Complementing last week’s post is another unfinished essay from my Rothbard biography project, aborted two decades ago.
“All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty.”1
Reason may be man’s most distinctive attribute, but his liberty, his essential freedom (as distinct from his effective freedom) is his noblest. For it is by his exercise of liberty that man decides either to be faithful to his rational nature or to evade its demands. Man is by nature a knower, but how he expresses that nature depends on how he exercises his liberty.
Murray Newton Rothbard denied that liberty was man’s highest end and that it may excuse license. He did believe, however, that man must protect liberty above all else in his political life, the realm of legitimate interpersonal violence. There is of course much more to life than politics. There is, for instance, religion, philosophy, and art, not to mention the love of family and friends. To enjoy them, however, requires liberty. It is therefore incoherent to constrict liberty in the name of art, religion, philosophy, or love. An attack on liberty is an attack on the great goods that presuppose it. Continue reading “Murray Rothbard: Notes on His Philosophical Starting Point”