“I was sure I was going to predecease him.”
That’s how my friend Father James A. Sadowsky (1923-2012) confirmed the news of the passing of Murray Newton Rothbard (1926–1995) two dozen years ago today.
It was after Sunday Mass at St. Agnes. Finishing breakfast with friends in a 42nd Street a coffee shop, I excused myself to call (using a 20th-century pay phone) my wife who, enduring a cold, couldn’t join me in Manhattan that wintry day.
“Father Sadowsky called,” she said. “Murray Rothbard died yesterday.”
It’s now been almost 36 years since the first chat that began my friendship with Murray, which continued through his last dozen years. His writings, illuminated by conversations, formed a major part of my education in economics, history, and politics. His personal influence makes it difficult to make a selection among the many memories.
Reading Man, Economy & State , a project I began on March 22, 1983, inspired me to call him one evening. Barely two months into it, I looked up his number (in a 20th-century phone book) and made bold to use it on May 18 (my diary says): “I got six new [libertarian] leads from him, including a Fordham [University] history professor who lives in Jackson Heights [John McCarthy] . . . . Rothbard is so easy to talk to and make laugh. . . . Look forward to meeting him in the Fall [at the Libertarian Party National Convention].”
Finishing that stout tome on June 19th marked the end of my political wilderness-wandering to which I had sentenced myself after breaking with Marxism six years earlier. 
By the time my “Jürgen Habermas’s Critique of Marxism” was published in the Winter 1977/1978 issue Science & Society, a Stalinoid academic journal, I was in the free market camp. (Its text with corrections and editorial notes is freely available here.) But I didn’t find National Review conservatism sufficiently inspiring.
Less than a year later I was invited to participate in Murray’s 1984 seminar on the history of economic thought:
Last Rothbard class was a damning critique of Adam Smith. Smith has almost no libertarian credentials. Marx can have him. . . . [T]here’s an essay in the latest Libertarian Vanguard that Rothbard wants me to read, and Mark [Brady] is going to copy for me . . . . Murray Rothbard was very friendly again with me after class. He’s busy packing for his move to Stanford CA, so, he says, he’s sorry he couldn’t have invited Gloria and me to dinner. Discussed my Christian libertarian idea with him on the bus. I’m flattered.” (May 4, 1984; unless otherwise marked, dates refer to diary entries.)
I met him for first time at the 1983 Libertarian National Convention at the Sheraton Hotel in New York. (This pic was taken there.) “He remembered my name,” I recorded, “and when I discussed [Bernard] Lonergan’s economics briefly, he said Lonergan struck him as an ‘institutionalist.’” (September 4, 1983)
After one session of that seminar there was a small celebration for his 58th birthday:
Very fortunate to have spent Murray Rothbard’s birthday with him at the souvlaki restaurant at 102 MacDougal St. [H]e sat at my table before any one else [from the group] got there. . . . It was a real pleasure to talk about my political past, his intellectual development . . . . There’s nothing I can’t broach with him. He gave me another perspective on Nathaniel Branden. The class on medieval economics was excellent as was the discussion afterwards on philosophy. (March 2, 1984) [1]
I will continue to treasure his writings and share them with anyone who’ll listen. But as I settle accounts with my erstwhile political conscience, I have to point out where, in my opinion, he was wrong.
For starters: his appropriation of the natural rights tradition was idiosyncratic. His reasons for uncoupling it from the natural law metaphysics that informed its classical exponents were never clear to me. (I’ll take my share of the blame for any failure of insight.) But that metaphysics (and anthropology) is not so easily set aside. 
A modernist cannot solve the problems of modernity, which are legion. It’s one thing to demonstrate a proposition without explicitly referring to God. It’s another to be satisfied with a theoretical life that, at its base and superstructure, is agnostic about God and evicts “God-talk” (however benignly and tolerantly) from scientific discourse.
Rothbard was so satisfied, and that marked him as thoroughly modern.
In my opinion, Murray’s agnosticism about God’s existence and revelation produced a defective anthropology; and one’s view of man cannot help but affect every branch of one’s theory.
Agnosticism (really, a function of one’s suppression of one’s innate knowledge of God) encouraged our culture’s trade-in of the imago Dei for the pseudo-autonomous “self,” as in the alleged “axiom” of “self-ownership.”
If one does not locate the absolute in God, then one must locate it in something less than God. For Murray, the “self-owning” person is at once the accidental product of nature’s flux and the absolute legislator thereof who someone stands over and above it.
One terrible consequence of this is to regard the human fetus as the mother’s property which, merely upon change of location (from in utero to ex utero) becomes a potential bearer of absolute rights.
According to Murray, a pregnant mother, her offspring’s natural protector, no more has duties toward what she carries in her womb than she does toward her limbs or organs.
On the contrary, she has, according Murray’s reasoning, the right to procure an abortion. That is, the absolute right to have the human being, whose genetically distinct body naturally came to be inside hers, killed. His anthropology made the individual, rather than the family, the starting point for social theorizing.
One’s man’s logical deduction is another’s reductio ad absurdum.
I regret I couldn’t persuade Murray to recoil from this fatal consequence of his fateful premise of “self-ownership” as he articulated it in The Ethics of Liberty. There he arbitrarily asserted, with italicized emphasis, that “birth is indeed the proper line of demarcation” separating allegedly subpersonal fetal tissue from the allegedly “future” rights-bearer.
His discussion of abortion with my friend James Sadowsky, available here, is germane. Murray’s rhetorical question, “Does birth really confer no rights?” is not an argument.
Note the slightly sarcastic words that precede it: “[the] act of birth, which I had always naively assumed to be an event of considerable important in everyone’s life, now takes on hardly more stature than the onset of adolescence or of one’s ‘mid-life crisis.'”
Murray rejected the idea that a human person comes to be the instant his or her body comes to be. The embryo is an immature, but complete human being. It needs nothing more than to be allowed to gestate.
Murray’s suggestion that the mother’s state of mind might equate the legal status of her “unwanted” fetus with that of a parasite shows how far the acids of modernity had eroded his common sense (of course, not his alone).
His assertion that “no human has the right to reside unwanted within the body of another” is gratuitous and deserves only gratuitous denial. It is best understood as the conclusion toward which he landscaped a garden path of argument.
The man who began an article with: “It is high time, and past due, that someone blew the whistle on ‘Women’s Liberation'” and proceeded to lampoon feminist economic ignorance, conceded to that movement the validity of their sacrament.[2]
Paul, the Apostle to the nations, listed 21 signs of the “concluding” ἔσχατος (eschatos) days of the present dispensation. One of them is “without natural affection” (2 Timothy 3:3 KJV). The Greek is ἄστοργος (ástorgos), which the RSV renders “inhuman.”
These last days coincide with “the fag-end of the Enlightenment,” to borrow the late Fr. Francis Canavan‘s charming phrase, so we shouldn’t be shocked when brilliant thinkers like Murray Rothbard blunder.[3] (Although as Wittgenstein remarked in another context, “For a blunder, that’s too big.”)
A thinker who would meet the issues of our times will reject modernity’s anthropological errors on pain of joining the other flickering embers in history’s ashtray. Classical liberals and libertarians are not exempt from this imperative (and fate). [4]
Recently Lew Rockwell summed up Murray Rothbard’s vision: a world of free markets, with no exceptions for any class of services (e.g., defense, police, and courts). He emphasized Murray’s lifelong theoretical consistency.
Some people [Lew wrote], “even among those who knew and admired Murray, fail to realize this because they view him through a political lens. They point to shifts in his political alliances, seeing him as shifting from Old Right to Left and finally to Paleolibertarian. They miss the essential point. Of course, Murray wanted to put his vision into practice. But for him the vision was primary. If you concentrate on Murray’s political tactics you will miss the real Murray.
But we who have been drawn to the life and writings of Murray Rothbard want to know how to get out from under the modern state, not (contrary to the impression Lew’s column gave me) how to evaluate his theoretical legacy (as important as that may be).
Theoretical consistency and fidelity to one’s vision may be necessary conditions of success, but they are hardly sufficient. Lew didn’t say they were sufficient, but neither did he say what is.
And if one’s “consistent vision” includes the deduction of the “right” to commit infanticide, then we could do without that hobgoblin. (Romans 1:22)
In the House of Representatives Ron Paul courageously championed Rothbardian economics and anti-interventionism. “If you want to know what Rothbard’s vision applied to contemporary America would be like in practice,” Lew wrote, “you should look to Ron Paul. Dr. Paul’s career in Congress, marked by his opposition to war and the Fed, is the best example of the anti-elitist free market values that Murray supported.”
Murray’s vision applied to America? What it would be like in practice? With all due respect to Rockwell and the great educational work of the Mises Institute, political success is not merely about getting the words right or even about disseminating the right words. (I know Lew knows this.)
Despite his articulation of Rothbard’s vision, the American electorate rejected Paul’s bid for the White House, twice. They didn’t give him (or anyone else) a chance to enshrine Rothbardian principles in the White House.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).
And if they don’t know how to realize their vision, they can also perish with it.
America’s perishing. Murray’s America was on its way out when he died. Now it’s virtually gone. So’s the time for implementing his vision.
I’ll spend what time remains “standing aside under shelter of a wall in a storm and blast of dust” (The Republic, Book VI, 496d). Murray’s books will comprise a share of my comfort reading for the storm’s duration. But I will pray, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” from the only book that, in the end, matters.
We may delight in studying history and the passing scene. We may even be addicted to doing so. But I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no sound pre-Kingdom politics.
Notes
[1] “The Great Women’s Liberation Issue: Setting It Straight,” The Individualist, May 1970. Reprinted as Chapter 8 of Rothbard, Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature, Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 157.)
[2] Further diary entries may interest some visitors:
After [Rothbard’s class] . . . I walked him to the 8th St. Playhouse where he was meeting his wife to see To Be or Not to Be. This gave me a chance to discuss strategy and get his side of the Voluntaryist issue. What a pleasure it was . . . . he thinks Voluntaryism blurs the line between the aggressor and the victim. If voting is immoral, then voting is part of the crime. If paying taxes is immoral, then the taxpayer is an enemy. Rothbard sees Voluntaryism as a dangerous misdirection of energy. The L[ibertarian]P[arty] is the best base of operations for a libertarian. (March 9, 1984)
Dog-tired, but enjoyed Murray Rothbard’s discussion of the Reformation. Before the class, he gave [me] two issues of his Libertarian Forum and the address of the Journal of Historical Review, a revisionist historical journal. . . . Rothbard wanted to go for a drink, but Gloria was suffering [from a cold] at home (as it is I got home late), so at least we talked on the way to the 6th Ave. bus, on the bus to 42nd St., and while waiting for his crosstown bus. We discussed privatized roads and, more importantly, strategy. He made a cogent case for LP electoral politics as long as one fights for the pure anarchist line and never compromises it. (March 16, 1984)
Enjoyed Rothbard’s class tonight, and am enjoying the friendship he extends to me. . . . He liked my idea of paraphrasing Man, Economy and State, and is encouraging me to do so. Too bad in five weeks he’ll be gone for almost a year, first California and then University of Nevada at Las Vegas. (April 6, 1984)
[3] Many have attributed this term to Father Canavan, but Charles Rice has cited its source: Francis Canavan, “Commentary,” Catholic Eye (New York), Dec. 10, 1987, at 2. See Charles E. Rice, Rights and the Need for Objective Moral Limits, 3 Ave Maria L. Rev. 259 (2005), 266 n. 42. In 1994 I once corresponded with Father Canavan. It can be read here.
[4] Timothy Gordon explores the devolution from (what he calls) “Catholic Natural Law” to the Protestant and Enlightenment deformations that informed the founding of the American republic in Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish without Rome. Dangerous Books, 2018. Despite the signal contributions of Catholic theologians to the articulation of the natural law (centuries after Aristotle gave it classical expression), I see no reason to follow Gordon in his modification of “Natural Law” by “Catholic.” Outside of the Biblical worldview, enunciating first truths (which we see to be true as soon as we understand them) and systematically relating them makes no sense. All historical circumstances illustrate those truths, and so the latter “transcend” the former; the modifier “Roman Catholic” obscures that transcendental character. Gordon does, however, make intelligible the sorry modernist perversion of natural law philosophy by showing it to be a reaction to the common ecclesiastical rival of Protestant and Enlightenment thinkers, viz., the Roman Catholic Church. My only other comment on Gordon (for now) is that natural law philosophy may be a necessary condition of republic-making (if that’s what we’re interested in doing), but the Catholic Church’s political history demonstrates that it not a sufficient one.