Readers will be aware that Murray Rothbard conceptualized all rights as property rights, derived from the principle of self-ownership. His concept of individual liberty was thus rooted in the defense of private property rights. This is not to say that he disregarded other philosophical perspectives in which the defense of individual liberty plays a central role. On the contrary, as Sheldon Richman has observed, Rothbard’s own political philosophy encompassed a wide range of perspectives on liberty:
Rothbard took obvious delight in exploring the foundations and ramifications of liberty across disciplines. For him, individual liberty was a single gem with many facets: economic, historical, sociological, political-ethical. A scholar can set his sights on one or another facet, but for Rothbard, something is lost if one neglects the whole gem.
This appreciation for a broader defense of liberty is on full display in Rothbard’s “A Strategy for the Right,” in which he struck a celebratory note describing his “return home to the Right-wing, after 35 years in the political wilderness.” In this 1992 address to the John Randolph Club, Rothbard highlighted the value of forming political coalitions in the defense of liberty, especially with traditional conservatives on the “Old Right” who recognized that a government with unlimited power to intervene in the lives of citizens can only ever be a tyrannical government. The Old Right stood resolutely against what Rothbard called “the power elite” who posed the gravest threat to individual liberty.
Rothbard defined the power elite as “the bureaucrats, politicians, and special interest groups dependent on political rule. They make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested, and lobby and are active twenty-four hours a day” when ordinary citizens are preoccupied with “the daily business of life, on making a living, being with his family, seeing his friends, etc.” It is precisely because those on the right have little time to devote to politics that forming coalitions in pursuit of common goals becomes important.
This is not, of course, to say that there are no important differences between libertarians and all who travel under the banner of “conservatives.” Nevertheless, Rothbard recognized that although “there were many differences within the framework of the Old Right,” traditional conservatives shared in common the desire to defend the individual from the tyranny of the Leviathan state and from the machinations of Neo-Marxist court intellectuals whose role is to legitimize state power.
From a different perspective, the conservative intellectual historian Richard Weaver also highlighted the importance of joining in common cause with those who defend liberty from different philosophical perspectives. Weaver was a great defender of property rights, and David Gordon has described Weaver’s book Ideas Have Consequences as a brilliant defense of property rights and “one of the founding works of post-World War II American conservatism.” In his essay “Conservatism and Libertarianism: The Common Ground,” Weaver advances an argument very similar in key respects to Rothbard’s “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature”—the argument that individual liberty is an essential attribute of human nature and that no defense of individual liberty can be successful if it operates at the level of high theory in disregard for human nature and the reality of the human condition. Weaver argues:
It is my contention that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire…this structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point.
Weaver, like Rothbard, was critical of the progressive radical who revolts against reality, whom he described as “the radical [who] makes his will the law, instead of following the rules of justice and prudence. Fancying that his dream or wish can be substituted for the great world of reality, he gets into a fix from which some good conservative has to rescue him.” This explains the conservative opposition to the progressive radical:
[The radical’s] first thought now is to get control of the state to make all men equal or to make all men rich, or failing that to make all men equally unhappy. This use of political instrumentality to coerce people to conform with his dream, in the face of their belief in a real order, is our reason, I think, for objecting to the radical.
Weaver rejected egalitarian schemes, which he rightly understood to be an excuse for vesting increasing power in the state. He saw the conservative rejection of egalitarianism and the commitment to reality as an important common point between libertarians and conservatives, emphasizing that human nature and human action are the key to understanding reality:
Praxeology, briefly defined, is the science of how things work because of their essential natures. We find this out not by consulting our wishes but by observing them. For example, I believe it is a praxeological law that a seller will always try to get as much as he can for what he has to sell, and a buyer will always try to pay as little as he can to get it. That is a law so universal that we think of it as part of the order of things. Not only is this law a reliable index of human behavior; it also makes possible the free market economy, with its extremely important contribution to political freedom.
These points of common interest between libertarian and conservative thought—while they do not by any means represent a uniform philosophical worldview—help to reinforce the strength of the political defense of liberty. The same applies to the defense of individualism within both traditions, even though here the divergence between the two worldviews becomes sharper. In his essay, “Two Types of American Individualism,” Weaver rejected the individualism which is reflected in “denying our responsibilities to our fellow men” through the type of “isolationism” for which Henry David Thoreau is admired. Instead, Weaver defended an individualism that is “more tolerant and circumspective,” that is not radical but, on the contrary, is rooted in human nature and offers “our best hope for preserving human personality in a civil society.” Weaver’s individualism draws upon a political philosophy that stands against “the forces of regimentation [and] totalitarianism” and is most powerfully expressed in the doctrine of states’ rights.
The standard bearer for this view of individualism is John Randolph of Roanoke, whose political philosophy was firmly realist in the Rothbardian sense, Weaver observing that, “His attitude was one of scorn for those who evade reality.” Randolph defended states’ rights as a doctrine that “in his mind constituted the anchor of liberty.” For Randolph, states’ rights stood as a bulwark against federal coercion, thereby safeguarding the individual citizen from the tyrannical centralization of government power. Weaver described Randolph as an “ultra-individualist,” an independent thinker who “was a follower neither of men’s opinions nor their fortunes, and he did not feel that a bold utterance needed apology.” In Randolph’s political philosophy, individualism was rooted in the social and political context of time and place. Weaver explains:
Individualism is a rejection of presumptive control from without. But Randolph never lost sight of the truth expressed in Aristotle’s dictum that man is a political animal. His individualism is, therefore, what I am going to call “social bond” individualism. It battles unremittingly for individual rights, while recognizing that these have to be secured within the social context… Randolph could not visualize men’s solving political questions through simple self-isolation.
Randolph wanted the locus of power to be as close as possible to those who would be affected by political decisions. He saw this as the most effective way to maximize the scope of individual liberty, arguing that, “Government to be safe and to be free must consist of representatives having a common interest and a common feeling with the represented.” Hence, Weaver argues that, “Randolph deserves to be called a political conservative individualist for two reasons…his belief in the limited though real role of government, and his defense of the smaller but ‘natural’ unit against the larger one which pretends a right to rule.”
This is a concept of individual liberty that treats “the relation of the individual to the state” as instrumental in ensuring as large as possible a scope for individual liberty. In this defense of natural rights, individual liberty, and states’ rights, Randolph helped to forge the foundations of the philosophical tradition which Rothbard celebrated in his “return home to the Right-wing.”
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