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

LAW AND NATURE IN THE WORK OF MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 11
definition of natural law has nothing revolutionary.
When he maintains that natural law is that
body of rules which man is able to discover by the
use of his reason, he does nothing but restate the
Scholastic notion of a rational foundation of
ethics. Indeed, his aim is rather to restore that
notion which had been shaken by the extreme
Augustinianism of certain Protestant currents of
thought. When he declares that these rules are
valid in themselves, independently of the fact that
God willed them, he repeats an assertion which
had already been made by some of the Schoolmen.
. . .
Grotius’s aim, D’Entrèves adds, “was to construct
a system of laws which would carry conviction
in an age in which theological controversy
was gradually losing the power to do so.” Grotius
and his juristic successors—Pufendorf, Burlamaqui,
and Vattel—proceeded to elaborate this
independent body of natural law in a purely secular
context, in accordance with their own particular
interests, which were not, in contrast to the
Schoolmen, primarily theological. 9
In An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic
Thought Rothbard states,
we should realize that the scholastics may have
dominated medieval and post-medieval traditions,
9 Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982), p. 5. The reference is to Alessandro
Passerin d’Entrèves, La dottrina del diritto naturale (Milan: Edizioni
di Comunità, 1954), pp. 51–52. It has recently been pointed out
that the continuity between natural law and natural rights in the
thought of Passerin d’Entrèves probably refers more to the function
historically carried out by natural law rather than to a doctrinal continuity.
See Raimondo Cubeddu, “La concezione del diritto naturale
in Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves,” in Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves
pensatore europeo, edited by Sergio Noto (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 2004), pp. 179–210.