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

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 63
attribute the importance that it has for Hayek. Of course,
this also means that if everyone knew in advance that he
would be tortured and enslaved one year out of every three,
neither would this be coercion. From this ensues Hayek’s
inordinate passion for the rule of law and equality under the
law, which he reveres to the exclusion of all other (and more
important) aspects of liberty. If everyone were prohibited
from drinking or from blaspheming Allah or forced into
slavery one out of three years, then Hayek could not say for
a moment that this would be coercion or unjustified.
His entire historical section then becomes a mass of distortion,
since he interprets the whole libertarian movement
as simply a narrow advance toward equality under the law,
which is only one, and a minor, aspect of libertarianism.
Hayek is enabled to do this by his brusque and cavalier dismissal
of the whole theory of natural law (natural rights—the
great libertarian deduction from natural law—is not mentioned
once in the Hayek discussion) as “intellectually unsatisfying.”
Since natural law is dismissed as some sort of unimportant
quirk, then obviously only the form of law can be discussed,
rather than the content: i.e., would everybody be
equal under whatever law there is? Granted, this restriction
of form would, in fact, restrict the content of tyranny to some
degree, but Hayek sees only the equality under the law as a
value. And not only does he brusquely dismiss natural law
and natural rights from his consideration, he acts as if the
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century libertarians were not
really concerned about it either.
Tied up with his dismissal of natural law is Hayek’s continuous
and all-pervasive attack on reason. Reason is his bête
noire, and time and time again, from numerous and even
contradictory standpoints, he opposes it. The true rationalist
theory was, and is, that reason can discover the natural law
of man, and from this can discover the natural rights of liberty.
Since Hayek dismisses this even from historical consideration,
he is left with only two choices for the formation of
a political ethic: either blind adherence to custom and the
traditions of the “social organism,” or the coercive force of