The two Murrays and the Age of Faux Anarchy

In 1972, Rothbard coedited with Ronald Radosh (then also part of the New Left, although later a neoconservative) a book titled A New History of Leviathan. As historian Gary Gerstle notes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), the Rothbard and Radosh volume was a “foundational text” that would “significantly influence the writing of American political history across the next quarter century.”

But by the time A New History of Leviathan appeared, Rothbard’s alliance with the New Left was already fraying. In 1969, moving from the simple hardline libertarianism he inherited from the economist Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard started describing himself as an anarcho-capitalist (borrowing from his one-time ally Karl Hess, a former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater who became a New Left radical).

As historian Quinn Slobodian writes in his recent study Crack-Up Capitalism, Rothbard “had no tolerance for government of any kind…. In his ideal world, government would be eliminated altogether. Security, utilities, infrastructure, health care: all would be bought through the market with no safety net for those unable to pay.”

Working through anarcho-capitalist thinking in his book Ethics of Liberty (1982), Rothbard argued that parents have the right to starve their children to death. The flavor of Rothbard’s reasoning is caught in this passage:

Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.

In the same spirit, Javier Melei has proposed legalizing the sale of children.

This conception of parental rights is characteristic of Rothbard’s defense of extreme hierarchy, which can also be seen in his advocacy of racial separatism. In the 1960s, as Slobodian notes, Rothbard “believed that Black secession from the United States was achievable; indeed, communities should respect the principle of racial separation. He became frustrated by the cross-racial collaboration of white and Black radicals. Blacks should work with Blacks, he thought, just as it was ‘the responsibility of whites to build the white movement.’”

Rothbard’s rejection of anti-racism and feminism was the pivot point in his intellectual journey and foreclosed any alliances he might have made with Bookchin or others on the left. Slobodian observes that “the deviation of the New Left from his preferred script of racial exit turned Rothbard violently against it by the early 1970s. Their dogged egalitarianism was an affront to his belief in the biologically hardwired hierarchy of talent and ability in both individuals and groups.”

Turning away from the New Left, Rothbard helped found the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974, rechristened the Cato Institute in 1974. Although Rothbard briefly found genuine influence as the éminence grise of the Koch brothers’ network, he bristled at what he saw as their compromised vision of liberty. They merely wanted to cut back the state, whereas he wanted to destroy the state altogether.

In 1982 Rothbard helped launch a new think tank, the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, housed in Auburn, Ala. His ally in this enterprise was a neo-Confederate libertarian named Llewellyn Rockwell Jr., described by Slobodian as “both a radical libertarian and an advocate of racial separatism ever since his first position at the conservative publisher Arlington House (named, with little subtlety, after the last residence of Confederate general Robert E. Lee).” In a 1970 letter, Rockwell said he supported “de facto segregation for the majority of both races.”

This partnership with Rockwell inaugurated Rothbard’s final and most lastingly influential phase. He now called himself a paleo-libertarian (to distinguish himself from New Left–influenced libertarians who were socially liberal). Under that rubric, Rothbard worked to forge an alliance with figures like Pat Buchanan and Samuel T. Francis, who were rebranding themselves as paleoconservatives (to distinguish their politics from the then-dominant neoconservatism of Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol). According to Rockwell in a 1990 essay for “The Rockwell-Rothbard Report” (a newsletter put out by the team), the task was to purge the “hippies, druggies, and militantly anti-Christian atheists” from the libertarian movement. In a 1992 article for “The Rockwell-Rothbard Report,” Rothbard upheld David Duke as a model for the politics of the new right-wing populism that he felt was necessary.

In that article, Rothbard showed how far he had abandoned any pretence of anarchist anti-statism. On the issue of crime he wrote, “Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not ‘white collar criminals’ or ‘inside traders’ but violent street criminals—robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.” He added, “Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares?”

On Friday, David Adler of the Progressive International reported on X: “President Javier Milei announces a total crackdown on Argentine civil society, calling on armed forces to break strikes, arrest protestors, ‘protect’ children from families that bring them to demos, and form a new national registry of all agitating organisations.” The naïve will say that Milei is betraying the spirit of libertarianism and anarchism. But in truth, the brutal use of state power to repress free speech and activism is central to the anarcho-capitalist agenda.

This vision of society is not anarchist. Nor is it even libertarian. It is authoritarian. No wonder Murray Rothbard couldn’t get along with Murray Bookchin. Nor is it surprising—as the political right grows more authoritarian around the world—that Rothbard is the Murray of the moment.