An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Hardcover]

I first heard of Murray Rothbard in 1970 when I was a high-school student researching the Depression. My kid brother pulled Rothbard's "America's Great Depression" off the shelf of our local public library and suggested I might find it useful.

I was at the age where I was exploring a variety of political perspectives, from John Kenneth Galbraith to Ayn Rand, but I soon recognized that Rothbard was unique.

It was only in the late '70s, as a graduate student at Stanford, that I actually had a chance to meet Rothbard in person. At the time, the national libertarian movement (the Cato Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, the Institute for Humane Studies, etc.) had, for various reasons, come to be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, near Stanford, and I had a chance to meet not only Rothabrd but a number of other leading figures in the movement, including Justin Raimondo, the author of this biography of Rothbard.

I was thus peripherally involved in some of the incidents described in this book -- for example, I was a member of the "Radical Caucus," founded by Rainmondo and led by Rothbard. I can therefore testify that, as far as my personal knowledge is concerned, Raimondo has reported accurately, even where he himself differed from Rothbard (for example, on the 1984 Presidential campaign, when Rothbard and I were on the opposite side from Raimondo).

Above all, Raimondo paints an accurate picture of Rothbard as a person: Rothbard was joyously ebullient, voraciously curious, and, while politically passionate, always a gentleman. Over the years, I myself differed from Rothbard on a number of issues -- ranging from intellectual property law to policy in Central America -- but I know of no case in which Rothbard ever behaved in a dishonorable manner.

Rothbard reoriented the thinking of those in our generation who had a serious interest in issues of political philosophy and government. He differed from other advocates of individual rights and limited government in that he combined a rigorously logical understanding of the structure of human rights with an unflinchingly detailed empirical understanding of human history.

He taught us three central lessons:

1. Government -- all governments everywhere -- exists to enable some human beings to control and manipulate other human beings. While an occasional purpose of government is to interfere with others' private lives and control their ideas and/or values, the overarching purpose of government is to enable some people to live at the expense of others via taxation, forced labor, etc.

2. The history of humankind is therefore the record of the struggle between Liberty and Power, between those humans who simply wish to be left alone to live their lives in peace and those who wish to control other human beings. Historians who portray the past as primarily consensus rather than conflict or as the inevitable triumph of impersonal, progressive social forces are lying apologists for tyranny.

3. War is, above all, the means by which government expands its power, not simply by seizing the population and territory of other states but, more importantly, as a means of intensifying and deepening its control of its own populace -- curtailing civil liberties, whipping up nationalist hysteria, increasing the burden of taxation, etc. You cannot favor individual rights, private property, and free markets and also favor war.

Of course, these lessons were, to a large degree, as Rothbard himself recognized, simply a matter of relearning the lessons of the radical liberals of the nineteenth century, of the Jeffersonian wing of the American founding, and of the founding libertarians (such as John Lilburne and the American Roger Williams) of the seventeenth-century English Revolution. But Rothbard presented these lessons in a clearer and more straightforward manner, backed by a wealth of historical understanding, than ever before.

For those of us previously exposed to the "conservatism" of William F. Buckley and his "New Right" circle (Buckley actually advocated, in his own words, a "totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores..." to pursue the war against international Communism!) or the "laissez-faire capitalism" of Ayn Rand (who argued that government was basically legitimate but that government somehow always ended up mysteriously diverted from its legitimate purpose), Rothbard came as a clarifying thunderclap out of the blue.

The Randians did not much care about history (Rand's "history" of philosophy was a cartoonish caricature) and the "conservatives" had little interest in either rigorous thinking or critical history. Rothbard, on the contrary, demanded that we pursue a serious study of economic theory, of the ethics of natural rights, and of the actual events of Western history.

In 1965, Rothbard predicted the collapse of the Soviet empire: based on his knowledge as an economist, he recognized that socialism could not succeed, and, using his knowledge of intellectual history, he predicted that the ideas of Locke and Jefferson, would, in the end, defeat the ideas of Marx and Lenin.

In the final years of his life, after the Soviet Empire had been swept into the dustbin of history, Rothbard correctly foresaw that the struggle over American imperialism would become the primary focus of world affairs, as is now clear to everyone in the wake of the "Bush doctrine" and the American attempt to conquer the Mideast.

As Raimondo discusses in detail, Rothbard pursued a variety of political alliances over the years, always with the goal of advancing his central aim, the freedom of the individual human being. Building on the great legacy of Western liberalism, Rothbard has left us an overarching framework, a powerful set of intellectual tools, for understanding the process of domination and exploitation, and ultimately, for bringing about the triumph of human freedom.

It is now up to us to further hone those tools and to learn to apply them to strip away the mask of Power and restore the natural rights of human beings both here in America and throughout the world.

It can't possibly be an easy job to condense the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers into less than four hundred pages. Indeed, author Justin Raimondo notes in his introduction that he hopes only to offer "what is little more than an extended biographical sketch, to capture the essential Rothbard, not only his ideas but also his personality and some sense of his historical significance."

Raimondo is too modest.

I'll keep this brief since other reviews of this book are available online (and if you write to me I'll tell you where to find them). What Raimondo actually provides in this volume is a cradle-to-grave overview of Rothbard's entire life and career, together with insightful summaries of carefully selected portions of Rothbard's thought. No doubt there is a great deal that Raimondo must omit or curtail. Nevertheless he provides considerably more than a "sketch."

Not that Raimondo's skills as a sketch artist are negligible. But the word "sketch" is better applied to his accounts of the various _other_ persons who populate his account -- from Rothbard's father David to Mises Institute founder Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. His accounts of these others are masterful sketches. But he brings Rothbard himself to life in a well-realized portrait of this giant of libertarianism.

Raimondo provides more: a defense and a vindication. Rothbard was the subject of scurrilous charges from several quarters throughout much of his career and even after his death, including (at the time of this writing) some misrepresentations from the "Objectivist" camp regarding the period of Rothbard's involvement with the Randian inner circle. Raimondo's handling of this topic is typical of his overall approach: he delves into Rothbard's personal correspondence and reveals, deftly and vigorously, what was actually going on -- not at all flatteringly to Rand and the founders of her cult.

In fact Raimondo really ought to be better known than he is as a critic of the "Objectivist" movement in general and of Rand in particular. Not surprisingly, Rothbard's encounter with Rand occupies some twenty-five pages of the present work, and Raimondo's incisive discussion is as penetrating and devastating as his earlier destructive criticism of Rand in _Reclaiming the American Right_. I shall with difficulty resist the temptation to spoil some of Raimondo's surprises; but for these twenty-five pages alone this book should be of interest to anyone even remotely interested in the "Objectivist" movement.

William F. Buckley does not come off well either; nor do the numerous lesser critics who buzzed about Rothbard like gnats. And of course there are fine positive accounts of Rothbard's wife JoAnn ("Joey, the indispensible framework"), his various longtime friends and associates, the great Ludwig von Mises, and the numerous other persons whose paths intersected Rothbard's for good or ill.

Amazingly, Raimondo manages to integrate all of this with an exposition of Rothbard's key economic and political insights. Obviously a good deal has had to be left out, or the book would have become unmanageably long. Nevertheless all of Rothbard's central themes are here, and all of his major works are given at least capsule summaries in their proper biographical context. This is no small feat -- especially since standard economic textbooks have trouble getting straight the Rothbardian views that Raimondo summarizes with apparent ease.

All in all, then, an astonishingly fine book that will be of interest both to those who already know who Rothbard was, and to those who have never heard of him before. "If this modest volume does its part," Raimondo writes in his introduction, "to make [Rothbard's] thought more accessible and readily available to a wider audience, it will have accomplished its purpose."

To that purpose it is admirably suited. Read it at once, and share it with everyone you know. And congratulations to Raimondo for a daunting task surpassingly well done.

Whole books could be written on Rothbard the Economist, or Rothbard the Historian. This book is about Murray Rothbard the Political Strategist and Polemicist. And that makes me happy, because it is *this* Rothbard that I personally recall so fondly from the old libertarian/anarchist trenches in the late '60s, early '70s, then again in the early '90s (when Rothbard and I last met).

Raimondo was there in those years 1978-1989 when I wasn't, when I largely fell away from the libertarian movement, and I enjoyed his coverage of those years in this book.

My only real gripe is that Justin sometimes lets his biases unfairly color his book, especially about periods where he wasn't personally present. One example is his "take" on Rothbard's alliance with Karl Hess in the late '60s. Hess was not quite so wooly or nutty as Raimondo paints him; you need only read Hess's writings in Rothbard's own "Libertarian Forum" newsletter from those days to see that Hess was a thoughtful Rothbardian anarchist during that period.

Anyway, thumbs up for Raimondo's biography of the heroic Murray Rothbard. But there are still more books to be written!