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

LAW AND NATURE IN THE WORK OF MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 5
respectively; and it is actually here that, for the first time,
Rothbard thoroughly and extensively expresses his dissent
from the ideas of the two great masters. The criticisms of
Mises are the same as those contained in Ethics of Liberty,
but the comments on the Symposium on Relativism of 1960
mark the first time that Rothbard distances himself from
some Misesian positions. This is an interesting set of documents
showing how the main lines of Rothbardian thought
were already firmly in place between the late 1950s and the
early 1960s as regards subjects such as the possibility of
absolute ethical values based on natural law, the nonaggression
axiom, and the criticism of the state.
But that is not all. As early as 1948, we find in the comments
made by the twenty-two-year-old Rothbard on Cutten’s
paper, “Rugged Individualism,” arguments that demolish
the aberrant theories of social Darwinism, revealing that
the young author’s individualism was already mature before
he met Mises. Allusions to the immorality of the state’s initiatives
for social welfare and criticisms of the state were a
sign that the development of Rothbard’s thought already
included the idea of the state as aggressor.
Alongside these writings, there are very positive comments
on Lionel Robbins’s The Great Depression and on
Caroline Robbins’s The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman.
The volume by Lionel Robbins is presented as “one of
the great economic works of our time.” 1 Robbins attributes
responsibility for the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to the interventionist
economic policies that caused the expansion of
credit in the preceding years. After this, recovery was slow
because of policies that interfered with the capacity of the
market to correct the structure of production that had been
damaged by the preceding expansion of credit, thereby
increasing the length and the severity of the Depression.
1 Murray N. Rothbard, “Review of Lionel Robbins, The Great
Depression” (London: Macmillan, 1937); see p. 79 in this volume.