Murray N. Rothbard vs. the Philosophers - Ludwig von Mises Institute

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 93
what he considers to be the classical and Christian concepts
of natural law, is bitterly opposed to the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century conceptions of Locke and the rationalists,
particularly to their “abstract,” “deductive” championing
of the natural rights of the individual: liberty, property,
etc.
Strauss, in fact, has been the leading champion, along
with Russell Kirk 42 and the Catholic scholars in America, of
a recent trend in Locke historiography (e.g., in Peter Stanlis’s
book on Edmund Burke and the Natural Law 43 ) to sunder
completely the “bad,” individualist natural-rights type
natural law of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
from the “good” classical-Christian type—good, presumably,
because it was so vague and so “prudential” that it offered
very little chance to defend individual liberty against the
state. In this reading, Hobbes and Locke are the great villains
in the alleged perversion of natural law.
To my mind, this “perversion” was a healthy sharpening
and development of the concept. My quarrel with Strauss,
Kirk, et al., therefore, is not only valuational—that they are
anti-natural rights and liberty, and I am for them—but also
factual and historical: for they think that the Lockeans had
an entirely different concept of natural law, whereas I think
that the difference—while clearly there—was a sharpening
42Russell Kirk, an exponent of American conservatism, was editor
of Modern Age, a journal published in Chicago by the Foundation
for Foreign Affairs, founded in 1957. He is the author of The
Portable Conservative Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1982);
The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Regnery,
1953); Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (Wilmington,
Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997); Prospects for Conservatives
(Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989); Rights and
Duties: Reflections on our Conservative Constitution (Dallas: Spence
Publications, 1997).
43Peter Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1958). The author places Edmund
Burke within the Thomist and late Scholastic tradition of natural
law rather than in that of natural rights.