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

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD 89
There are a few difficulties with the book. Perhaps the
main one is that Miss Robbins is sometimes wobbly about
whom she should admit to the liberal pantheon, and that she
lets in quite a few people who are not liberals even by a generous
stretch of the imagination. Her standards are unfortunately
not high enough, and this is particularly true in the
chapter on Scotland, where she includes Robert Wallace,
who was practically a communist, as well as quite unliberal
people like Adam Ferguson. 38 She includes land communists
paradox of a kind of ethics and politics following nature and reason,
applying them in the kingdom of the philosopher horses and
another kingdom based on injustice and the abuse of men reduced
to slaves.
Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was an English novelist and playwright
who wrote Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749).
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was an English writer of Unitarian
origins and a friend of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and John Keats. Author of An Essay
on the Principles of Human Action (1805), he worked for the Morning
Chronicle, and his articles appeared in the collection A View of
the English Stage (1818). See, among others, Characters of Shakespeare’s
Plays (1817) and The Spirit of the Age (1825).
James Boswell (1749–1795), a Scottish lawyer, attended Adam
Smith’s lectures at Glasgow University. During a trip to Europe in
1764, he interviewed Rousseau and Voltaire. He is most well known
as the biographer of the famous man of letters Samuel Johnson, The
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).
38Robert Wallace (1697–1771), a Scottish Presbyterian minister,
was the author of Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and
Providence (1761), a communitarian utopia. In this work, Wallace
described the idea of a world government that eliminated private
property and imposed equality. In his ideal world, the raising of children
would be delegated to the state.
Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), a Scottish philosopher and historian,
taught moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from
1764 to 1785. He was one of the most important figures of the
Scottish Enlightenment. Author of An Essay on the History of Civil
Society (1767), he was one of the exponents of the spontaneous
order tradition. According to Ferguson,