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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSOPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
34 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
awareness of the historical and evolutionary character of
law. Fassò goes on to say that it would be ingenuous “to mistake
the values held in one age, and valid for that age, for
eternal and immutable values.” 62
Thus, the attempt to establish what is absolutely good for
man by appealing to “human nature,” which would really
seem to be a cultural idea, demonstrates the great distance
between Rothbard and Hayek’s evolutionary argument. In
this sense, Rothbard’s criticism of Hayek is paradigmatic of
the split we find today within the Austrian School of economics
between the libertarians who refer back to Locke’s
version of the idea of right reason that enables an understanding
of natural law, and the heirs of the theory, typical
of the Austrian School, of a limited, fallible, and evolutionist
kind of knowledge. This contrast, already evident in the
writings under consideration here, is made explicit and theorized
more fully by Rothbard in his 1992 The Present
State of the Austrian School of Economics, from which the
profound differences between the various paradigms within
the Austrian School emerge. In this paper, Rothbard takes
his distance from “Hayek’s entire work,” in that it is
“devoted to a denigration of human reason.” 63
Absolute values for whom? Absolute on the basis of
which arguments? Absolute because they are experienced
as such or because they are based on absolute
reasons? . . . And is it not true that nothing is more
cultural than the idea of nature and, therefore, also of
human nature? And then, is it not precisely the
awareness of the fallibility of human knowledge and
of an inevitable pluralism of different values that provides
the safest garrison for liberty and the constitutional
state?
See Antiseri, “Ius quia iustum. Sed quid iustum? Considerazioni
in margine a ‘La dottrina del diritto naturale’,” in Alessandro
Passerin d’Entrèves pensatore europeo, p. 111.
62Fassò, La legge della ragione, p. 217
63Murray N. Rothbard, in The Logic of Action I, p. 141. This
work was first presented on the occasion of the Tenth Anniversary