Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Gordon on Rothbard

David Gordon is an acquaintance of mine, an occasional penpal and we even got together once for a beer. [Actually we got together for him to watch me drink several.]

Anyway, David writes on all sorts of interesting things for the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and is the definitive biographer for the late libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard, whose primer on natural law I excerpted here.

In David's review of Rothbard's An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith here, of course my favorite part was this:

The pitting of 'tradition' vs. 'modernity' is largely an artificial antithesis. 'Moderns' like Locke or perhaps even Hobbes may have been individualists and 'right-thinkers', but they were also steeped in scholasticism and natural law. (p. 314)


Exactamundo, Murray and David. Although Locke is claimed for the Enlightenment, a more apt description of him is as capping off an even longer natural law tradition that begins with the classical Greeks, finds its feet with the Roman Stoics, runs through the Christian medieval philosophers, and at last finds fruition in the American Founding.

What is "modern" is a whole different sack of bananas, and starting with the French revolution, its fruits to date have been a mixed bag at best.

Murray Rothbard is a thinker I find fascinating, if only for his apparent contradictions---an atheist, a libertarian, yet still a "Thomist," that is, one who follows in Aquinas' tradition. I recommend Gordon's essay, Rothbard's Last Triumph, Part One and Part Two for an introduction to Rothbard's thought. Among his targets: Aristotle; the Whig theory of history; Adam Smith; Hegel; and most amusingly, as Gordon points out, John Stuart Mill:

John Stuart was the quintessence of soft rather than hardcore, a woolly minded man of mush in striking contrast to his steel-edged father.… John Mill's enormous popularity and stature in the British intellectual world was partially due to his very mush-headedness. (p. 277)


Rothbard is delicious. Follow the links and enjoy, and most of all, learn how we should never take anyone's authority when it comes to philosophy, a book where the ink never dries.

16 comments:

Jonathan Rowe said...

Gordon, if I remember correctly has written interesting commentaries on Harry Jaffa and the Straussians.

He also, I have heard, did a good review of Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul," which I have not yet read (I wonder if it's available online).

He addresses Sullivan's failure to distinguish between Robbie George's new natural law and Ed Feser's traditional natural law (though I think Sullivan was unfairly hammered by some other critics for not addressing the difference -- honestly, to most folks not steeped in the Aristotelian-Thomistic nuances, the differences are not that meaningful).

Tom Van Dyke said...

David's ace. And at the Founding, they embraced the general principle of natural law without getting nuanced or formal about it.

In fact, once you dial in God as Lawgiver, which Locke [via Hooker] and James Wilson did [and Grotius did not], it doesn't have to be all that philosophically rigorous.

Jonathan Rowe said...

Now I know why I never read Gordon's review of Sullivan's book; it's a subscriber only piece at TAC.

http://www.amconmag.com/issue/2006/oct/23/

Tom Van Dyke said...

Well, let me say this in defense of Excitable Andy: When a generalist like him misses some details discernible by only experts, that's not a mortal sin. It's when they misunderstand their subject at its core that they get in real trouble, and errors on minor details pale.

We need our generalists [and I do consider meself one] because somebody's got to try to pull all the wisdom together into one place, so we, the great unwashed, can try to apply it. Otherwise, all intellectual effort and progress remains isolated, in a self-imposed ghetto.

And, without reading Andy or David on this subject, I'm not sure natural law works without the presumption of a knowing and loving God, which is why Locke and the Founders reinserted Him, finding Thomas and Suarez and Grotius' attempts to argue it without Him.

Although the neo-Thomists try, Finnis and Rothbard to name two. That's what I meant about the ink never being dry in the book of philosophy.

Daniel said...

Tom,
Are you saying that Locke is not an Enlightenment figure or that the Enlightenment is a form of scholasticism? I don't think you can separate Locke from the Enlightenment when he was the root of its epistemology and its political philosophy. OTOH, if you want to define the Enlightenment as a branch of scholasticism, that is a very interesting inquiry.

I agree that the American Revolution wasn't terribly revolutionary and that the French Revolution attempted a complete break from the past. But where does our friend, President Jefferson, fit in?

In reality, I think there is never a complete break from the past. We draw lines between eras and movements, but the beginning of one movement is always part of it predecessor. No one escapes the past. The American and French Revolutions went in different directions due to differences in circumstances as much as differences in philosophy. And those differences in philosophy may have been driven by circumstances.

Tom Van Dyke said...

Well there are at least 4 Enlightenments and 2 Lockes. Our concern is the Founding's, and their Enlightenment was Scottish and their Locke was seen as an extension of Richard Hooker, an Anglican divine and a Thomist.

King of Ireland said...

Daniel Stated:

"The American and French Revolutions went in different directions due to differences in circumstances as much as differences in philosophy. And those differences in philosophy may have been driven by circumstances."

I think it was also differences in their political theology. I pointed this out in my last few posts if you want to go back and read them.

Daniel said...

KofI,
Clearly the political theology was different and in critical ways. But the anti-clericism of our version of the enlightenment might have looked a lot uglier and more radical if we had to deal with the entrenched ecclesiatical structure that supported the French aristocracy. And our new improved scholasticism was able to flourish because we had an ecclesiastical environment in which it could flourish.

Daniel said...

Tom,
Certainly there were very different movements within the Enlightenment. But those movements were in dialogue and the lines were sometimes fuzzy. They all sought a new epistemology based on sensation and they revered reason and experimentation. Major elements of ours were rooted in Scottish Realism, but what about those "key founders"? Some hints say 'yes' but not enough for confidence.

Tom Van Dyke said...

I don't buy the "key" Founders method. I think it's lazy, grabbing Jefferson & Adams' private and post-presidential writings on religion because they're the most easily accesible.

As far as Adams the public man goes, he went to church every Sunday for 76+ years, and was widely thought to be too religious, not enough.

As for Jefferson, he hid the depths of his heresies, and permitted his supporters in the election of 1800 to argue he was as orthodox as the next guy.

As for Franklin, he was agnostic about Christian doctrine, but it was he who called for prayer at the Constitutional Convention.

And there are 100 other Founders whose thoughts and letters have been lost to history.

As for the Founding, I'll argue there's a lot more Aquinas than Hume in it, and Humeists have so far not taken me up on that bet.

As for revolutionary France, I see your point, that overturning an established monarchy and an entrenched clergy required more radical means, but Britain solved the same problem 100 years before with considerably less terror and upheaval. The radical "Enlightenment" French had no excuse for not learning from history. Therefore I agree with K of I that the flaw was indeed in their political theology, which substituted the "general will" [of man] for "natural law" [a higher law].

Daniel said...

Tom,
The key founders deserve a bit more weight than others because they were leaders whose views were apparently respected by all. That said, for the same reason, I think their public personas carry much more weight than private ruminations. (Although it is interesting to consider the implications of their private thoughts.)

More Aquinas than Hume? I agree. But whether Aquinas was dominant remains an open question in my mind, which I find one of the more interesting of the recurring themes of this blog.

Daniel said...

On the key framers, one of the more neglected of the "key" framers is James Wilson, who was of the Scottish Realist philosophy. Of course, maybe we should take Madison's advise to heart, and look to the thoughts of the ratifiers. As you say, Tom, a much more difficult project, but worthwhile.

Tom Van Dyke said...

My view is that "natural law" and its development into the Founding principles of "rights" is what was dominant, Daniel. Aquinas is present in this way, in the political theology.

Since he wrote 500 years before the Founding, he was already assimilated into Western thought. Neither was he correct on everything, and neither had he developed "rights" into the form we recognize them today.

Daniel said...

I think there are two ways of thinking about the influence of "natural law", and it is be a mistake to conflate the two. The first, which I think is undeniable, is that it was simply part of the background in which the founders operated. The second, of which I am not convinced, is that the founding was, in some sense, explicitly founded on Thomistic principles.

Proving the second becomes difficult to sort out from there because even the Scottish Realists claimed to begin from Newtonian principles and methods as they constructed something that looks a lot like Thomism (and that we rightly consider solidly in that tradition). And even they tended to avoid Thomistic language".

I suspect that if you have accused Wilson or Witherspoon of being Thomists, even they would have denied it. It simply was not fashionable. I would put them in that category (or perhaps neo-Thomist).

King of Ireland said...

Daniel stated:

"Clearly the political theology was different and in critical ways. But the anti-clericism of our version of the enlightenment might have looked a lot uglier and more radical if we had to deal with the entrenched ecclesiatical structure that supported the French aristocracy. And our new improved scholasticism was able to flourish because we had an ecclesiastical environment in which it could flourish."

I would agree with this. One of the writers at Cato Unbound argued this in the current series on how we came into the modern world. Check it out.

King of Ireland said...

Daniel stated:

"I suspect that if you have accused Wilson or Witherspoon of being Thomists, even they would have denied it. It simply was not fashionable. I would put them in that category (or perhaps neo-Thomist)."

It was the Neo Confucists that got people to get their heads out of their asses and start thinking and participating in life again. To me Neo means same principles that adapt to the new context. This is exactly what I am attempting to bring out in my lastest post up top.

I think Tom has shown many times that it was not cool to quote anything Catholic at the time or one would be a papists which was synonymous with being clerical. It was wrong though. All the ideas they borrowed were from people who got them from Aquinas.