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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSOPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
4 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
seminars at prestigious universities and was one of the most
influential classical-liberal foundations in the United States.
Since the end of the 1940s, Rothbard had also been
working part time as a consultant to the National Book
Foundation (a subsidiary of the Volker Fund) and for the
Foundation for Economic Education. The Foundation for
Economic Education (FEE) was founded by Leonard E.
Read in 1946, with headquarters in a mansion on the banks
of the Hudson River in New York. Its aim was to disseminate
libertarian ideas, especially in the area of economics.
Rothbard first made contact with this foundation when he
requested a copy of a pamphlet against rent control, Roofs
or Ceilings? written by Milton Friedman and George Stigler.
The young Rothbard had attended Stigler’s economics lectures
at Columbia University.
The reviews and comments published in the following
pages date from the years when Rothbard was working for
the Volker Fund, and the two classical-liberal foundations,
National Book Foundation, and FEE. Given their nature,
they comprise a set of writings that are very heterogeneous,
composed in a style that is sometimes informal and marked
by the biting irony that was to become a typical feature of
Rothbard’s prose. In them, one can find some of the major
themes that characterize the thought of the author.
These writings are published here for the first time, in
their original English, and the decision to publish them was
made for various reasons. Some pieces clarify the author’s
position in relation to intellectuals such as Leo Strauss and
Karl Polanyi on subjects such as progress, technology, and
on what today is termed “globalization.” Others, such as the
two sets of comments on Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty,
contain not only the criticisms—later found in Ethics of Liberty—of
the Hayekian concept of “coercion,” but also some
interesting criticisms of the rule of law as a guarantee of liberty
and of the absence of references to natural law in
Hayek’s work. Furthermore, these writings help shed light
on the genesis of Rothbard’s thought. His criticisms of
Hayek’s and Mises’s ideas date back to 1958 and 1960