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

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD VS. THE PHILOSPHERS: UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS
90 ON HAYEK, MISES, STRAUSS, AND POLYANI
like William Ogilvie 39 and Thomas Spence, and she is especially
fond of a statist character like Thomas Pownall. 40 In
short, while she is obviously extremely sympathetic with the
Like the winds that come we know not whence, and blow
whithersoever they list, the forms of society are derived
from an obscure and distant origin; they arise, long
before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not
from the speculations of men. . . . This is the simplest
form under which we can consider the establishment of
nations: and we ascribe to a previous design, what
came to be known only by experience, what no human
wisdom could foresee, and what, without the concurring
humour and disposition of his age, no authority
could enable an individual to execute. (An Essay on
the History of Civil Society [Whitefish, Mont.:
Kessinger Publishing, 2004], pp. 75–76)
One of the characteristic aspects of his thought was a profound
criticism of commercial society, which, he claimed, through the division
of labor, alienated man, depriving him of his humanity. For Ferguson,
the development of the mechanical arts and the growth of
production and trade did not automatically lead to moral and political
progress. The division of labor in the sphere of the state, furthermore,
had led to the establishment of a standing army that, in
Ferguson’s opinion, was yet another instrument of oppression in the
hands of government. Ferguson therefore proposed the republican
ideal of the citizen soldier. This explicitly recalled the values and
ideas of the modern republican tradition. He thought that freedom
could be kept alive not so much by constitutions and laws but rather
by the active participation of citizens in civil life.
39William Ogilvie (1736–1819) taught philosophy at the Aberdeen
University and was a supporter of the theory of the joint property of
the earth.
40Thomas Spence (1750–1814), an English radical, maintained
that all land should be public. In 1792 he moved to London where
he earned his living selling copies of The Rights of Man by Thomas
Paine on street corners. He was arrested on several occasions for
distributing seditious texts. In 1793, for a short time, he published
the journal Pig’s Meat. He opened a shop selling books with radical
ideas. He supported women’s rights.
Thomas Pownall (1722–1805) was the author of Administration
of the Colonies (1764), in which he supported the idea of a union of
all the British dominions on the basis of common commercial interests.