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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
64 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
government edict. The former, to Hayek, is the “evolutionary,”
irrationalist, empirical (and really, pragmatic) tradition, and is
good; the latter is the evil, rationalist, “French” tradition.
In short, for Hayek, reason and rationalism are synonymous
with government coercion, and coercion can only be
attacked by also attacking reason, and saying, over and over
again, that we need to do so, despite the fact that we do not
know what we are doing or why. Not realizing that reason is
in fact the very opposite of coercion, that force and persuasion
are antitheses, and that this was so considered by the
rationalist libertarians, Hayek constantly confuses traditions
and concepts. Also, he doesn’t seem to fully realize the
paradox of using reason, as he tries to do, to attack reason.
Because he lumps all systematic rationalists together, he
can say, with the Jacobins, that reason leads to tyranny, and
a few pages later, attack rationalism that leads to “extreme”
laissez-faire, and even anarchism. He explicitly attacks laissez-faire
for being the product of “French” rationalism—and
he is right that it is such a product—but out of what masterpiece
of gigantic confusion can he link this up with
tyranny? Confusion is compounded when he identifies Locke
as an “empiricist,” and Jefferson and Price and Priestley as
terrible rationalists, even though Jefferson, Paine, et al.
were taking their doctrines squarely from Locke. 16 He
16 Richard Price (1723–1791), a dissenter of Arian convictions,
was a great supporter of both American Independence and the French
Revolution (it should be noted, however, that he died before the end
of the latter). In 1758 he became a minister of the Presbyterian
Church in the Newington Green community. He was a member of the
Royal Society and of the Pennsylvania Society for Abolishing Negro
Slavery. He was also part of numerous intellectual circles; one of his
favorites was the Honest Whig club. Price’s political philosophy came
directly from the moral theory of the autonomy of the individual,
according to which an individual, in order to be virtuous, had to be
free; and any constraint whatsoever on individual conscience was an
arbitrary exercise of power. One of his famous speeches was “On the
Love of Our Country,” given in 1789 to the Society for the Commemoration
of the Glorious Revolution, in which he expressed his
unreserved approval for the French Revolution. This speech led