For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto
Prompted by the Spring issue of the Independent Review, which includes a symposium on the book for its 50th anniversary, on Monday I reread Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto.
Rothbard (1926-1995) was a heterodox economist, an anarcho-capitalist, and utterly prolific. In his introduction the crackpot Lew Rockwell writes:
There are many varieties of libertarianism alive in the world today, but Rothbardianism remains the center of its intellectual gravity, its primary muse and conscience, its strategic and moral core, and the focal point of debate even when its name is not acknowledged.
I think that’s about right. Whichever direction you get to libertarianism from, whether from the left or right, or falling through the ceiling like a cartoon character, there is no way to approach the thing without going through Rothbard.
(and whether people like it or not, which accounts for the last bit of Rockwell’s comment. The more familiar you are with the literature of liberty the more you notice him: sometimes he’s just in the footnotes, and sometimes he’s not mentioned at all but the formulation of arguments are his. For example, I think much more of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is him grappling with Rothbard than people realize).
There are different ways to slice and dice the libertarian world – whether by consequentialist and deontological libertarians, or perhaps by strains like Tom Palmer essentially does – but however you go about it the most fervently doctrinal, orthodox, and intransigent will be the Rothbardians.
Ideological enclaves inspired or created by one person can take on their own character and retroactively distort their progenitor’s image (within this universe, this has certainly happened to Ludwig von Mises). This is and is not true with Rothbard.
In a podcast I once heard Jonah Goldberg say that if you had a graph with one axis labeled ‘Genius’ and the other ‘Crackpot’, Rothbard would be an outlier. I think it’s more accurate to say that Rothbard was both a genius and a fanatic, with all the associated accoutrements those words imply, good and bad; sometimes he was one or the other, and sometimes both in equal measure; this is true from book to book and essay to essay, but also differing in distinct intellectual periods (I don’t remember where, but Peter Boettke has argued that it’s better to understand Rothbard’s intellectual life in terms of periodicity).
As a result, while Rothbardianism as it stands today (almost totally juvenile) can generally be traced directly back to the writings of its source, it is often a most unfortunate selection of those writings.
It has been some time since I have ensconced myself in Rothbard’s readable prose, and given the state of the movement, it was with great interest that I returned to For a New Liberty, a book I first read in high school. The book was published in 1973 and helps demarcate a change in Rothbard’s efforts. Previously he was most interested in talking to other professional economists. Indeed, a study of the footnotes in his great work Man, Economy, and State shows a man who was completely up on the literature of his subject, both historical and contemporary (in 1962). Rothbard became increasingly interested in growing the libertarian movement, political machinations, and detailing an ideological program. For a New Liberty is the book length starting point of this program.
The book is, as the subtitle states, a political manifesto – one of the worst forms of prose possible, only beat out by personal manifestos, explicit works of philosophy, and your uncle’s family history book. As such it displays those works’ typical characteristics, including total clarity in the exclusive truth of its claims:
In the broadest and longest-run sense, libertarianism will win eventually because it and only it is compatible with the nature of man and of the world. Only liberty can achieve man’s prosperity, fulfillment, and happiness. In short, libertarianism will win because it is true, because it is the correct policy for mankind, and truth will eventually win out.
That on its own isn’t a problem. Has there ever been anyone anywhere at any point in time who didn’t think their own philosophy was correct to the exclusion of others? Moreover, if a kind of manifesto is warranted, it is a political one. As Rothbard notes:
The enormous success of Karl Marx and Marxism has been due not to the validity of his ideas – all of which, indeed, are fallacious – but to the fact that he dared to weave socialist theory into a mighty system. Liberty cannot succeed without an equivalent and contrasting systematic theory. . .
Of course he adds with confidence that “we now have that theory.”
This is from the end of the book, the brief third part, an Epilogue on A Strategy for Liberty. This is preceded by the initial small but punchy Part I: The Libertarian Creed and, what takes up a vast majority of the book, Part II: Libertarian Applications to Current Problems.
Part I begins with what Rothbard calls the nonaggression axiom:
The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. . .“Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use of threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.
(as Matt Zwolinski points out in his contribution to the symposium, this is not really an axiom, even on Rothbard’s own terms. Either way, today you will more likely see this referred to as the NAP: nonaggression principle.)
And he gives a small taste of the radical implications:
If no man may aggress against another; if, in short, everyone has the absolute right to be “free from aggression, then this at once implies that the libertarian stands foursquare for what are generally known as ‘civil liberties’. . .furthermore, he regards conscription as slavery on a massive scale. And since war, especially modern war, entails the mass slaughter of civilians, the libertarian regards such conflicts as mass murder and therefore totally illegitimate.
These views are, as he notes, considered “leftist.” On the other hand, the libertarian believes in “a system of ‘laissez-faire capitalism’,” which is considered “extreme right wing.” The point is that the libertarian, “insists on applying the general moral law to everyone and makes no special exceptions for any person or group.” This is true for the state, he goes on:
But if we look at the state naked, as it were, we see that it is universally allowed, and even encouraged, to commit all the acts which even non-libertarians concede are reprehensible crimes. The State habitually commits mass murder, which it calls “war,” or sometimes “suppression of subversion”; the State engages in enslavement into its military forces, which it calls “conscription”; and it lives and has its being in the practice of forcible theft, which it calls “taxation.” The libertarian insists that whether or not such practices are supported by the majority of the population is not germane to their nature: that, regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.
This whole first part of the book explicates what self-ownership and aggression are and what they entail before turning to the state itself in greater detail – as he sums the matter up: “In fact, if you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the state as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically follow.”
Part II is of great interest as it is less abstract, though not less radical, and applies libertarian principles to mostly recognizable problems, some of which are a bit dated. This part also delivers some of the most memorable and eyebrow raising lines of the book.
On policies that “that put everyone into a cage and coerce him into doing what the conservatives or liberals believe to be the moral thing”:
The irony, of course, is that by forcing men to be “moral” – i.e., to act morally – the conservative or liberal jailkeepers would in reality deprive men of the very possibility of being moral. The concept of “morality” makes no sense unless the moral act is feely chosen.
On abortion:
Most discussion of the issue bogs down in minutiae about when human life begins, when or if the fetus can be considered to be alive, etc. All this is really irrelevant to the issue of the legality (again, not necessarily the morality) of abortion. The Catholic antiabortionist, for example, declares that all that he wants for the fetus is the rights of any human being—i.e., the right not to be murdered. But there is more involved here, and this is the crucial consideration. If we are to treat the fetus as having the same rights as humans, then let us ask: What human has the right to remain, unbidden, as an unwanted parasite within some other human being’s body? This is the nub of the issue: the absolute right of every person and hence every woman, to the ownership of her own body. What the mother is doing in an abortion is causing an unwanted entity within her body to be ejected from it: If the fetus dies, this does not rebut the point that no being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person’s body.
Or in rejecting that the Russia was “hell-bent upon a military attack upon the United States”:
Russia, therefore, governed Eastern Europe as military occupier after winning a war launched against her. Russia’s initial goal was not to communize Eastern Europe on the backs of the Soviet army. Her goal was to gain assurances that Eastern Europe would not be the broad highway for an assault on Russia, as it had been three times in half a century—the last time in a war in which over 20 million Russians had been slaughtered. In short, Russia wanted countries on her border which would not be anti-Communist in a military sense, and which would not be used as a springboard for another invasion.
Of course if there is an element of choice in a decision, then there is a moral component to it, but it is not obvious that making it difficult for someone to obtain heroin deprives them or the possibility of being moral (an admittedly easy example); whatever your views on abortion, most are unlikely to agree that a baby lives “unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person’s body”; and it’s a stretch to argue that the Soviet Union’s domination over Eastern Europe somehow works against its imperialist credentials.
Likewise, if you’re not already in agreement with Rothbard his discussion of private courts and policing or assigning private property rights to waterways (including the ocean) and the air will strain the imagination and come across as pretty thin gruel.
Still, there is a lot to like here. The book is more sensitive to what today we would call marginalized groups than I remembered (and more sensitive than an older Rothbard would be). He rightly points out how government education and poor policing disproportionately harms blacks:
In America today, for example, we have the general rule in our cities of black areas patrolled by police hired by central urban governments, governments that are perceived to be alien to the black communities. Police supplied, controlled, and paid for by the residents and landowners of the communities themselves would be a completely different story; they would be supplying, and perceived to be supplying, services to their customers rather than coercing them on behalf of an alien authority.
He’s quite explicit about what he’s trying to show in such sections:
. . .the potential appeal of libertarianism is a multiclass appeal; it is an appeal that cuts across race, occupation, economic class, and the generations; any and all people not directly in the ruling elite are potentially receptive to our message. Every person or group that values its liberty or prosperity is a potential adherent to the libertarian creed.
And, always a favorite part of reading Rothbard, he has a unique ability to deliver criticisms in understandable, compact, and fatal formulations. His pithy attack on Utilitarianism is more powerful than its clarity might suggest (for some reason philosophers associate obfuscation with profundity), as David Gordon notes in his essay for the symposium, and he has “a ken eye for tracing out the consequences of various measures of government intervention in the free market,” many of which hold up nicely.
To avoid recounting the whole of this book, let’s jump to the point: does it work? As a system, not really.
For example, as Zwolinski points out, Rothbard does not advance any argument for the existence of individual rights. He, instead, asserts that “Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation.” But he does not show how the individual human choice actually gives rise to such a right. And its these sorts of problems of distinction you tend to find in Rothbard.
As a reading experience, the books is a breeze – Rothbard is always so readable. There’s no fault to be had there. You get the impression that this was very easy and a joy for him to write. Also, despite any issues with the foundations of the book, Rothbard is a great systematizer and everything fits together so neatly that it he almost pulls it off. Those interested in such a system will be better off reading (after For a New Liberty) his book The Ethics of Liberty, in which I think he gets about as close as you can to having a working secular system of natural rights from a deductive rationalist approach.
The main fault I see in the book after all these years, beyond what is wrong with any arguments, is that it feels a bit shallow and simplistic. Maybe that’s because it’s a manifesto covering a huge amount of ground, and maybe that’s because I’ve read his later writings in which he develops in detail virtually everything here – so I know what is missing.
Still, as an introduction to this radical flavor of libertarianism, you can’t do better. It’s readable, assertive, confident, and you’ll be arguing with him the whole way through, which is fun no matter what.
And for some of us who are in the libertarian tent and have been influenced by Rothbard, there are still passages that soar and ultimate points that have us cheering along this happy warrior:
The libertarian creed, finally, offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Even more than conservatives, who are often attached to the monarchical traditions of a happily obsolete European past, libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, and a free-market economy.