Murray Rothbard – Anthony G. Flood

On the Centennial of James Sadowsky, SJ: Philosophical Theologian, Libertarian Ethicist, Dearly Missed Friend

My friend James A. Sadowsky, SJ (December 28, 1928-September 7, 2012) would have turned 100 today. I’ve appended the obituary by Mises Institute Senior Fellow David Gordon. My first of many lunches with Jim was at the Brasserie (1958-2015) in the Seagram’s Building in 1983 when he was a youthful 59 years old. Following Dr. Gordon’s tribute is a list of articles whose content you may access on my old website (which will reach its emerald anniversary on January 17, 2024).

James A. Sadowsky, SJ

No one who met Jim Sadowsky could ever forget him. I first saw him at a conference at Claremont University in California in August 1979; his great friend Bill Baumgarth, a political science professor at Fordham, was also there. His distinctive style of conversation at once attracted my attention. He spoke in a very terse way, and he had no patience with nonsense, a category that covered much of what he heard. If you gave him an argument and asked him whether he understood what you meant, he usually answered, “No, I don’t.” He once said to a fellow Jesuit, “that’s false, and you know it’s false.”

Behind that gruff exterior was a very kind and warm person, with a delight in humor. I knew I would get along with him at that conference when he said to a small group of people, “I may not look like a cup of coffee, but I certainly feel like one.” I was the only one who laughed, and he said to me, “You have a discerning sense of humor.” We were friends from then on.

He delighted in paradoxical remarks, such as “The word philosophy comes from the Greek word philosophia, which means philosophy.” “We wouldn’t have the concept of free will, unless we had it.” “A student of mine once objected to Ockham’s razor, on the grounds that it’s unnecessary.”

He told me that a student in one of his philosophy classes at Fordham wore a tee-shirt that said, “I don’t need your drugs.” He said that he asked him, “Does this mean you get enough of your own?” The student answered, “Drugs are a very serious subject; you shouldn’t tell jokes about them.” He said to me, “I don’t understand. If he didn’t think it was funny, how did he know it was a joke?” After he told me that he sometimes played contract bridge, I asked him whether he was a good player. “Yes,” he answered, “but I play with better players.” One of my favorites among his comments was, “I like to get to the desserts first, ahead of all the greedy and selfish people.”

Continue reading “On the Centennial of James Sadowsky, SJ: Philosophical Theologian, Libertarian Ethicist, Dearly Missed Friend”

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”

Rothbard on Aptheker on Slavery

Aptheker and Rothbard — Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995)

For over forty years, my political history had two Jewish New York intellectual “bookends,” the communist Herbert Aptheker and the libertarian Murray Rothbard. In 2009 “Austro-Athenian” libertarian philosopher Roderick T. Long, in a blog post that first bore this one’s title, noted the overlap of their thought, at least on the subject of slavery, without noting the irony of that convergence.

Before going our separate ways home after a session of Murray’s seminar on the history of economic thought (at New York University in 1984), I gingerly mentioned to Murray that ten years earlier I had worked as Aptheker’s research assistant. His eyes widened in delight. He then told me how “interesting” he had found aspects of Aptheker’s The American Revolution, a subject on which he, Murray, had written Conceived in Liberty (five volumes). This was more cognitive dissonance than I could handle, so I didn’t pursue the topic. (I now regret passing on that opportunity, but then my association with Aptheker was still something I want to move away from.)[1]

Professor Long’s post needs no further preface. Here the link to it: Rothbard on Aptheker on Slavery. I welcome comment.

Note

[1] “. . . [T]he ‘Consensus’ school of historians . . . became ascendant in the 1940s and 1950s. Just as the Progressives reflected the Marxian outlook of American intellectuals of the 1930s, so the Consensus school reflected the neo-Conservative ‘American celebration’ that typified intellectuals in post-World War II America. . . . [B]y deprecating the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, the Consensus school could isolate it from the indisputably radical French Revolution and other modern upheavals, and continue to denounce the latter as ideological and socially disruptive while seeming to embrace the founding heritage of America. The leading Consensus historians were Daniel J. Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter. . . .

“. . . But the Consensus historians did make one important contribution. They restored the older idea of the American Revolution as a movement of the great majority of the American people. It replaced the view held by Progressives and Imperialists alike that the revolution was a minority action imposed on a reluctant public. Particularly important in developing this position was the judicious work by John Richard Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–1783, still the best one volume book on the revolutionary war period. On the left, the Marxian historian Herbert Aptheker also advanced this position. He chided the 1930s Progressives for their opposition to the revolution as a minority class movement in The American Revolution, 1763–1783.” Murray Rothbard, “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution: Bibliographic Essay,” Literature of Liberty, No. 1, March 1, 1978, https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/modern-historians-confront-american-revolution. (Emphasis added.—A.G.F.)

What’s in store for 2023

While my country is being invaded (to name no other enormity about to befall us) I will, God willing, finish my manuscript on Otis Q. Sellers, about whom I’ve blogged (and drafted a lot apart from this platform) over the past few years.

One challenge I’ve faced is how to represent myself. I’m not a professor of Hebrew or Greek or of the Bible, but then I wasn’t a professor of American Communism when I compiled the chapters of Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness; or of political economy when I blogged Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic into existence; or of philosophy (which I did study formally at the graduate level) before writing the posts that became Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. Nevertheless, I’m proud of their contents and stand by them.

Reflecting on these books, I see that each expressed a polemical impulse to set a record straight, not to bolster a curriculum vitae. Were I to write my Sellers book to, say, impress a church historian or scripture scholar, I would doom it to failure. I also don’t think I could muster the interest to see it through.

If, however, I were to order my historical and biographical material to tell the story of my Christian Individualism (the new working title for Maverick Workman) as it found fulfillment in Sellers’s, I believe the book can resonate with fellow Christian truth-seekers. (If they manage to stumble upon it.)

While that’s going on in the background, I’ll be giving expression to other interests, especially Marxism, with which I had more than a nodding acquaintance a half-century ago, an ideological cancer that’s metastasizing throughout the body of Western culture (or what remains of it). It continues to scramble people’s minds, and it’s about time I say what I have to about it. Continue reading “What’s in store for 2023”

Aquinas’s proto-liberal concerns

The pleasant discovery of a series of posts by Professor Jonathan McIntosh on the site of the Libertarian Christian Institute (LCI) has occasioned my republishing today part of Chapter 10 of Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic (CCL). As that chapter originated as a post written about ten years ago, I’ve edited it, airbrushing references to the polemic. (Those interested in the latter should consult the book. I’ve modified the chapter in other ways.)

With erudition and nuance, Dr. McIntosh locates Thomas Aquinas on the political spectrum as a proto-liberal (my term, not McIntosh’s).

These anti-libertarian sentiments [of Thomas’s, just enumerated by McIntosh] notwithstanding, there are yet many other respects in which Aquinas’s political thought is not only consistent with libertarianism, but arguably provide the latter with an ideal and even necessary, moral and metaphysical framework.

McIntosh’s aim is

to sketch at least the outlines of a distinctly Thomistic, natural law libertarianism, one that coherently combines Aquinas’s account of law’s place within the social and moral dimension of human nature, with libertarianism’s more considered and consistent ethic of law’s inherently coercive nature.

McIntosh is a kindred spirit whose work I’m happy to advertise. (Visit his blogs The Natural Law Libertarian and The Flame Imperishable.) His admiration for Thomas is great, but does not inhibit his criticism. Aquinas’s thought on the subject of liberty is, as I shall show in my own way, a mixed bag, but one whose contents every lover of liberty and reason is better off for having explored.

McIntosh’s series is entitled “The Libertarian Aquinas: Aquinas and Libertarianism,” and here are links to Part I, Part II, and Part III. (At least another installment is on the way.) I welcome any criticism of my effort he may see fit to give.

I’m taking this opportunity to thank again LCI’s Chief Executive Officer Doug Stuart for interviewing me about Christ, Capital & Liberty in late 2019 and making our discussion available on their site since last March.

Note: The “Austrians” referred to in today’s post are writers who subscribe to the Austrian School of Economics (ASE), whose “dean” was Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). “Anarcho-Catholics” are Roman Catholics who find a “profound philosophical commonality” between the ASE and Catholic teaching (but not “Catholic Social Teaching”). I would include among them James A. Sadowsky, S.J. (1923-2012), Joseph Sobran (1946-2010), Thomas E. Woods, and Gerard N. Casey, although none of them uses (or used) that term to describe his political philosophy. I have defended that compatibility; as a dispensationalist, however, I no longer use the descriptor for myself.

Continue reading “Aquinas’s proto-liberal concerns”

Better late than never: the Jesuits’ welcome, if tardy, application of the natural law

Frank Campbell, Georgetown slave, early 1900s. Campbell was one of the Maryland Jesuit slaves sold in 1838.

“. . . the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day. Hence, the great importance of the shift in Negro demands from greater welfare handouts to ‘reparations,’ reparations for the years of slavery and exploitation and for the failure to grant the Negroes their land, the failure to heed the Radical abolitionist’s call for ‘40 acres and a mule’ to the former slaves. In many cases, moreover, the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed.” Murray Rothbard (1969)[1]

A century-and-a-half after the Civil War, the Society of Jesus has acknowledged the justice of specific reparations owed to the five thousand or so living descendants of the Black people the Jesuits once owned, an enterprise they had engaged in for more than a century. With a “down payment” of $15 million, the Jesuits have pledged to raise $100 million in private donations (not taxpayer funds).[2] What follows is an edited excerpt from “Lock(e), Stock and Jesuit,” Chapter 29 of my Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic.

Continue reading “Better late than never: the Jesuits’ welcome, if tardy, application of the natural law”

1949: What were my influencers doing?

Last December 15th in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:

- President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
- Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
- Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
- The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
- The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
- Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.

World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.

No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence. Continue reading “1949: What were my influencers doing?”

“Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?

Before launching this site in October 2018, I put a tagline under my name in the masthead. At first, it referred rather boringly to the half-century of retrospective I wanted to set down here. I eventually changed it to “Navigating this dispensation’s last days” and cited a couple of Biblical verses to justify the reference to “dispensation.”

Still boring, perhaps, but at least it suggested the unity of my interests.

My understanding of the current historical phase—the dispensation of the grace of God (Ephesians 3:2)—informs how I evaluate events, arguments, apologetics, liberty and threats thereto, and everything else, and therefore what I write on this blog. Every visitor here should know that. We’re living in this dispensation’s last days with its syndrome of 21 wicked symptoms (2 Timothy 3).

That unity hasn’t always been clear. The hundred-plus posts published so far have struck even me as an aggregate, not an organic whole, a “many” without an obvious “one.” Mixed messaging may have resulted.

Brand Blanshard (1892-1989)

Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995)

For example, if an essay on Brand Blanshard or C. E. M. Joad drew you in, you may have been put off by posts on the metapologetics of Greg Bahnsen (which he learned from Cornelius Van Til).

Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987)

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995)

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003)

Or perhaps you appreciated reading about the libertarian Murray Rothbard, but couldn’t care less about Stalinist Herbert Aptheker or Trotskyist George Novack.

(Or vice versa.)

Then there’s my goal, puzzling to some who know me, of producing a life-and-thought study of Otis Q. Sellers, the independent dispensationalist you’ve probably never heard of.

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992)

The manuscript is growing, but as I’m challenged to summarize his thought (already clearly expressed, but spread out over many publications and recordings), I’ll be blogging much of the rest of the book into existence. Continue reading ““Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?”

The spiritual preconditions of rational debate: Eric Voegelin’s diagnosis revisited

The “national conversation” Leftists urge us to have about social order is about as genuine as Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers Campaign and, for patriots tempted to participate, about as safe. Debate has spiritual conditions, and the Left-dominated academedia complex guarantees that they’re rarely, if ever, met (except perhaps among family, friends, and trusted associates, at least for now).

No one made that point with greater profundity and learning than Eric Voegelin. On November 2, 2018 I posted a vignette of my interaction with the great philosopher of consciousness, enriched by extensive quotes from his classic essay, “On Debate and Existence.” Our perilous times call for reposting it. Those who vaguely remember it should take another look; it’ll be new for those who don’t.—Anthony Flood

Eric Voegelin: no debate without accord on existential order

(First published November 2, 2018)

“What ‘banged’?”

That was the derisive reaction of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) to someone’s mentioning the prevailing cosmology, the Big Bang theory (not to be confused with the television comedy whose theme song’s lyrics encapsulate the disordered cosmology Voegelin analyzed*).

He asked that rhetorical question on March 26, 1983 in Newton, Massachusetts during a Friday night-Saturday afternoon conference arranged by organizers of the annual Lonergan Workshops. (During that year’s meeting in June I’d meet Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, whose mind I revered as much as Voegelin’s.)

Being a Rothbardian libertarian, I could hardly resist asking Voegelin about the seminars that Ludwig von Mises led in Vienna in the twenties. Smiling, Voegelin said he appreciated learning from Mises that inflation is not an increase in prices but rather the central bank’s increase in the money supply not commensurate with an increase in production of commodities. (A government may politically “freeze” prices, but then the economic effect of the inflation, that is, of the physical increase, is a shortage of the goods whose prices were frozen.)

At the cocktail hour I asked Voegelin (I paraphrase from memory) how he could communicate with scholars whose grasp of the historical material was far below his (among whom he did not number Father Lonergan, but I certainly include myself). “With a kind of controlled irony,” he deadpanned.

Continue reading “The spiritual preconditions of rational debate: Eric Voegelin’s diagnosis revisited”

My philosophical “credo”: all right (mostly) after all these years

“Elements of a Credo” was probably the first piece I wrote for my antique (i.e., not mobile-friendly) philosophy site in 2004. (Compare the edited version below with the original.) I wrestle with its applicability to my current thinking. That is, I’m unhappy with its pretension to theological “neutrality.” But reading it as though it were written by someone else, I think it good enough to share in the hope that it might provoke conversation.—AGF

“He who tells me only what I already know, what I already believe, and what I like to hear, may please me, but he does not contribute to my grasp of the subject. Whereas, he who compels me to face aspects of the matter which I would like to avoid really does something for me.”

George Andrew Lundberg ¹

I am a philosopher. That is, I seek to “frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality).

I am also a commentator on the passing scene. Apart from any degree of success I may enjoy as a philosopher, I feel compelled to venture provisional, qualified judgments in advance of the completion of my speculative philosophy.

As philosopher and commentator, I seek the truth. To do that, I need the cooperation of some and, more importantly, the noninterference of all.

Some may not refrain from interfering. They would even coerce my cooperators into shunning me. For the unfettered seeking of truth invariably leads to the expression of particular truths, or just the exposure of falsehood, which threatens to harm the (at least short-term) interests of the coercers.

That has ever been the nature of the truth-seeking business. It has never been merely about straightening out someone else’s muddled thinking within the ambit of a journal article and then repairing to one’s study for a cigar and a glass of sherry. Socrates made that clear. Nothing has changed since his day. Continue reading “My philosophical “credo”: all right (mostly) after all these years”