one had explained more clearly the moral hazards and perversions created by socialism and social democracy. Whereas the events in Eastern Europe and the economic and moral crisis of the Western states — of stagnating or falling real incomes, staggering public debt, imminently bankrupt social security systems, family and social disintegration, rising incivility, moral degeneration, and crime — were an obvious embarrassment and intellectual debacle for the social-democratic academic establishment, 30 they provided dramatic empirical confirmation for Rothbard and his theoretical work.
In this situation, libertarianism and Rothbard's influence in particular could only grow and gain prominence. By the mids, Rothbard's role as the spiritus rector of a steadily growing and increasingly "threatening" revolutionary libertarian movement was even acknowledged by the mainstream media.
Nor did the academic rejection make any noticeable impression on Rothbard or the further development of libertarian theory. The Ethics of Liberty had been published at a low point in Rothbard's career. Though one of the founders of the Cato Institute, Rothbard had been forced out by the chief financial backer as too "extreme" and "intransigent.
Long after the book had gone out of print in the United States, it was being translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and German, further securing its status as an enduring classic of political philosophy. Ironically, was also the year of the founding of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, of which he served as academic head until his death.
Together with a new academic position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, these would prove to be the years of Rothbard's greatest professional success. After the original publication of The Ethics of Liberty and until his death in , Rothbard was working on a comprehensive and encompassing history of economic and political thought. Two massive volumes of the unfinished three-volume project were published posthumously, in , under the titles Economic Thought Before Adam Smith and Classical Economics.
Pure and abstract Austrian and libertarian theory was illustrated with historical examples and illustrations, and at the same lime intellectual and political history was presented as a systematically comprehensible subject, methodically and thematically unified and integrated.
Rothbard here opened a panoramic view of the entire history of Western civilization, with new vistas and many surprising or even startling reinterpretations and reevaluations. History was unfolded as a permanent struggle between truth and falsehood and good justice and evil — of intellectual and political heroes great and small, and of economic and political breakthroughs and progress, as well as of blunderers and villains, and of errors, perversions, and decline — and the civilizational ups and downs of human history were explained as the results of true and false ideas and the distribution and strength of ideologies in public consciousness.
By complementing economic and political theory with history, Rothbard provided the Austro-libertarian movement with a grand historical perspective, sociological understanding, and strategic vision, and thus deepened and broadened libertarianism's popular anchoring and sociological base.
Besides his main work on the history of economic and political thought, however, Rothbard also returned repeatedly to political theory. In reaction to a growing environmentalist movement and its transformation into an anti-human and pro-animal movement, Rothbard wrote "Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution," 33 further elucidating the concepts of physical invasion, tort, causation, risk, burden of proof, and liability.
In response to the rise of nationalism and separatism in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Empire and US multiculturalism and compulsory "non-discrimination," a decade later in an article on "Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation State," 34 he further elaborated on the libertarian answers to the questions of nations, borders, immigration, separation, and secession.
In the preface to the French edition of The Ethics of Liberty, he summarily reviewed several current contributions to libertarian theory — apart from Nozick's, utilitarian and contractarian libertarianisms, and natural-rights minarchisms — and rejected all of them as ultimately confused or inconsistent. In the monthly Free Market published by the Mises Institute, he provided political and economic analysis of current events, beginning in and continuing until In addition, in he founded the monthly Rothbard-Rockwell Report, which served as the main outlet of Rothbard's political, sociological, cultural and religious commentary ; he contributed dozens of articles in which he applied libertarian principles to the full range of human events and experiences — from war and criminal punishment to the appropriation of air space and waves, blackmail, affirmative action, and adoption, etc.
None of these later writings, however, brought any systematic changes as compared to The Ethics of Liberty, whether on principle or remote conclusions. Different and new problem aspects were analyzed and emphasized, but the essentials were already contained in his earlier treatise. In distinct contrast to Nozick, Rothbard did not change his mind on essential questions. Indeed, looking back over his entire career, it can be said that from the late s, when he had first arrived at what would later become the Rothbardian system, until the end of his life, Rothbard did not waver on fundamental matters of economic or political theory.
Yet owing to his long and intensive work in the history of economic and political thought, a different thematic emphasis became apparent in his later writings, most noticeably in the several hundred articles contributed during the last years of his life. Apart from economic and political concerns, Rothbard increasingly focused his attention on and stressed the importance of culture as a sociological prerequisite of libertarianism.
Libertarianism as developed in The Ethics of Liberty was no more and no less than a political philosophy. It provided an answer to the question of which actions are lawful and hence may not be legitimately threatened with physical violence, and which actions are unlawful and may be so punished. It did not say anything with respect to the further question whether or not all lawful actions should be equally tolerated or possibly punished by means other than — and below the threshold of — a threat of physical violence, such as public disapprobation, ostracism, exclusion, and expulsion.
Even given its explicitly limited scope, The Ethics of Liberty had a distinctly old-fashioned flavor and revealed libertarianism as a fundamentally conservative doctrine. The most obvious indicator of this was the already noted emphasis placed on punishment as the necessary complement to property. More specifically, Rothbard presented a rigorous modern defense of the traditional proportionality principle of punishment as contained in the lex talionis — of an eye for an eye, or rather, as he would correctively explain, two eyes for an eye.
This and Rothbard's own life-long cultural conservatism notwithstanding, however, from its beginnings in the late s and the founding of a libertarian party in , the libertarian movement had great appeal to many of the counter-cultural Left that had then grown up in the United States in opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Did not the illegitimacy of the state and the non-aggression axiom imply that everyone was at liberty to choose his very own non-aggressive lifestyle, no matter what it was? Much of Rothbard's later writings, with their increased emphasis on cultural matters, were designed to correct this development and to explain the error in the idea of a leftist multi-counter-cultural libertarianism, of libertarianism as a variant of libertinism. It was false — empirically as well as normatively — that libertarianism could or should be combined with egalitarian multiculturalism.
Both were in fact sociologically incompatible, and libertarianism could and should be combined exclusively with traditional Western bourgeois culture; that is, the old-fashioned ideal of a family-based and hierarchically structured society of voluntarily acknowledged rank orders of social authority. Empirically, Rothbard did not tire to explain, the left-libertarians failed to recognize that the restoration of private-property rights and laissez-faire economics implied a sharp and drastic increase in social "discrimination.
The modern social-democratic welfare state has increasingly stripped private-property owners of their right to exclude. In distinct contrast, a libertarian society where the right to exclude was fully restored to owners of private property would be profoundly unegalitarian.
To be sure, private property also implies the owner's right to include and to open and facilitate access to one's property, and every private-property owner also faces an economic incentive of including rather than excluding so long as he expects this to increase the value of his property.
The Ethics of Liberty's chapter most difficult to accept for conservatives, on "Children and Rights," comes thus to appear in a different light.
In this chapter Rothbard argued in favor of a mother's "absolute right to her own body and therefore to perform an abortion. Further, upon child birth, a mother and with her consent parents jointly ,.
Parents would be able to sell their trustee-rights in children to anyone who wished to buy them at any mutually-agreed price p. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child … but the parent should have the legal right not to feed his child, i. So as to avoid any misunderstanding, in the next sentence Rothbard reminded his reader of the strictly delineated scope of his treatise on political philosophy and noted that "whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.
Of course, conservative political theory was a contradiction in terms. Conservatism essentially meant not to have, and even reject, any abstract theory and rigorous logical argument.
Not surprisingly, Rothbard was singularly unimpressed by conservative critics such as Russell Kirk, whose "theoretical" work he considered devoid of analytical and argumentative rigor. Consequently, Rothbard did not see any reason to abandon his original conclusions.
Until the end of his life, he would not budge on the problem of abortion and child neglect and insisted on a mother's absolute legal lawful right to an abortion and of letting her children die. In fact, if women did not have such rights and had committed instead a punishable crime, it would seem that their crime then must be equivalent to murder.
Should abortion accordingly be threatened with capital punishment and convicted abortionist mothers be executed? But who, except its mother, can possibly claim a right to her fetus and child and thus be considered as the rightful victim of her actions? Who could bring a wrongful death suit against her? Surely not the state.
For a conservative in particular, any state interference in the autonomy of families should be anathema. But who else, if indeed anyone? Yet while Rothbard unchangingly held to his conclusions concerning the rights of children and parents, his later writings with an increased emphasis on moral-cultural matters and the exclusionary aspect of private property rights placed these conclusions in a wider — and characteristically conservative — social context.
Thus, while in favor of a woman's right to have an abortion, Rothbard was nonetheless strictly opposed to the US Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, which recognized such a right.
This was not because he believed the court's finding concerning the legality of abortion wrong, but on the more fundamental ground that the US Supreme Court had no jurisdiction in the matter and that, by assuming it, the court had engendered a systematic centralization of state power. The right to have an abortion does not imply that one may have an abortion anywhere. In fact, there is nothing impermissible about private owners and associations discriminating against and punishing abortionists by every means other than physical punishment.
Every household and property owner is free to prohibit an abortion on his own territory and may enter into a restrictive covenant with other owners for the same purpose.
Moreover, every owner and every association of owners is free to fire or not to hire and to refuse to engage in any transaction whatsoever with an abortionist. It may indeed be the case that no civilized place can be found anywhere and that one must retire to the infamous "back alley" to have an abortion. Not only would there be nothing wrong with such a situation, it would be positively moral in raising the cost of irresponsible sexual conduct and helping to reduce the number of abortions.
In distinct contrast, the Supreme Court's decision was not only unlawful by expanding its, i. Libertarians, Rothbard stressed in this connection, must be opposed, as are traditional conservatives but unlike social democrats, neo-conservatives, and left-libertarians , on principled grounds to any and all centralization of state power, even and especially if such centralization involves a correct judgment such as that abortion should be legal, or that taxes should be abolished.
It would be anti-libertarian, for instance, to appeal to the United Nations to order the breakup of a taxi-monopoly in Houston, or to the US government to order Utah to abolish its state-certification requirement for teachers, because in doing so one would have illegitimately granted these state agencies jurisdiction over property that they plainly do not own but others do : not only Houston or Utah, but every city in the world and every state in the United States.
And while every state, small or large, violates the rights of private-property owners and must be feared and combated, large central states violate more people's rights and must be feared even more. They do not come into existence ab ova, but are the outgrowth of a process of eliminative competition among originally numerous independent small local states. Central states, and ultimately a single world state, represent the successful expansion and concentration of state power, i.
Hence, a libertarian, as his second-best solution, must always discriminate in favor of local and against central government, and he must always try to correct injustices at the level and location where they occur rather than empowering some higher more centralized level of government to rectify a local injustice.
In fact, as a result of his increasing emphasis on cultural conservatism as a sociological presupposition of libertarianism, Rothbard succeeded in bringing about a fundamental reorientation of the libertarian movement during the last decade of his life. Symbolic of this change in direction was Rothbard's dissociation, in , from the Libertarian Party.
Rothbard's action did not, as some prominent left-libertarians vainly proclaimed at the time, mark the end of his association with libertarianism or his role as the libertarian movement's guiding star. Rather, it marked the beginning of a systematic ideological realignment to open libertarian access to the American "heartland" and foment there a rapidly growing and increasingly radicalized populist movement among "Middle Americans" disgusted with the welfare-warfare statism, and social disintegration produced and promoted by federal policies.
The anti-central-state shift in American politics at the decisive end of the Cold War was the first unmistakable sign of the burgeoning strength of the conservative-libertarian grassroots movement envisioned and shaped by Rothbard.
At the academic level, Rothbard's lifelong work for the scholarship of liberty has at long last come to serve as the foundational theoretical edifice for the modern successors of the old classical-liberal movement, the movement that originally influenced the development of the basic libertarian position. Today, this movement is truly international in scope, and includes thousands of lay intellectuals and professional scholars the world over, many of whom view Rothbard's voluminous writings over the entire course of his lifetime as the model and ideal of principled political and economic thinking.
For his seminal Ethics of Liberty to be available once again should further solidify this status. Contact Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He is the founder and president of The Property and Freedom Society.
Skip to main content. As defined by Rothbard, a state is an organization which possesses either or both in actual fact, almost always both of the following characteristics: a it acquires its revenue by physical coercion taxation ; and b it achieves a compulsory monopoly of force and of ultimate decision-making power over a given territorial area. His writing, he stated, was in the mode of much contemporary philosophical work in epistemology and metaphysics: there are elaborate arguments, claims rebutted by unlikely counterexamples, surprising theses, puzzles, abstract structural conditions, challenges to find another theory which fits a specified range of cases, startling conclusions, and so on….
And the Declaration of Independence, and in particular its author Thomas Jefferson, reflected and expressed the same rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment and the even older natural-law tradition that also characterized Rothbard and his political philosophy: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Rothbard noted, There is rough justice in the common quip that "we will recognize the rights of animals whenever they petition for them. Further, upon child birth, a mother and with her consent parents jointly , would have the trustee-ownership of her children, an ownership limited only by the illegality of aggressing against their persons and by their absolute right to run away or to leave home at any time.
So long as children have not left home, a parent: does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas January 1. Murray N. Van Nostrand, Rothbard, Power and Market , 2nd ed. See Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State , ch. Ibid, p. Mises, Human Action , p. Rothbard, For A New Liberty , rev ed. New York: Macmillan, Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia , p. There he wrote, I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to stop.
I have not found that book, or attempted it. Still, I wrote and thought in awareness of it, in the hope that this book would bask in its light. He moves along gently, exploring his own and the author's thoughts.
He explores together with the author, moving only where he is ready to; then he stops. Perhaps, at a later time mulling it over or in a second reading, he will move further…. I place no extreme obligation of attentiveness on my readers; I hope instead for those who read as I do, seeking what they can learn from, make use of, transform for their own purposes … This book puts forward its explanations in a very tentative spirit; not only do I not ask you to believe they are correct, I do not think it important for me to believe them correct, either.
Still, I do believe, and hope you will find it so, that these proposed explanations are illuminating and worth considering, that they are worth surpassing; also, that the process of seeking and elaborating explanations, being open to new possibilities, the new wonderings and wanderings, the free exploration, is itself a delight.
Can any pleasure compare to that of a new idea, a new question? There is sexual experience of course, not dissimilar, with its own playfulness and possibilities, its focused freedom, its depth, its sharp pleasures and its gentle ones, its ecstasies. What is the mind's excitement and sensuality? What is orgasm? Whatever, it unfortunately will frighten and offend the puritans of the mind do the two puritanisms share a common root? In accordance with this non-methodical mindset, Nozick's philosophical interests continued to drift from one subject to another.
Already in his Philosophical Explanations , he had confessed, "I have found and not only in sequence many different philosophies alluring and appealing, cogent and impressive, tempting and wonderful. It was one exciting subject among innumerous others, to be taken up for "exploration" or dropped as one's curiosity demanded. It was not entirely surprising then when, only a few years after the publication of the very book that had made him famous, it became increasingly obvious that Nozick had all but abandoned even his kind and gentle libertarianism.
And when he at last acknowledged openly in The Examined Life , a book of neo-Buddhist musings on the meaning of life that he was no longer a libertarian and had converted to communitarian social democracy, he still felt under no obligation to give reasons for his change of mind and explain why his previous ethical views had been false.
Interestingly, this development seems to have had little effect on the status of Anarchy, State, and Utopia as prime libertarian philosophizing. An interesting parallel exists between the treatment of Rothbard vs. Nozick by the philosophy establishment, and that of Mises vs. Hayek by the economics establishment. Even if Mises's conclusions were significantly more radical than Hayek's, both came to largely similar — politically "incorrect" — free-market conclusions.
Based on the similarity of their conclusions, both Mises and Hayek were considered Austrian School economists. Yet the method by which they derived their conclusions fundamentally differed. Mises was a philosophical rationalist: systematic, rigorous, proving and demonstrating, and lucid as a writer. In comparison, Hayek was a philosophical skeptic; unsystematic, methodologically eclectic, tentative and probing, and a less than lucid writer. Murray Rothbard's greatest contribution to the politics of freedom is back in print.
Following up on Mises's demonstration that a society without private property degenerates into economic chaos, Rothbard shows that every interference with property represents a violent and unethical invasion that diminishes liberty and prosperity. First published in , The Ethics of Liberty is a masterpiece of argumentation, and shockingly radical in its conclusions. Rothbard says that the very existence of the state — the entity with a monopoly privilege to invade private property — is contrary to the ethics of liberty.
A society without a state is not only viable; it is the only one consistent with natural rights. When it first appeared, the book was ignored by the scholarly world. Robert Nozick's treatise, taking a much softer view, was heralded instead.
Nozick has since moved on to social democracy. Meanwhile, Rothbard's primary philosophical work went out of print and then virtually disappeared. Foreign-language editions have appeared, but the English version was unavailable.
But times have changed. This was a bit of a disappointment. Perhaps it's too seminal for its own good. But time is not the full reason for my disappointment, nor does it excuse his simplicity to the extent that some apologists might claim.
I cannot get over the fact that I was expecting a more substantial and philosophically honest exposition of liberty from a natural rights perspective. I have listened to some of Rothbard's lectures and found him to be an engaging speaker.
So I wanted to believe that he was also a good philosopher. Instead, Rothbard offers an all-too-brief natural rights account of property rights, liberty, homesteading and the non-aggression principle. He extends these principles dogmatically and unwaveringly to the whole realm of human interaction, but since the foundations of the edifice are merely repeated from page to page, the entire credibility of his argument hinges on the first couple of chapters.
And there isn't much there. I believe that his foundations are left underdeveloped. The logically deduced structure, however majestic and grand, is left, inexplicably, without proper intellectual bodyguards, beyond a few underpaid foot soldiers whom a stronger army can eat for breakfast. In other words, if you wish to have a leitmotif to carry a 3-hour opera, you better have a good one.
And his is only The whole edifice of rights becomes dubious as a consequence. This is especially true when it comes to the difficult cases, like the lifeboat dilemma, shouting fire in a crowded theatre, or children's rights.
His answers are occasionally interesting, always logical, but mostly simple-minded. He does introduce some wonderfully radical proposals which make a lot of sense, but I wish he could argue for them from a more robust standpoint. One does not have to be a convinced rule-utilitarian, like I am, and like many classical liberals have been, to see major problems with his philosophy. Even natural rights have better exponents, starting with John Locke himself, whom Rothbard mangles for his own purposes, thus simplifying philosophical issues down to the basics.
Considering that everything is supposed to flow from simple premises, too little work is being done to ward off criticisms. Of course, the Shakespeare fallacy is partially applicable here, too, since a lot of the criticism was fleshed out only decades later, but compared to contemporary works like Anarchy, State, and Utopia , Rothbard's grasp of the complexities of philosophical argumentation seems tame and lame.
He fights straw men when he can, he doesn't give a fair hearing to the other side, and he introduces freshman-level, hyperbolic counterarguments to utilitarianism and other alternative theories, as if he was the first man to come up with such stuff.
The style of the book straddles the fine line between lucid and simplistic. It could be praised for the clarity of its arguments. But it should also be attacked for the simplicity of its logical steps. They are watertight only in the carefully constructed world of ideal theory - the crystal palaces of libertarian heaven. But reality seeps in. The best laid plans of mice and Rothbard only take us so far.
Natural rights are a potentially super powerful tool of philosophy that demand better exposition. There was a time when I might have been more impressed by a theory that seems to provide answers to all circumstances. It is good to have a theory that can be appealed to in all possible circumstances, but it is not a virtue of a theory that is provides easy answers.
Any dogmatic theory, indeed, can be applied in an infinity of circumstances. A theory that explains everything explains nothing.
0コメント