 This week, we're joined by Mises Institute Senior Fellow Dr. David Gordon. The man Lou Rockwell claims knows everything about everything. Our topic? The life and times of the late Dr. Murray Rothbard. David Gordon was both his friend and associate, and if you're a Rothbard fan, you'll really enjoy this week's show. We discuss Rothbard's life from an insider's perspective, touching on his experience founding the Cato Institute, his relationship with Mises, and the areas where they disagreed, his time with Ayn Rand and her objective as followers, and much, much more. Stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to Mises Weekends. I'm Jeff Deist, and I'm very pleased to be joined this weekend by none other than our own David Gordon, who is visiting us from Los Angeles. So he's in studio here. I'm face-to-face with him. And David, thank you very much. It's great to see you. Oh, great to see you too, Jeff. Thanks for inviting me. David, last weekend, we spent some time with Guido Halsman going inside the mind of Ludwig von Mises. This week, we'd like to talk to you in a similar vein about Murray Rothbard. So tell us first and foremost about your relationship with Murray. I met Murray in 1979. I'd actually read Man economy in state when it first came out in 62, when I was in junior high, but I didn't get to meet any of the major libertarians till 79. I met him in 79. I attended a conference at the Cato Institute in Eugene, Oregon in June, and he and I hit it off right away, and I met also his great friends, Ronald Hamway and Ralph Rayco. Right after that conference through Murray's influence, I was offered a job at the Cato Institute, and I was there briefly as probably no Murray split with the Cato Institute, and I went with him. But I always got along very well with Murray. What impressed me the most about him was he had an endlessly curious mind. He was always absorbing new information, and he would keep up with all the latest books, and although of course he's best known for his libertarianism and his workers and economists, he kept up with all sorts of subjects. He was new philosophy, history, he was up with trends in art and music, anything you wanted to talk to him about. He would have new ideas, and he'd know all the new books on it, and he would be very fast in the way he talked, and he'd want you to have to keep up with him. It was sometimes hard to do it. I'd always be on the phone with him, you know, at least sometimes several times a week in the annual for 17 years. So did you ever spend any time in his New York apartment, and did you know Joey Rothbard as well? Oh, yes. Well, I knew Joey very well. She was very protective of Murray. They'd met when they were both at Columbia. She was very, very smart, very well read. She knew American history very well. And of course, she was protective of him, and then he ultimately found himself in hot water with the iron rand circle over the fact that Joey was not rational enough for them in the sense that she was religious. Oh, yes. Yes. I remember she told me that one of the things they wanted her to do, they thought that they didn't want him to divorce her right away because she was religious, but they wanted her to listen to their stuff, and they thought if she did that she would convert to their views. Nathaniel Brandon apparently had done a series of tapes on the existence of God and proofs of God, and they wanted her to listen to them, and she wouldn't do it. She said something like, why do I need to listen to these tapes by this atheist? She was a quite devout Presbyterian. She kept up with that all her life. There was a minister, I think, Dr. Reed in the church in New York she thought very highly of. David, of course, Murray Rothbard was known for being just enormously well read and able to carry on conversations about an incredibly wide variety of topics. In a sense, I guess this is the definition of a polymath. Oh, yes. Yes, very much. Although I got my PhD in history, most of my academic work has been in philosophy, and I found he was very good at philosophical arguments. His mind worked extremely fast, and sometimes when he writing, he wouldn't put in all the steps. He would expect things that were obvious to him might not be obvious to all the readers, and I think he'd expect readers to be able to fill in all the blanks, and sometimes they couldn't do it. If you ask him about something, he could explain all the steps, but it was just so obvious to him that I think he didn't always put everything in. So sometimes you'll find sometimes people say, criticizing myself, well, he said this and this doesn't follow, but in his mind it did, he just had to get the derivation and he assumed that readers would be able to do that. Well, David, another aspect of Murray's genius was just that he was so incredibly prolific. Can you talk a little bit about his tremendous output, both academic and otherwise? Oh, yes. It really is quite amazing. When he, man economy and state, which was his major work on economics, I think if you include the power and market, which he intended to have in the book, it's well over a thousand pages. That was something he was finishing just in his late 20s, early 30s, then he did a four-volume history of colonial and revolutionary America conceived in liberty. He has published, after he died, there's a massive two-volume work on history of economic thought and he has thousands of articles. While this was going on, most academics are just occupied with their scholarly work, and he was very involved in libertarian politics and he was constantly writing and commenting on all the different events that was happening. One thing also, he kept up with politics really in a very unusual way in this way that he would be able to tell you, say in elections, say he could take anyone, all the different congressional races in the country could tell you who was running and what the different issues were. Say if there was a conflict, say in the Middle East, like I say today, we have the conflict going on, but the Israelis against Hamas, he would be able to tell you, say what every subgroup of the different sides was and what all their positions were and what each one had said. He'd give you the history of all of them. When you ask him about politics, he would give you a detailed account, he'd have interpretations of everything that these accounts would be based on his own reading in the sources. He'd know all the different sources and he could tell you books about it and what he thought of it. David, do you think if Murray had had a more comfortable academic position and tenure at some prestigious school somewhere that his outcome in his drive would have been reduced? Well, it's possible, although I think with him, he just had, you know, Mises has in the human action discussion, the creative genius or someone who was driven to work no matter what. I think this was probably true of Murray. I think whatever his position was, he would never have gotten comfortable. I mean, when he got his job at Las Vegas, I mean, I think he was doing better financially than he had at the Brooklyn Polytechnic and he really didn't have to keep writing. He had really nothing to prove, but he really kept on. I mean, people didn't even know he was working on this multi-volume history of economics. There were some of his critics who had said, well, Rothbard was a scholar at one time, but then he gave up scholarship and he just decided he wanted to do libertarian political work. Then they were very surprised when this history of economics came out, because that work would have taken anyone else, would have had to work full time on it for years and probably then they wouldn't have been able to finish it, but he was able to do it. It's amazing how he had the time to do it, but he did, because if you read the book, he gives not just accounts of the major figures in economics, but he'll give accounts of all the minor people who were writing and he's read all their works and you'll have detailed comments on them and the secondary literature on them. So he really, it was a tremendous achievement. It's actually my favorite of Murray's books is the history of economic thought. So Murray Rothbard completes his magnum opus, man economy and state, at a fairly young age and this book is praised by Mises himself. Tell us a little bit about Murray's relationship with Mises. Murray always respected Mises a great deal when he started tending the Mises seminar at NYU in 1949. He always looked up to Mises and they would go after the lecturers. The students would, I think, go to a cafe and keep talking. Now, Mises, although he was from what all accounts of him, he was a very war friendly person, a typical old style European. He wasn't one who really paled around with the students very much. So I think Murray didn't enjoy would sometimes visit him and Mises wife, Margaret, I wouldn't say they were enormously close friends. I mean, they were certainly, you could certainly say they were friends, but they didn't really socialize enormously. One thing Murray said about Mises was he had a very dry sense of humor. I remember Margaret von Mises came to a Mises Institute put on conference and a dinner for Murray on his 60th birthday, which was in 1986. I was lucky enough to be there and Margaret Mises, von Mises was there and she spoke and she said how much she and her husband admired Murray. Of course, Mises was a very different kind of person than Murray. He was obviously an old world European gentleman. Murray was sort of a brash Brooklynite, very much a product of the 20th century. And I know Mises was a little uncomfortable with some of Murray's positions on, let's say, anarchism. Oh, yes, I think that's that's right. When Mises did an extremely favorable review, a glowing review of man economy and state, but he said as something he said, well, there are a few things on legal questions where he thought Murray's views were more questionable. It could be challenged. And I think Mises tended to associate anarchism with the left. This is what he's familiar with. And he the idea of individualist anarchism, pro-capitalist anarchism really wasn't one he was familiar with. I'd like to think if he'd had more time to study it, he would have gone over to that view. But as it happens, he didn't. And in fact, if in human action, he's very critical of Franz Oppenheimer, who's one of the heroes to the anarchists and one Murray like that. But Mises is very critical of him. I think one thing that you touch on in your question, I think is very important is Murray Rothbard was in foreign policy, very consistent, non-interventionist. He thought the US shouldn't have gotten involved in World War II, the Cold War we should be. He thought the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War was really had been just built up by the Truman and later administration. For him, the communism was more of an internal promise that socialism is a bad system. So the way to combat communism and socialism is just to establish a free market. But Mises tended to be much more sympathetic to sort of an anti-communist foreign policy. Mises was not an opponent of entry into World War II. I don't know that he specifically commented on American entry, but he would not, I suspect, have been sympathetic to the American isolationist. So he was one who, I think, on foreign policy grounds would have been opposed to Rothbard on the Cold War. In fact, I think in planned chaos, Mises suggests that because of there's something about the Soviet state, the socialist character state would cause them to expand necessarily. And in fact, he went so far in the second edition of Human Action. He defends conscription, which went against his own work in... He had some very good arguments in Nacional Economie, which was the 1940 German version of Human Action. But he endorsed conscription. So I think there'd be quite a bit of divergence there between them. But so far as I know, they didn't go into that. They never argued about it or went into it. But I think that would have been certainly an area that they differed. David, after Murray Rothbard completes man economy in state, his major economics treatise, he goes on to write some truly fundamental books about libertarianism, including, of course, the Ethics of Liberty. Talk about how Murray really created the foundation of the modern libertarian movement. Oh, yes, that's a very good point. I think if you do it through Austrian economics, Austrian economics is value free. But the Mises was the people who argued on the basis of economics for libertarianism. Mises was a utilitarian, that's to say, so roughly he was arguing. We should have a free market because this is the best, in fact, the only way to promote peace and prosperity. We should have free market because it's really the only system that works. But the approach through rights is saying that it's certainly relevant that something works. It's promoting peace and prosperity, but that really isn't the basis of ethics. It's that people have certain rights, such as the right to own yourself, a right to acquire property. And you get an independent argument for libertarianism on that basis. Murray, in philosophy, was mainly influenced by the Aristotelian and Thomas tradition, Thomas as followers of St. Thomas Aquinas and afterwards the Neoscholastic philosophies is sometimes called. And he studied that quite a bit. And this is another area where Mises differed with Rothbard. Mises had a very low opinion of the Neoscholastics. He referred, there was a footnote in human actuary first to a book by Louis Rougier, and very critical of the Neoscholastic. So that wasn't, and also Mises was critical of natural law philosophies. He thought that it was really very sound. So that's another area where they were rather different. David, you've identified some areas where Murray Rothbard felt Mises was wrong in his approach or his theory. Given the benefit of hindsight today, are there some areas where modern Austrians or modern libertarians might look at Murray's work and say Rothbard was wrong about X, Y or Z? Well, basically, I think Murray was on the right lines entirely. If I had to say anything, sometimes I think when he was refuting a position he differed with, when he was defending a position, his, what he would do would be he amasses many of his arguments as possible. And sometimes I think in a few cases there are problems in some of the arguments. I think as I was mentioning before, he thought enormously fast in what he was doing. So I think sometimes, I think in philosophy, you have to go a little slower. And then sometimes some steps that he would just say, oh, well, this is completely obvious. Sometimes there are objections one could raise to it. So it would have been nice if he could respond to that. I think he could, he would have if he'd been asked, but he just didn't. I remember there was one, you see, one thing about Murray was very, very open in conversation. But if he was convinced of a certain position, especially if it involved politics, this wouldn't be true, say just in any general intellectual issues, like you could certainly say, you know, I don't, I don't agree with what you're saying about German Baroque art, or of course I wouldn't know enough to differ with him. But I mean, somebody could certainly say that, but I mean, if somebody differed with some political point, you had to be very careful how you put it. Like I would usually say, well, if someone were to object to give this objection, how would you respond? I wouldn't say, I think this is a good objection. You had to be rather careful about this thing because Murray would get very enthusiastic about a particular way of looking at things and, you know, that, that would be it. Well, were you at all intimidated by him intellectually? I mean, he's this little guy, but he was such a force. Oh, yes. I mean, you, I would very much hesitate to differ with Murray. You know, I thought, if, if I differed with him, the odds were very much in favor of his being right not me, you know, but I mean, sometimes you know, I just go over things. I say, well, here's a point. Like the one issue, and this is one I think that Murray, one where Murray was right and I was wrong, is I, when I tended to be very favorable, much more favorable than he was to Robert Nozick as a philosopher. I thought maybe there was a way of taking Nozick's position so that he really wasn't that different from anarchism. And Murray thought, no, no, this is wrong. And I think Murray was right. But what happened in their, the different philosophies, there was a complication in that Murray and Nozick really didn't like each other much. It was much more Nozick didn't like Murray than the other way round. But that was something you always had to bear in mind when you were talking to Nozick about, to Murray about Nozick, that he didn't like Nozick very much. They apparently had, there were different issues that they, I think one of the issues was kind of a purely obscure one that Nozick thought you can have measurement of someone's internal subjective states. Like you could talk about degrees of pain or sort of making this a purely objective measurement. In fact, Nozick had a paper where he defends measuring interpersonal utility. And of course Rothbard said, no, you couldn't do that. That was one issue. And then they differed very much on the Middle East that Nozick was very pro-Israel and Rothbard was very much the other way. And they had some differences on particular candidates in the Libertarian Party. They tended to support different people. Murray was very involved in Libertarian Party politics. I didn't keep up with that at all, but he would have particular people that he supported. And he would be very upset with people who supported a different group from the one that he wanted. David, even some of Murray Rothbard's close friends and associates like Ron Hamway, for instance, have remarked about his intransigence. Do you think if he had been a little less intransigent, a little smoother around the edges, let's say, would he have been a more effective Libertarian? Well, I don't know that I'd agree with that really. The thing about him was he tended, it was just among Libertarians that he insisted on what he considered to be the correct position. Say, if someone wasn't a Libertarian, he would be very, very tolerant of whatever he said. For example, one of his best friends, also from Joey Rothbard, there was a couple Leonard Leib and his wife, Leonard Leib was a historian who wrote mainly about the Netherlands. Leonard Leib was very much a conventional leftist, but they got along perfectly well. But the thing was, if you were a Libertarian, then Murray expected you to have the right position. Again, it would be all right if you didn't have the right position as long as you didn't insist on arguing with him. I think, to some extent, it's true that he was very intransigent. He would insist on what he believed was right. But I think the thing that sometimes overlooked is that the people who opposed him tended to be very insistent on what they thought and they kept arguing with him and wanted to insist on what they thought. It was only if they kept after him that he would eventually lose his temper. I remember there was one case where George Smith and Wendy McElroy were very prominent Libertarians in the LA, LA circles, were interested in nonviolent resistance to the state and they became very interested in thought of Mahatma Gandhi and wrote on him. Rothbard, with his, typically knew everything, he had some very negative comments on Gandhi. He'd gone through his career and he had a lot of negative comments on him. One thing about Gandhi, I forget whether Murray included this in his, in his, what he wrote about him, was during World War I, Gandhi giving recruiting speeches in India for the British Army, which you wouldn't expect, but that was true. So, after he wrote this, then Wendy McElroy wrote a reply defending Gandhi and then Murray was perfectly all right with that. But then George Smith wrote another very much sharper criticism of Rothbard. Then Rothbard got very upset and I think that broke up their friendship at least for a while. So, you had to provoke Murray to get him upset with you. But I think it, to answer your question more directly, I think if he'd been smoother around the edges, it wouldn't really be Murray. That was his personality. He was very much like the hero main character in Ibsen's play, Bran said, the devil is compromise. I think that was the really essential to Murray to state the truth as he saw it. David, I'd like to touch upon Rothbard's atheism. He was born into, I guess, a secular Jewish family in Brooklyn in the early part of the 20th century. Talk about how his atheism shaped his worldview and his career. Well, I think he was an atheist. He wasn't out of hostility to religion. It was more that he didn't find the arguments for existence of God very convincing. Now, toward the end of his life, I think he just said something like, if there is a God, it would be a being that we really can't know anything about or would act in a completely different way to anything we would understand. I think with him, it's more of an intellectual matter. He just didn't find the arguments convincing. For him, it wouldn't be an emotional thing. It was just that he didn't find... But I don't think that wouldn't... If he wasn't someone, say the Randians would be, if you're not an atheist, you're really irrational. He would not take that view. He was very tolerant of whatever people thought. That was just his understanding of things. One of his great friends was the Jesuit libertarian father, James Sadoski. That certainly Sadoski, being a Jesuit, never affected their friendship. I think that existence of God, or atheism, wasn't really a central issue for Rothbard. But he was able to construct his entire defense and theory of natural rights without reference to a theist deity. Yes, that's right. In doing that though, I mean, that's in the natural law tradition. I mean, remember Aquinas, who was great authority on natural law, thought that natural law is what it can be established purely by reason. So it's consistent with being a theist to support natural law in Rothbard's way of doing it. David, as we wrap this interview up, any last thoughts on Murray Rothbard's enduring legacy now that he's been gone 20 years? I always viewed Murray as a second father. He really meant a lot to me. And I think he's had similar effects on a lot of people that at the Mises Institute, we try to promote Rothbard's legacy. And I think he's really the one who's by far the most important person in libertarianism. I often wish when issues come up today, I wish I could call Murray and find out his views on things so he would always have a tremendously analytical and informed judgment on everything. So I think he's he's the one you really have to study if you want to understand libertarianism. David Gordon, thanks very much for your time today. It was great having you in studio. Ladies and gentlemen, hope you enjoyed the interview. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.