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

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 113
Leo Strauss, “Relativism” 62
I should make clear why I, a vehement critic of the books
of Strauss’s that I have read, consider this paper to be an
excellent one. Strauss has one good point, and one alone:
that there exists an absolute ethics for man, discoverable by
reason, in accordance with the natural law of human nature.
This is his good point, even though whenever he discusses
the content of the ethics that he upholds, he becomes poor
and questionable. But it is precisely this one good point to
which he devotes his entire paper on relativism.
I have said in discussing Leoni’s paper, that Strauss is
right, and Mises and Leoni are wrong, and I say this even
though in the content of their political positions, I am enormously
more in agreement with Mises than with Strauss.
Strauss’s paper is devoted to a critique of ethical relativism
(upheld by Mises, and particularly Leoni), and an argument
on behalf of the existence of an objective, rational ethics.
The paper is rather oddly organized, being a series of
criticisms of various relativists. Strauss begins with the
almost incredibly confused and overrated Isaiah Berlin, and
has no trouble demolishing Berlin and exposing his confusions—Berlin
trying to be at the same time an exponent of
“positive freedom,” “negative freedom,” absolutism, and relativism.
He then proceeds to a very keen critique of the relativism
of the famous Arnold Brecht. 63 Strauss shows, for
62Leo Strauss, “Relativism,” in Schoeck and Wiggins, eds., Relativism,
pp. 135–57.
63Arnold Brecht (1884–1977) was a civil servant in Germany.
Under the Nazi regime he was arrested in 1933 and then released,
after which he escaped to the United States. He began his academic
career in the field of political science at the New School for Social
Research in New York, where he remained until 1953, when he
retired. At the center of Brecht’s work was the development of political
studies as a scientific discipline. He was the author of Political
Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth-Century Political Thought
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), in which he