 Let me first introduce you, Jared Casey, and you teach at the University College Dublin, and your profession is? Philosophy. Yes. Okay. And you have a new book out on Rothbard. I do indeed. Let's just jump right into that. That's what everybody cares about right now. We love you, but let's hear about your book. What can I say? I wish you were called the worldview of Rothbard as per the advertisement and the AC, ASC guide, but actually it's just called Murray Rothbard because the series is part of, is called the Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers. So there are 20 volumes and just have the names of the people, Locke, Hume, von Mises, Rothbard, and so it's in there. So it's one of those. I see. So do they give you a word, Libet? Yes. Yeah. Did you have an outline? They want a kind of intellectual bio, then they want a substantive chapter which deals with it thought critically. They want a, what's it, contemporary relevance, and then current sort of affairs. So we've got Strauss, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or whatever, Rothbard, right? It's one of the... Well, it's important to get him in there. Right. Right? So it wasn't a given that he was going to be in there. Or did you have to lobby for this? No, but the general editor is a guy called John Medikroff from University College London. He's a good guy. And it could have been somebody else. And so he was in touch with me about something else. And you told him, look, I'm a fan of this. Well, I think he was looking for somebody. He knew he wanted to know if I knew somebody could do it and I said, I'll do it, me. And so I did. And did you take the approach of introducing the whole Rothbard thought? I mean, how could anybody do that? You can't. So you have to be really selective. So the first is basically life and time. So it comes from an intellectual perspective. So it's reasonably short. The second one kind of looks to some extent at the praxeology side. So it kind of goes light on the economics. I'm not doing man economy in the state. So it's called like Rothbard the Libertarian. So I focus on that. And the third one is really on Rothbard the Historian, which not even people who know that about Rothbard don't know, you know, they want to read the four volumes on American history or they want to read the two volume economic history. And I find Rothbard very interesting as an historian. Historian and historian of thought. Historian of thought. Yeah, exactly. So the third chapter, I think, even for people who are aficionados and so on, might find something of interest in there, especially because I reviewed the review literature. In other words, the reviews that came out in the journals. I see. Of like Panic of 1819. Yeah, from the very earliest works up to the late stuff. Conceived in liberty and everything. So I put all that in. And the last one then really just takes all of that and applies it to current circumstances. And that's where I kind of let myself go a little bit and had a bit of fun. If Rothbard had not been an economist, had not been a philosopher, he could have been a historian. Right? Oh yeah, clearly. Clearly. And in the course of the chapter, I say that one of the reasons why he didn't go down particularly well with the historian establishment was because his approach is so different and so on. He does really call a lot of things into question that they were granted. To history. Yeah. Yeah. So he adopts the same radical perspective. And of course he brings his libertarianism to bear. I mean, what he's focusing on, what he's looking for evidence of is stress on liberty and on freedom. Well, sure. It's the same way as you and I, when we pick up the newspaper, we go, oh, well, you know, Gaddafi's killing his own people, that's what states do or whatever. You know, you have this libertarianism. So Murray looked back at history and did the same thing. Right? Yeah. There's an intimacy he had with history, I find. But he also has, I think he has a narrative style that many historians would or should die for. It's just like, I don't think the man was capable of writing a dull word. You might disagree with him. You might think he goes over the top. But the one card in the scene he does never commits is being dull or boring. Well, he's excited to tell you about what he knows. He's evangelical. He's got news to tell and he's bursting to tell you. Yeah, he can't wait. And he never runs out of it. He's a kind of guy. You know, if you met him at the corridor, he wouldn't escape. It'd be 45 minutes and he'd be saying, I've got to go to an appointment and so on. And he'd be still telling. And you'd still be interested. Yeah. Until about 4 a.m. as I recall. Until 4 a.m. as I recall. I'll do it. I never knew him personally. And that's my one regret. I'd love to have known him. Now, you had finished all your academic studies and got your present teaching position and everything and then you bumped into Rothbard and the Austrian tradition. Yeah. I'm a very late convert and so on. So I was well. I came as a real shock to me. I was always interested in the phenomenon of money and what it was. It seemed a very mysterious sort of thing. Obviously, you could show pieces of paper or coins and so on. But it seemed a very odd sort of thing that people were willing to exchange goods and services for crumpled dirty pieces of paper. So a friend of mine who was interested in German philosophy was on a sabbatical and he brought me home a copy of Mises theory of money and credit. I see. Which it's like, wow. Yeah. It explains everything. And it does. And it does in such a way. I mean, again, Mises doesn't seem to have the same kind of touches Rothbard does in terms of being sort of popular and appealing on the surface and so on. But because I was turned on to this particular question for me, it was like the answers and then not only persuasive in the sense that yes, it may well be true, but there are others, but persuasive in the sense that it kind of wrestled me to the ground, cut me in a half Nelson and I couldn't move. It's so systematic. It's brilliant. Yeah. It's super. But as I said before, it's not where you normally start. Right. In that sense. But you need to start where your interests are and those were mine. I mean, sure as people have told you the same story. Once you start, you're on a slippery slope is it where you go and you know. And yet it's a credit to you. Human action, yeah. I mean, it's a credit to you that you were, you had a teachable spirit even as a mature academic. Yeah. That's a little unusual. I don't know. Yeah. My kids often wonder what I'm going to do when I grow up and I feel the same way. I just, I'm not like the Athenians always on the lookout for something new necessarily. But I do have questions and those are the kind of things which were motivating me. And it just happened that at the right time when these questions were live to use the kind of James Ian sense for me, the book came and the result was, you know, putting a detonator in some jelly knight. Now, do you feel the Ratharosman, you read a lot of reviews of his book and you see that he's variously criticized from the left, from the right, from, do you feel the need to come to his defense? I think you have in several papers. Yes, I have. Look, nobody's perfect, right? And that includes Rothbard. So nobody gets everything right all the time. But the one thing, and you could make accusations of various kinds, you know, people have accused him of perhaps not being a scholar at times as he needed to be, and that may well be right. But in a sense, he was producing so much material. And I'm very happy to forgive him because of the liveliness of what he's got. And somebody else can fill in the details and cross the T's and dot the I's and so on. But the one thing you can't criticize him for is raw intellectual integrity. And that comes to me shining through the page. I mean, he's the guy who could be completely wrong. I'm not saying he is, but he could completely wrong in something. He clearly believes and is passionately interested in what he's talking about. And it's not afraid to change his mind if he needs to do it and so on. But he always comes across, he has the sort of passion of a very good teacher. This is what you always look for in a teacher. Is somebody who not only knows the stuff but is really passionately interested and managed to communicate that. It's like lighting a torch. It's like lighting a fire and passing it on to the students. And he does that. And in his writings all the time, however, I mean, people have remarked in his country and he was hard to get along with or and so on. That may be so. I didn't know him, but I can tell you, if I'd known him, we wouldn't have had any problem getting along. He's just my kind of guy if only because of that absolutely outrageous cackle that he had, which I've heard on the recordings. I mean, anybody who laughs like that is my kind of guy. So I would have killed to be the kind of guy who was stuck in his apartment in New York until four o'clock in the morning. I would have been there until six. He would have had to throw me out. That's how it would have worked. Part of the revolutionary band of five people or whatever it was. I would have been there to sign up. So that really comes across. I'm not saying other people don't have intellectual integrity, but he has it in a way in which he lives it out. He lives it out in his writings. He lives it out in his polemical work. He lives it out in the engagements that he had, practical engagements, what he did and what he didn't do. And yeah, okay. So he might be a little bit prickly and all of the rest, but hey, so am I. I mean, human beings are like that. I much prefer them like that. Right. But a few rough ages and so on, rather than be all smooth and polished and engaged. In your book, how do you assess his... Well, let me ask it this way. I was going to ask about his anarchism, but let me just ask it more broadly. What do you think Rothbard's major contributions to the world of ideas really are? I mean, if you're going to name two, three or four, what would they be? Okay. I'm not going to comment on the economic stuff because I'm not really that competent. Okay. So I'm going to... So what my not mentioning doesn't mean that those aren't important. I think they are probably, but economists had better comment on that. I think his major contribution is, well, probably two-fold. One is taking the idea of liberty really seriously, and he has the virtues of a logician. I'm a logician myself by training, and I recognize it. So that he takes the idea, and he's prepared to follow it wherever it takes him. He's not saying, oh, this would be unpopular, or this might be inexperient, or this might upset somebody. I might not get promoted. Yeah. Well, he didn't try, but he didn't seem to worry about it. He has that, and I love that. I mean, okay, even if the guy is completely wrong, at least you can sit and you're working all day, but I don't think he is, but he takes that, okay? And the other really interesting thing for me from the point of view, because this appeals to me as a Catholic to some extent, Catholics often tend to think that sort of the natural law is something which is sort of Catholic doctrine or something, and it isn't, of course, right? But nonetheless, it has received probably its greatest development and most of its adherence would be in the Catholic tradition. Rothbard's not in that tradition, and yet he discovers that himself, and it has an immediate appeal to him. So he manages to combine his libertarian views and he gives it a grounding in natural law, which I think is properly the only way it can be grounded. Okay, I know there's, okay, I know there are people who do it through a utilitarian perspective, people like David Treven and others. But apart from the fact that whenever, if you ever do that, you're always giving hostages a fortune because it's always open to somebody to come up and say, well, if we go down the liberty route, it's not actually going to be productive of the greatest good for the greatest number or whatever it might be. And that's something you'd have to take into account. But I think in the end, it's not principled. And Rothbard's account is principled, so he tries, especially in the ethics of liberty, which I use as a textbook actually for a course I'm doing here, and students find it incredibly exciting. But it's just one chapter or two on natural law. Oh, he throws it away. It's almost like he's not saying, well, I'm doing this because it's kind of obvious and so on. So I take a bit longer to do it, but he does, he just kind of throws it away. But he exhibits it. He instantiates it in the rest of the book. Yes. So you get this grounding in natural law in a Fully Thomas tradition, and then a quick movement into a kind of an enlightenment style embrace of human rights. And then a little further down the trajectory you end in anarchism. Yeah. So I mean, this is a gigantic apparatus. Well, it's a little book with an almighty charge. Okay, I mean, it's the kind of book that probably should probably take about a thousand pages. Sure. But Murray started out quickly so he can get it. That's the same thing. And then you fill it in. But the great thing from a pedagogical point of view is because it's relatively short, because the chapters are brief, because he writes so well and engagingly, even if there are questions that are not answered and roughnesses and so on, it's precisely the right kind of text to give to an undergraduate with an inquiring mind because there are lots of things you can latch on to. And not only does he, I don't need to, it's not a stuffy piece of philosophical work all polished and so nobody can engage with it. And you have the application chapters. And there are things in there that I just find slightly outrageous myself, but that's fine. It's great. It's challenging. It's engaging. It's annoying. It's wonderful. You make a good point about his applications and I'm not sure I've entirely thought about it this way, but sometimes people say, well, Rothbard had his conclusion in mind and then sort of patched up his argument to arrive at it. But you're saying really the opposite. He had an argument in mind and wanted to see where it would go. Yeah. I mean, let's be frank. If I were to take a minimal government position, I would have many more converts. I would have many more people who'd be prepared to buy it. If I said, look, let's take off all the stuff about communications and we don't need the government. Let's take off health, education and welfare. It might be more difficult, but let's get rid of all that. And let's just say we need the government for provision of loan order, legal services and so on. And so we're stuck with that. And they'd probably go, yeah, it's that last one. That's the real sticking point. Okay. So when I'm doing my class, I tell the students how it works and I go, and I'm going all the way. I'm not stopping here. I'm going all the way. I mean, this is the Ponsass syndrome. This is the one that really tests whether you want to take it all the way. That's the hard core. And if you recall how Power and Market opens, right? First chapter, boom, national defense. So you get that one, at least in Rothbard's mind. That's the first one. And of course, I mean, even to the publishers, this was something like a scandal. It was a nervous breakdown. I mean, you know, so they subverted it basically. And yet you look around the world today. I mean, what is the power that the state has that's the most potentially deadly? Yes. Absolutely. So Rothbard's right. I mean, you do the numbers. I mean, how many people have been killed in the 20th century? And I say to my first-year class, I was saying the other day, this is not in the libertarian class, but saying count up the number of people who've been killed by the state, or those who aspire to control the state. Okay. Put that in one column. And I said on the other column, put the number of people who've been killed by ordinary decent murders. Okay. In revenge or in crime. Duel. Start from the ground. You come up to here with this one, and you're barely half an inch off the ground on the other one. And what was the function of the state again? To preserve the peace and order and to protect us and so on. I wonder, I mean, we might have a slight problem here, don't you think? Now, did you find that you had reflected on the nature of the state before you'd read Rothbard? Or was this a... No, really. I would have probably accepted it as a sort of an unpleasant necessity. I was doing a job that somebody had to do, not that I particularly wanted to do it. But yeah, I wouldn't really have thought about it. Political philosophy wasn't something I was particularly interested in. But Murray identifies the state, right? I mean, he says this is the state, and he puts a circle around it, he investigates it closely and helps the reader understand it as something special, unique, pervasive, more so than you thought. And clouds the mind. He does, yeah. Well, the other thing, I mean, since I've started on down this road, I mean, I've been investigating the historical antecedents, I've been reading a lot of stuff. There's a huge amount of material on there. And the one very interesting thing is it wouldn't be true to say that the state is a 17th century invention. But the state as we know it is a 17th century invention. In other words, the more or less the essential components of the state have been present in all course of governments and empires and so on. But the particular kind of state that we now have, which most people simply take for granted, the first thing I have to do in my class is to impress upon the students the contingency, the sheer raw contingency of the state. The nation state as we know it. Yeah, I just say, look, there was a time when it did not exist. There will be a time, please God soon, when it will not exist. And people will look back and talk about the age of the state. But for us, the nature of human beings is that when we look around the world we tend to see not only that things are so, but without reflecting on it too much, we conclude from this that they must be so. It must be this way. So, and I give Hackney an example. I say when I was growing up in Ireland, telephones were provided by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. You know, you had to apply for one. It took two years in order to get one. You had no control over the color of the apparatus. They put it wherever they wanted to, usually in a drafty hall, and they charged you whatever you like. Okay? But this was the natural order. This was the way it was and the way it had to be. Move forward 50 or 60 years and now there are rival phone companies and you can have a telephone on the top of your roof if you want and you can have a Mickey Mouse when dangling from your ceiling and you can have different services or none at all. None at all and just use one of these. Yeah, I mean, see, again, so I try to use examples like these to shift, to unsettle the idea that things must be so. And so, for example, in terms of the anarchy thing, instead of coming straight at the state, I use examples that I've got from the BBC recordings of programs where they talk about the removal of traffic lights. Oh, of course. So that's not contentious, okay? That doesn't raise any questions about force or crime and so on where people are involved. But you can actually see graphically what happens when you actually remove the traffic lights. It's better. And then you realize, and the guy tells you, there are 48,000 sets of traffic lights in the UK. And then you see the photographs and there's a whole bunch of people sitting at traffic lights, fumes spewing out, and on the other side and nobody's moving, they're all just sitting there. And nobody's moving. And then you see a village where they deliberately took out the traffic lights and one woman predicted chaos. She said, this place is mad enough. You take out the traffic lights. It's going to be ten times worse. I came back to her three days later and she said, I can't believe it. I looked around the camera and there's nobody there. There's an occasional car whizzing by. It's just, you know. And so those are the kind of things, you know, and of course, you know, Rockbar would have approved of these because these are the kinds of things that again show, because when you come into the big ones, you've already, as it were, self and the students wind up so that they're now receptive to thinking about it. Now, Murray, I wonder if Rothbard's writing is clear enough on the distinction between the nation state, as we know it, and something like a medieval personal state. Hmm. Probably not. He adopts what is essentially the Vivarian definition of the state, which is probably correct. You know, it's that organization which claims, bracket rightfully, the monopoly of force within the given territory. That's why I say that the state, as we know it, originated in the 17th century because it's a product of the breakdown of the medieval synthesis, the product of the reformation. It comes from that period. Okay, so when the church breaks up and you've already had the empire broken up, then that's when you get the nation state. But elements of the state, at least in the empire, they claim the monopoly of force, but strictly speaking, they weren't able to enforce it. They hadn't got the means. The populations were too diverse. So it's true. I'm sorry, just to finish, even in the Middle Ages. Of course, you had overlapping authorities. You had vertical and horizontal and you had merchants and so on. So it was a complicated legal and political structure. And the fun of that, if you like, for somebody, was that there were cracks. There were crevices. There were gaps. You could slip in and out of. You could move around. It wasn't ideal. I don't want to make it sound idyllic, but at least you didn't have what I suppose in the 20th century became the totalitarian claims of the state to be all and all, to determine ultimately every feature, to be the final legal port of call. That didn't work in the Middle Ages. There is a transition. That is very interesting. I guess I didn't entirely understand that that was your view, that the Rothbardian view of the state really comes into being as a modern thing. And the state of the 12th century, the state of the 19th... Well, you can hardly call... In fact, in that book by what's... I can't think of his name, the legal scholar Loan Revolution, Hart Berman. Berman argues, in fact, that the state, the first state was the church. It's an interesting thesis. He says they were the first ones to develop a central organized authority, a bureaucracy. You need a bureaucracy in order to organize a state. That's why a personal rule. That's why, in others, in the movies, for example, in Rome from the Republic to the empire, really only begins to take shape about 200 AD when the emperors begin to develop a bureaucracy. Right? And that's when you begin to exercise something... The permanent aspect of the state. The permanent aspect of the state and the control. And of course, Frederick... Frederick, great. Again, so this period of time, the 11th, 12th century, is really the beginnings of Western civilizations we know. It's from that that we get the universities. It's from that that we get the beginnings of the modern state Frederick attempted to, but wasn't in a position to control the empire in the way that he wanted. But he did... He set up the University of Naples as a training institution for his civil servants. He wanted these people. And of course, the University of Bologna was started and run by students. Again, with an idea that they would go into the public service. I mean, there were guys on the make. Just like they are now lawyers, lawyers then, we know what they're like. So, you have the beginnings of that, but the nature of society at that period was such that it simply wasn't possible, even for somebody, a strong will, say, is the emperors to impose their rule in the way that they wanted to. It took the breakup of the religious unity of Europe for that became available. I have to ask you a last question. I think I could sit here all afternoon with you. This is so fascinating. But just one last question on this issue of the state. I think my impression is that today, when people think of the state, they think of politicians. Yes. Who are we going to elect? Who's the face, you know? And you're saying that's just completely wrong. Yeah. The state you see is an institution. And institutions always have to be served by particular individuals. In other words, you can't have an institution that doesn't have people, if you like pulling the levers. But the whole point about an institution is that any individual can come or go. No individual is indispensable. So in other words, say in Britain you've got a prime minister. You're always going to have a prime minister. It'll be this guy. It'll be that guy. But it doesn't really make too much difference, as we see. So once you have set up the state, you've set up what is, like a complicated apparatus of levers and so on. And then you can more or less slot anybody in to pulling those particular levers. The politics game as we played here in the United States and in the UK and in Ireland simply involves shuffling the lever pullers around. You can have this group of lever pullers or that group of lever pullers. Or even more profoundly, you could even put all of the political figures on a boat to China and the state would still. Well, we have a spectacular case. Belgium. Belgium at the moment hasn't had a government for almost a year. The part they had an election about a year ago, as we speak. And they have not been able to form a government. And by and large, the Belgian bureaucracy and so on has been continuing to do the kinds of things. Now some decisions are going to come up that are going to cause problems because they will need executive action. There's no way to change the system. But it's astonishing. It's astonishing that the government can disappear for nine, 10 months and nobody seems to notice that. But it's not anarchy. It's a state. It's exactly the same thing. The bureaucratic structures are all in place and they all get administered and everything gets turned over in more or less the same way. It's just to show that it isn't really the people. It's the actual creation of the institution. And that is another major difference between the modern state and the medieval states. Professor Casey, we have so much to learn from you. I'm glad that you used this interview to teach us a little bit. I hope we're going to hear much more from you in the future. Thank you for all your wonderful work and for coming to Auburn and for sitting down here with us. It's my pleasure.