Tag: Lew Rockwell

Milestones and Memory’s Millstones

I wished Herbert Aptheker a happy 60th in person in 1975 and called Isaac Asimov on his five years later. I had just finished reading the latter’s memoir, his number was listed, and he answered immediately and amiably. I also participated in Murray Rothbard’s surprise celebration (same milestone) in 1986.

For mine in 2013, my wife and I went to Nam Wah Tea Parlor on Chinatown’s Doyers Street on the recommendation of Mark Margolis, the recently deceased actor with whom only the week before we had shared a common table (i.e., with “strangers”) at Joe’s Shanghai (around the corner on Pell Street).

For me, reaching 70 has not been like hitting 60. I’m neither living nor working where I was then; I had no clue of how (if ever) those transitions would go. Between then and now I got a few things published, books that had been pipedreams and might have remained so. Herbert lived to 87; Isaac, 71; Murray never made it to 69. Each man finished many projects, but also left some unfinished. I’m thinking especially of the “missing” (that is, unwritten) third volume of Murray’s history of economic thought.

I remember talking about Asimov’s books to a youngster working in the mailroom of Sargent Shriver’s law firm. He was stunned to learn that Asimov was a person: the spines of hundreds of books in his school’s library bearing Asimov’s name suggested the name of a publishing house.

Aptheker is and will be (except perhaps for his progeny and the dwindling number of those who knew him) a subject of specialized interest, a function of a broader interest in Africana studies and Communism.

Burton Blumert, Lew Rockwell, David Gordon, Murray Rothbard; undated, but probably late 1980s.

Of these three, only the writings of the polymath economist, historian, and political philosopher Rothbard have convinced thousands of scholars to work in his intellectual tradition (natural rights, praxeology, and antistate, antiwar revisionism). At a memorial in ’86, Lew Rockwell told me that “he [Murray] needs his [Robert] Skidelsky,” referring to Keynes’s biographer. Twenty years later, Murray’s mentor and former Gestapo target Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) got his Hülsmann. Murray’s oeuvre will need a team of Hülsmanns (as I learned the hard way). Continue reading “Milestones and Memory’s Millstones”

Murray Rothbard: on my late friend’s lamentable error

“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.

Picture 1It 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].”Image result for murray rothbard

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)

Continue reading “Murray Rothbard: on my late friend’s lamentable error”