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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSOPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
12 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
but that despite this fact, they were pioneers and
elaborators of the natural law and natural rights
traditions. The pitting of “tradition” versus
“modernity” is largely an artificial antithesis. . . .
Locke may have been and indeed was an ardent
Protestant, but he was also a Protestant scholastic,
heavily influenced by the founder of Protestant
scholasticism, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius, who in
turn was heavily influenced by the late Spanish
Catholic scholastics. . . . While Locke developed
libertarian natural rights thought more fully than
his predecessors, it was still squarely embedded in
the scholastic natural law tradition. 10
Within this vision, the Rothbardian idea of a link
between the laws of nature and natural rights becomes less
distinct at the point where the author emphasizes the
enrichment brought by the Levellers and Locke in terms of
individualism. Rothbard says that while Aristotle’s vision of
man led to the state being seen as the place of the good and
virtuous action, “it was, in contrast, the Levellers and John
Locke in seventeenth-century England who transformed
classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological
and hence political individualism.” 11 The continuity thesis
has recently been corroborated by the work of Brian
Tierney who clearly questions the ideas of Strauss and
Michel Villey on the contrast between an ancient Aristotelian
doctrine of natural law and a modern theory of
subjective individual rights. 12 While for Villey the modern
10Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective, vol. 1, pp. 313–14.
11Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 21.
12See Strauss, Natural Right and History; Michel Villey, La formation
de la pensée juridique moderne (Paris: Editions
Montchrestien, 1975); and Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural
Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law,
1150–1625 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1997). See also Annabel
S. Brett, Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later
Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).