The
Noblest Cause of All
by
Murray
N. Rothbard
by Murray N. Rothbard
DIGG THIS
This article
is taken from Murray Rothbard's Keynote Address to the Libertarian
Party Convention, 1977.
I have long
been convinced that the process of becoming a libertarian
whether it happens gradually or in a blinding flash of conversion
is a twofold rather than a single process. If we may use
a now familiar rhetoric, we might say that the true libertarian
is "born again," that is, that the process of conversion to
liberty takes place in two distinct though sometimes rapidly
succeeding stages.
The first conversion
is what we might call the "baptism of reason" the moment
or moments when the person becomes convinced that liberty is the
best, and the only just, social system for mankind. He or she realizes
that liberty is the true, the good, and the beautiful. But I have
become increasingly convinced that this realization is only the
first step to becoming a full-fledged libertarian. To be truly "born
again," the libertarian must experience what we might call
a second baptism, the "baptism of will." That is, he must be
driven by his rational insight to dedicate himself to the mighty
goal of bringing about the victory of liberty, of libertarian principles,
in the real world. He must set out to transform reality in
accordance with his ideal vision. In short, the truly complete libertarian,
the "born again" libertarian, if you will, is not content with recognizing
the truth of liberty as the best social system; he cannot and will
not rest content until that system, that set of principles, has
triumphed in the world of reality.
Reason and
will are thus fused in a mighty and unflinching determination to
carry on the struggle until the victory of liberty over statism
has been achieved. The American revolutionaries pledged "their lives,
their fortunes, and their sacred honor" to their struggle for liberty
and independence. They were not parlor libertarians; they were determined
to settle for nothing less than victory, regardless of how long
or how arduous the task. And one thing is certain: they never could
have won without that iron determination; for otherwise, they would
have wilted very early: after Long Island, or Fort Washington, or
Valley Forge. The American revolutionaries would settle for nothing
less than victory; can we fail to follow their glorious example?
I am convinced
that our primary task, now, as libertarians, is not to hassle with
each other on the precise role of the courts or the police in the
eventual free society, nor over the proper detailed strategy or
tactics of achieving it. As important as these questions are, our
most vital task is for each and every one of us to achieve the baptism
of will, that is, to adopt and hold high forever the
victory of liberty as our primary, overriding political goal. This
is what we are all about, we libertarians.
To paraphrase
a very different ideologist, our task is not simply to understand
the world but also to change it. And that is why we libertarians
call ourselves a "movement"; Webster's defines "movement"
as a "connected and long continued series of acts and events tending
toward some more or less definite end ... as, the Tractarian movement;
the prohibition movement." Our common end, of
course, is the victory of liberty over statism.
I used to think
that adopting the victory of liberty as the overriding goal must
be almost self-evident to all libertarians until I began
to find those who turned pale and fled when the word "victory" was
mentioned. For there are all too many libertarians who apparently
believe that the point of the whole enterprise is not triumph in
the real world, but all sorts of other motivations, ranging from
contemplating the beautiful intellectual edifice of the libertarian
system to selling each other dried beans to bearing moral witness
to the rightness or righteousness of the libertarian worldview.
There is, I
suppose, a certain satisfaction in knowing, or even proclaiming,
that we are right and that everybody else is wrong and misguided.
But, in the long run, this and the other motivations are only frivolous;
they are simply not worthy of respect. They are not worthy of being
mentioned in the same breath as the American revolutionaries who
pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the
cause.
The major serious
objection to holding victory as our goal is that such a goal can
only be hopeless and absurd. The state, it is said, is mighty, pervasive,
and all-powerful; and who are we but a tiny handful of men and women,
dwarfed by the legions of the state? But this sort of thinking is
impressionistic and superficial; geared to the range of the present
moment, it overlooks the underlying trends of historical events.
Here, in particular, we can take hope and inspiration from the Founding
Fathers and the American Revolution. For, I can assure you, to the
observers of that day, the American cause looked totally hopeless.
How could a handful of ragged, untrained soldiers hope to defeat
the mightiest state, the mightiest Empire of the eighteenth century?
To all knowledgeable people, the American cause seemed hopelessly
quixotic and absurd, Utopian and unrealistic. For, think of it:
In all of history there had never been a successful mass revolution
from below against a strong ruling state. So how could this American
rabble possibly succeed? And yet we did it! We won! We performed
the impossible.
The first libertarian
revolution succeeded, and we can do the same but we, too,
must have the will to triumph, to accept nothing less than total
victory.
Of course,
in the immediate present, any existing state may look all-powerful,
while opposition movements may seem small and puny. But, in a few
short years, how the tables may be turned! State after state has
seemed all-powerful almost to the day of its collapse and demise,
while numerous successful ideological movements have flowered from
a tiny handful to triumph a few short years later.
And no state
has seemed more powerful than did the British Empire at the start
of the American revolutionary war. It was easy to look superficially
at the first two years of that war and conclude that all was inevitably
lost. Washington's Continental Army had almost been wiped out in
New York; Howe's army had conquered the American capital at Philadelphia.
Washington's forces froze and starved through the winter at Valley
Forge and St. Leger and Burgoyne were marching down from Canada
to meet at Albany and then proceed to New York City and cut America
in two.
As everyone
knows, the turning point of the war came in late 1777, when Gentleman
Johnny Burgoyne's once mighty British army was surrounded and forced
to surrender at Saratoga. But what were the factors that brought
about this fateful turn and that carried the Americans through the
rest of the lengthy conflict to victory?
There are many
causal facts that we could mention, including the overweening self-confidence
of the British, who contemptuously dismissed Americans as a militarily
untrained rabble; there is also the determination and dedication
of the Americans, civilian and military. But what I would like to
concentrate on here is the fact that the American revolutionary
leaders adopted and developed what would nowadays be called a "mass
line." That is, in contrast to conservatives, whether of 1777
or 1977, the American revolutionaries were not afraid of the mass
of the American public. On the contrary, they realized that the
great bulk of Americans were being oppressed by the British, and
that the public could be brought to see this and to act upon that
knowledge.
And sure enough,
the great strength of the American armed forces is that they relied
upon, indeed blended with, the civilian population. In a deep sense
they were that population. The Americans were a people in
arms, a mobile people that knew their particular terrain, and who
were imbued with a deep sense of their rights and of the iniquity
of the British invasion of those rights. When combating Burgoyne,
the Americans, led by British-born libertarian General Horatio Gates,
shrewdly avoided, until the very end at Saratoga, direct confrontation
with the superior firepower of the highly trained British invasion
force. Instead, Gates, aided by influxes of armed civilians who
joined the fray as their own counties and districts were being invaded,
wore down the British forces by guerrilla harassment. An example
particularly heart-warming to libertarians, is the case of General
John Stark, who had resigned from the American army and retired
to his native New Hampshire in pique at shabby treatment by his
superiors. But when a troop sent out by Burgoyne invaded southwestern
Vermont, Stark rose up, mobilized the militia and other volunteers
from New Hampshire and Vermont, and clobbered the British troops
at the Battle of Bennington.
Gates and Stark,
and later the victor of the decisive final Southern campaign, General
Nathaniel Greene, were following the theories and the vision of
their mentor, the forgotten and unsung hero of the revolutionary
war, General Charles Lee, second in command of the American army
during the first years of the war. Lee was a fascinating character,
an English military genius and soldier of fortune and a radical
laissez-faire libertarian, who, as soon as he heard of the events
leading up to the Boston Tea Party and the developing break with
his native country, rushed to America to take part in the revolution.
It was Lee who fused the political and the military together to
develop the principles, strategies, and tactics of revolutionary
guerrilla warfare, which he called "people's war." Every American
military victory in the war was fought on people's war, guerrilla
principles; every defeat was suffered when America tried to play
the age-old game of inter-state warfare between two disciplined
state armies marching to meet each other in open frontal combat.
Thus, Lee and
his disciples worked out and applied the military implications of
a mass line, of a people rising up against the Leviathan state.
There were
other vitally important features of this overall mass line. One
of its important aspects was that the American revolutionaries blended
all the arguments against British imperialism into a harmonious
and integrated structure. Historians have argued whether the revolution's
thrust was economic, constitutional, moral, religious, political,
or philosophic without realizing that the revolutionaries'
libertarian perspective integrated them all. No vital aspect went
neglected. The revolutionaries understood and pointed out
that the British government was injuring the economic well-being
of the Americans through taxes, regulations, and privileged monopolies;
but they also knew that, in so doing, the British were aggressing
against the natural rights of person and property enjoyed by Americans
and by all men. For the American revolutionaries, there was no split,
no disjunction, between the economic and the moral, between prosperity
and rights.
As a corollary
to their mass line, the American revolutionaries and their leaders
were not afraid to be radical. In current rhetoric, they dared to
struggle and dared to win. There were three features of that radicalism
that I would like to explore today. First was their willingness,
indeed their eagerness, to desanctify, to demythologize the state,
to strip it of its ancient encrusted armor of justifications, alibis,
and rationalizations. The last and vital remaining act of this process
was desanctifying the king a revered mystical symbol of state
sovereignty which was far more powerful, to Americans and to Britons,
than Parliament or the unwritten British constitution.
This final
act was necessary to any outright American break for independence;
it was first launched tentatively, very early in the revolutionary
agitation, by Patrick Henry, but the mortal blow was delivered by
the unknown, impecunious pamphleteer Tom Paine, another English-born
laissez-faire radical who performed this feat in his runaway best-seller,
Common Sense. Paine realized that this final act of demystification
had to be couched radically, in no mincing or uncertain terms, thus
cutting the final umbilical cord not only with Great Britain, but
also with the age-old established principle of monarchy. And in
so doing Paine also pointed out the piratic origins of the state
itself. He referred to King George as "the royal brute of England,"
and to kings in general as "crowned ruffians," whose thrones
had all been established by being heads of gangs of "armed banditti."
The king, he
wrote, was "nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless
gang; whose savage manners or preeminence in subtlety obtained him
the title of chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power
and extending his depredations, overawed the quiet and defenseless..."
Paine concluded
his great work with these stirring words:
"O! Ye that
love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant,
stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression.
Freedom hath been hunted around the globe. Asia and Africa have
long expelled her. Europe regards her as a stranger, and England
hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and
prepare in time an asylum for mankind."
I would like
to underscore the importance of the line, "Ye that dare oppose not
only tyranny but the tyrant..." For here Paine was referring to
that two-step, double "baptism" process of which I spoke earlier.
That it is splendid, but not enough, to come to the point of opposing
tyranny in the abstract, as a general principle; but that it is
of equally vital importance to press on to the second stage, to
the concrete activism of engaging in struggle against the actual
tyrant of whatever time and place we happen to live in.
This
brings me to the second, interconnecting radicalism of the first
libertarian revolution. It used to be thought that all Americans
had read John Locke and were simply engaged in applying his concept
of natural rights, of rights to liberty and property, and right
of revolution against tyranny. But now we know that the process
was not that simple. Even in those enlightened days not everyone
was interested in or equipped to read abstract philosophy. What
most Americans did read were intellectuals and libertarians,
like Tom Paine, who took Locke's abstract philosophy and radicalized
it to apply to the conditions of their time. By far the most influential
such writings throughout the eighteenth century were "Cato's Letters,"
written by two libertarian English journalists, John Trenchard and
Thomas Gordon. Trenchard and Gordon not only put Locke's ideas into
stirring and hard-hitting phrases; they took Locke's "if ... then"
proposition: that is, if the government transgresses against
rights of person and property, then it is proper to rebel
against it, and added in effect this insight: "The if is
always here." In other words, they pointed out that it is the essence
of power, of government, to expand beyond its laissez-faire limits,
that it is always conspiring and attempting to do so, and therefore
that it is the task of the people to guard eternally against this
process. That they must always regard their government with hostility
and deep suspicion: in short, with what is now disparagingly called,
"a conspiracy theory of history."
And so, when
the British government, after the war with France was over in 1763,
began their grand design to reduce the virtually independent American
colonies to imperial subjection, the American colonists, without
access to the memoranda and archives of the British government of
the day, suspected the worst, and immediately roused themselves
to determined resistance. Now, two hundred years later, we know
that the colonists' suspicions were correct; they could not
know this, but they were armed with a "conspiracy theory" which
always suspects governments of designs upon liberty. They
had absorbed the lesson of Trenchard and Gordon in Cato's Letters:
"We know,
by infinite examples and experience, that men possessed of Power,
rather than part with it, will do anything, even the worst and
the blackest, to keep it [pace Richard Nixon]; and scarce
ever any man upon earth went out of it as long as he could carry
everything his own way in it... This seems certain, that the good
of the world, or of their people, was not one of their motives
either for continuing in Power, or for quitting it.
It is the
nature of Power to be ever encroaching, and converting every extraordinary
Power, granted at particular times ... into an ordinary power,
to be used at all times....
Alas! Power
encroaches daily upon Liberty, with a success too evident... Tyranny
has engrossed almost the whole earth, and striking at mankind
root and branch, makes the world a slaughterhouse...."
There is another
critical point to make about the importance of such men, such best-sellers
as Trenchard and Gordon or Tom Paine. At the last LP national convention
in Washington, a friendly journalist, and many others, remarked
that it seemed more like a scholars' conference than a political
party gathering. And one participant reported that everyone there
seemed to be very smart, but if that's the case, how in the world
will we ever win the masses of the non-smart?
Well, the first
answer is that yes, we are very different from other political
party conventions. I don't think that the crucial difference is
that we're smart and the others are dumb; after all, if we may let
this secret out to the world, we're not all that smart! We
are a glorious movement to be sure, but we have hardly achieved
perfection. The difference between us and the Democrats and Republicans
is not that we are so much smarter than they are, but that we are
deeply concerned with ideas, with principles, whereas they are simply
concerned with getting their places at the public trough. We
are interested in principles, they in power; and, gloriously
enough, our principle is that their power be dismantled.
But how can
the masses understand ideas? Well, a quick answer is that they have
done so before: notably in the American Revolution and for a hundred
or so years afterwards: in America and in Europe. So if they didn't
read Locke, they read Paine or Cato or their popularizers, or read
their followers in the press or heard them in speeches and sermons.
The American
revolutionary movement was a diverse and structured one, with different
persons and institutions specializing in various aspects of the
struggle. The same is and will be true of our movement. Just as
not everyone had to read Locke to become a full-fledged American
revolutionary, not everyone now has to read all of our flowering
theoretical works in order to grasp the essence of libertarianism
and to act upon it.
The American
revolutionaries never felt that every American had to grasp fully
the fifth lemma of the third syllogism of the second chapter of
Locke before they could take their place in the developing struggle;
and the same should be true of our libertarians and our own theoretical
works. Naturally, the more that everyone reads and understands the
better; and it is hardly my point to deprecate the great importance
of theory or of reading. My point is that not everyone has to know
and agree to every nuance before we start moving, ingathering, and
acting to transform the real world.
There is a
third important aspect of the radicalism of the American revolutionaries,
and this again underscores the importance of the mass line. In contrast
to their polar enemies, the conservatives, who strove to maintain
traditional aristocratic and monarchical rule over the masses, the
libertarian revolutionary leaders realized that the masses, as well
as themselves, were the victims of the state, and hence they only
needed to be educated and aroused to join the radical libertarian
cause. The conservatives knew full well that they were subsisting
on privileges coerced from a deluded and oppressed public through
their control of state power; hence they apprehended that the masses
were their mortal enemy. The laissez-faire radicals, for their part,
understood that same fact, and so from the revolution down through
most of the nineteenth century, here, in Great Britain, and on the
continent of Europe, these libertarians led the mass of the public
against traditional conservative statism. Where the conservatives
rested their case on traditional privileges sanctified by mystical
divine command, the laissez-faire radicals held aloft the banner
of reason and individual rights for all people.
Here again
is a profound lesson for us today. Too many libertarians have absorbed
the negative and elitist conservative worldview to the effect that
our enemy today is the poor, who are robbing the rich; the blacks,
who are robbing the whites; or the masses, who are robbing heroes
and businessmen. In fact, it is the state that is robbing
all classes, rich and poor, black and white, worker and businessman
alike; it is the state that is ripping us all off; it is the state
that is the common enemy of mankind. And who is the state? It is
any group who manages to seize control of the state's coercive machinery
of theft and privilege. Of course these ruling groups have differed
in composition through history, from kings and nobles to privileged
merchants to Communist parties to the Trilateral Commission. But
whoever they are, they can only be a small minority of the population,
ruling and robbing the rest of us for their power and wealth. And
since they are a small minority, the state rulers can only be kept
in power by deluding us about the wisdom or necessity of their rule.
Hence, it is our major task to oppose and desanctify their entrenched
rule, in the same spirit that the first libertarian revolutionaries
opposed and desanctified their rulers two hundred years ago.
We must strip the mystical veil of sanctity from our rulers
just as Tom Paine stripped the sanctity from King George III. And
in this task we libertarians are not the spokesmen for any ethnic
or economic class; we are the spokesmen for all classes, for all
of the public; we strive to see all of these groups united, hand-in-hand,
in opposition to the plundering and privileged minority that constitutes
the rulers of the state.
It is this
task, this march toward liberty, that the libertarian movement has
undertaken. That movement was born only a little while ago, and
in a few short years it has grown and expanded enormously, in numbers,
in the depth of understanding of its members, and in the influence
it has been exerting on the outside world. It has grown amazingly
far beyond the dreams of its tiny handful of original members. The
libertarian movement extends beyond the Libertarian Party, and consists
of a broad number of people and organizations, ranging from scholarly
centers and magazines to lobbying groups to supper clubs to tax
rebels. But while the Libertarian Party is not the whole movement,
it is a vital part of that movement. We are the institution that
garners the publicity, that brings to enormous numbers of people
their first knowledge of libertarianism and of the libertarian movement,
that educates and ingathers the broad public and attracts and nurtures
present and future libertarian activists and cadres. And, on top
of all this, we are the only libertarian organization that can use
the established institutions of the ballot box and the political
party structure to roll back the Leviathan state, to pressure from
below for repeal of statist measures, decrees, and institutions.
Our national
convention is a time for stocktaking, for judging how well we have
been succeeding at our task. Well, let's take a look: since our
last convention, we have mounted our first nationwide presidential
campaign. We were on the ballot despite enormous legal handicaps
in almost two-thirds of the states, and we have vaulted into
becoming the nation's third largest political party. Now how's that
for a party that only began a half dozen years ago? I say that's
terrific, and shows that we are truly the wave of the future.
And so we have
splendidly achieved Phase I of the hoped for growth and expansion
of the Libertarian Party. Phase I was the establishment of our party
as the leading nationwide third party, a feat accomplished by the
1976 presidential campaign. Phase II, our task for the near future,
our turning point, is to use the 1976 results as a springboard for
widening and deepening the grass roots strength of the Party throughout
the states: over this year and next to develop local and state-wide
chapters and candidates. Then, if we perform that task well, we
will be ready for a great leap forward in the 1980 presidential
campaign to make this party into a true mass party at the head of
a mighty movement, a movement to complete the original American
revolution and to bring liberty to our land.
We
hereby put everyone on notice: We are libertarians of the will as
well as the intellect, of activity as well as theory, of real-world
struggle as well as idealistic vision. We are a serious movement.
Our goal is nothing less than the victory of liberty over the Leviathan
state, and we shall not be deflected, we shall not be diverted,
we shall not be suborned, from achieving that goal. The odds against
us are no greater than the odds that faced our forefathers at Concord,
at Saratoga, or at Valley Forge. Secure in the knowledge that we
are in the right, inspired by the vision, determination and courage
of our forbears, we dedicate ourselves to the noblest cause of all,
the old American cause, of individual liberty. With such dedication
and with such a goal, how can we help but win?
Murray
N. Rothbard (19261995) was the author of Man,
Economy, and State, Conceived
in Liberty, What
Has Government Done to Our Money, For
a New Liberty, The
Case Against the Fed, and many
other books and articles. He was
also the editor with Lew Rockwell of The
Rothbard-Rockwell Report.
Copyright
© 2007 Ludwig von Mises Institute
All rights reserved.
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