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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
122 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
this idea permeates the book. 74 Modern Rousseauism
received a major impetus from the cultural anthropologists,
such as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Franz Boas, and the
like (many of whom were Communists, and the remainder
highly left-wing), who went eagerly to visit the existing primitive
tribes, and reported back about the gay, happy life of
Tribe X which had no private property and no inhibitions
imposed by monogamous marriage. 75
There are several things to be said about this worship of
the primitive. First, it is absolutely illegitimate to infer, as
Polanyi does, the history of pre-Western civilization from
analysis of existing primitive tribes. Let us never forget that
the existing primitive tribes are precisely the ones that didn’t
progress—that remained in their primitive state. To infer
from observing them that this is the way our ancestors
behaved is nonsense—and apt to be the reverse of the truth,
for our ancestors presumably behaved in ways that quickly
advanced them beyond the primitive stage thousands of
years ago. To scoff, therefore, at the idea that our ancestors
among primitive tribes engaged in barter, and then in monetary
exchange, etc., on the basis of the magic and games
indulged in by present-day primitives, is a blunder of the
highest order.
74Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 202. Rothbard notes,
“For an excellent discussion of Rousseau, primitivism and the
Romantic Movement, see Irving Babbit, Rousseau and Romanticism
(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935).”
75Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) was an American anthropologist
whose work had a strong influence in the field of cultural anthropology.
She studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University, where
she later taught. After eleven years of study in the field among
Native Americans, she published Tales of the Cochiti Indians (1931)
and Patterns of Culture (1934), emphasizing how the attitudes of a
particular culture contributed deterministically to defining an individual’s
personality. In 1940, to combat Nazi racial theories, she
published Race: Science and Politics. She was recognized as one of
the most important anthropologists in the United States and was
president of the American Anthropological Association.