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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
106 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
any selections or make any judgments about values—as
Leoni indicates, and Mises shows elsewhere, making judgments
of relevance or about values does not imply a value
judgment on the part of the scholar.) For, in the final analysis,
Leoni has to concede that ultimate ends—ultimate ethical
values—are arbitrary and personal, and in fact, in an
explicitly antirational section, he is scornful of the very idea
that ethical values should be rationally demonstrated. To
say, as Leoni does, that “if we need to ‘demonstrate’ the
validity of our values to ourselves, this possibly means that
we actually do not believe them enough to give up that
‘demonstration’ . . . if we try to demonstrate our values to
other people, this is by no means the surest way of convincing
them to accept those values,” is sheer antirational obscurantism.
55 Values should be demonstrated because reason is
the only sure, solid ground of conviction about values—far
more solid than the emotional whims upon which Leoni
would apparently base them. Strauss is right that the Weber
position is, in the end, ethical relativism, because it holds
that ethics are purely subjective and arbitrary, and not subject
to rational demonstration; Strauss is right because he
believes in the possibility and demonstrability of rational,
objective ethics.
Leoni is also on shakier ground than Mises, because
Mises’s main discussion is on keeping economics and praxeology
apart from ethics—which is a perfectly sound position—whereas
Leoni is trying to keep ethics out of “political
science.” Now, while economics is a self-subsistent, wertfrei
science, “political science” is not; modern political science
is an empty, pretentious, quasi-mathematical set of
“model building,” and when we peel away the pretension, we
find that “political science” is divisible into two parts: current
history of political institutions or political thought, and
political philosophy. And the very essence of political philosophy
is the carving out of an ethical system—strictly, a
subset of ethics dealing with political ethics. Ethics is the
55 Ibid., p. 163.