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

LAW AND NATURE IN THE WORK OF MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 7
The great defect is that Strauss, while favoring
what he considers to be the classical and Christian
concepts of natural law, is bitterly opposed to
the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions
of Locke and the rationalists, particularly to
their “abstract,” “deductive” championing of the
natural rights of the individual: liberty, property,
etc.
Strauss, in fact, has been the leading champion,
along with Russell Kirk and the Catholic
scholars in America, of a recent trend in Locke
historiography . . . to sunder completely the “bad,”
individualist, natural-rights type natural law of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from the
“good” classical-Christian type—good, presumably,
because it was so vague and so “prudential”
that it offered very little chance to defend individual
liberty against the state. In this reading,
Hobbes and Locke are the great villains in the
alleged perversion of natural law.
To my mind, this “perversion” was a healthy
sharpening and development of the concept. My
quarrel with Strauss, Kirk, et al., therefore, is
not only valuational—that they are anti-natural
rights and liberty, and I am for them—but also
factual and historical: for they think that the
Lockeans had an entirely different concept of natural
law, whereas I think that the difference—
while clearly there—was a sharpening development,
rather than a perversion or a diametric
opposite. 2
This is where Rothbard’s criticism of the Straussian concept
of modern natural law first appears. 3 Strauss argues
2Murray N. Rothbard, “Letter on What is Political Philosophy?
by Leo Strauss”; see p. 91 in this volume.
3This theme comes up in later works. See, for example, Murray
N. Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic
Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Cheltenham,
U.K.: Eward Elgar, 1995), pp. 313–14, 339.