Can you imagine the fun?
It would be nice. It is somewhat saddening though, to chronicle the life of a man who had such a profound impact and yet never meet him in person. It was like you have been robbed of something great. Some kind of injustice has befallen you.
I’ve asked myself this question before. And the answer was no.
Part of the reason; is Murray Rothbard’s Typewriter.
And the fact that people like Walter Block do not, nor would I really want them too. I’d prefer he be working on the next vol of History of Economic Thought, or Vol 5 of Conceived in Liberty, or the other masterpieces he would have no doubt written. Who knows though, I do like it when Kinsella, Woods, Tucker & others drop by.
However, I guess the above concern isn’t entirely accurate / reasonable:
Still the State’s Greatest Living Enemy by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
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Conventional Critiques
It’s usually best to not pay attention to these trivialists. As Raimondo points out, “he was a giant among pygmies, too large to be consumed by the struggle with his errant followers.” There’s no reason why today’s Rothbardians should be consumed by the claims against him either. And yet, a main virtue of this book is precisely that it debunks a room-full of myths about the man, and it does so not with conjecture, but with primary documentation. Let’s consider a few.
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"He allowed Libertarian activities to distract him from scholarship. This line is repeated by those who were actively involved with his struggles over the leadership of the Libertarian Party. Certainly those battles consumed his enemies. There are even times when these activities threaten to consume Raimondo! But, as he points out, during the worst of the battles (1979–1983), Rothbard wrote and published The Mystery of Banking and The Ethics of Liberty “in addition to several major scholarly articles, and was simultaneously researching a book on the Progressive era in American history” (manuscript in the archives of the Mises Institute). “How he managed this level of productivity while engaged in this increasingly acrimonious dispute is a testament to the scale of his intellectual gifts,” Raimondo writes.
Some respond: but if he hadn’t been involved in these petty political struggles, how much more might he have produced! This is a fallacy. For Rothbard, activism of this sort was a habit, a means of relaxation, a source for diverting his energies in order to replenish them for the heavy lifting he had to do. It is as silly to imagine “what might have been” as it is to think what the average person could accomplish at work if he never had to sleep. By the way, Rothbard also spent countless hours reading about chess, attending classes on music and architecture, watching his beloved soap operas, and keeping up with sports. Are we to say that these “distracted” him, or should we say that they made him a well-rounded person?"
[:)]
Yep. The Happy Warrior. The sheer force of his personality is what I believe really got the movement going.
Why would Rothbard waste his time talking to us?? Rather than talking to his far more intelligent colleagues??
I’m guessing that someone that productive had great time-management skills, meaning he planned his interaction with the general public very carefully and in measured/strategic amounts.
The Generosity of Murray - Rockwell
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Oddly, however, Rothbard himself doesn’t figure into his own history of ideas. It’s not just that he never got around to writing about the 20th century. There is more at work. What we see here is a fascinating combination of generosity and humility, a man far more interested in promoting the sound ideas of others rather than his own work.
We saw this in the course of his life, and once we understand it, we gain insight into the unusual personal conflicts that have been fodder for gossip and legend in libertarian circles for decades. Justin Raimondo does a fine job of discussing many of these in his biography Enemy of the State. He shows that the history of personality conflicts that peppered the life of Rothbard really amount to a long series of personal betrayals of their benefactor (the worst sin, in Dante’s view).
And yet this raises the question: Why were there so many who benefitted from Rothbard’s personal mentorship and later turned on him to denounce him and try so hard to topple him from his position as Mr. Libertarian? Some, like the billionaire Charles Koch, attempted to run his name out of public life, as documented in Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism.
Here is a stab at a reason. To be around Rothbard, and to be part of his circle of friends, was an enormously flattering experience. He made everyone feel brilliant and important. He wasn’t the sort to insist that one sit at his feet and learn from him. He drew you in and made you feel as if you were making a great contribution to a historic project. If you made a point that he thought was a good one, he would praise you to the skies.
If you go through Rothbard’s work, you find an unleashed passion for giving others credit for contributions to the history of ideas. His Ethics of Liberty, for example, is replete with citations to people who otherwise made no mark. The people who entered into his world began to think of themselves as Rothbard’s intellectual equals, and this was not an accident. It was something that Rothbard himself encouraged. He was radically against the creation of a personality cult, and instead shared and spread his ideas with profligate abandon.
These people came to be so flattered by his attention, and so absorbed into his approach, that they actually started to believe that Rothbard himself was dispensable. There was usually some precipitating event. The Rothbardian would write an article that departed from the master in some respect. Rothbard might have said nothing, but this was not his way. He longed for intellectual engagement, so he would come back and engage, usually in a way that harmed the pride of the disciple. The disciple would take it all personally and turn on the master in a life-changing way, and swear eternal enmity. This happened time and again, even for some not in the Koch ambit.
But consider the driving force here. Rothbard was so generous, so flattering to those around him, that his disciples felt empowered to the point that they actually believed that they were on Rothbard’s intellectual level and could easily break off on their own, and become famous. A telling fact, however, is that none of these people – and there were many – really did anything on their own, and what they did do amounted to recycling what Rothbard had taught them without giving him credit. That’s a short history of how it came to be that Rothbard, one of the century’s brightest lights, rarely received the credit he deserved during his lifetime.
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The libertarian movement has really been so blessed with an angel like Rothbard as its intellectual leader.
Rothbard does hang around these forums.
As an Indian, called by my name.
But from him look at how many more great authors, philosophers, and economists we get to enjoy! [:)]
Well I was talking about not being able to meet him in person. I mean, you develop this whole theory based on the works of a man you never got the chance to meet. It’s somewhat saddening. I just wish I could of met him…and maybe he had enough time to finish his economic history.