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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSOPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
8 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
that modern natural law is a degeneration of the classical
natural law that is an expression of civic virtue. In Strauss’s
view, the individualism of the Lockean tradition, with its
theory of property, breaks with the classical and Scholastic
tradition and represents a decline from the values of the
past, placing the individual and his rights at the center of
the universe with consequences such as “the solution of the
political problem through economic means,” of which he disapproves.
4 Strauss writes that
Locke’s teaching on property, and therewith his
whole political philosophy, are revolutionary not
only with regard to the biblical tradition but with
regard to the philosophic tradition as well.
Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties
or obligations to natural rights, the individual,
the ego, had become the center and origin of the
moral world, since man—as distinguished from
man’s end—had become that center or origin. 5
Safeguarding the individual’s right to property becomes
an aim of the kind of politics that had ceased to draw inspiration
from a natural end, wisdom, and virtue.
Rothbard sees Strauss as an icon of conservatism, pressing
an invitation to return to the ancients, and as a critic of
a modernity heralding the historicism and relativism that led
to the impossibility of making judgments of binding value
for the whole community. Affirming that values are subjective
and, above all, can change with the times would make it
4Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1959), p. 49. At the heart of
Strauss’s idea is the critical reconstruction of modernity as a break
with the ancient and medieval politico-philosophical tradition. See
also Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Raimondo Cubeddu, Leo Strauss e la
filosofia politica moderna (Naples: ESI, 1983).
5Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, [1953] 1965), p. 248.