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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSOPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
6 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
Rothbard also greatly appreciates Caroline Robbins’s
monumental work on the eighteenth-century republicans.
He considers the principal merit of her work to be that it
fills the gap between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and
the liberal and republican ideas that emerged at the end of
the eighteenth century, thus rediscovering a whole series of
liberal, radical, dissident, and republican thinkers. Personalities
like Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard—the
authors of the famous Cato’s Letters—Thomas Hollis, John
Burgh, and Francis Hutcheson are restored to historiography,
underlining their important role in preserving and
developing the English liberal and libertarian tradition.
ROTHBARD AND LEO STRAUSS
ONE OF THE BASIC themes of the writings presented here is
the possibility of a rational foundation for ethical values.
Another is Rothbard’s constant reference to natural law and
natural rights. Because of these themes, the writings on
Strauss, although brief, are important. Rothbard is always
critical of Leo Strauss but he agrees with him on the need
for a rational basis for ethics and absolute values. These
positions are seen both in the review of What is Political
Philosophy? and in the comments on Strauss’s paper for the
Symposium on Relativism (organized by the Volker Fund in
1960). According to Rothbard, the great virtue of Strauss’s
work “is that he is on the forefront of the fight to restore
and resurrect political philosophy from the interment given
it by modern positivists and adherents of scientism—in
short, that he wants to restore values and political ethics to
the study of politics.” However, Rothbard thinks that
Strauss’s work also contains an important flaw: