I will never forget the first time I saw Murray Rothbard. It was in September 1980 at the meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. I didn’t see him in the mornings, he only appeared during the afternoon sessions. I remember seeing him standing at the back of the auditorium on one side. Next to him was his great friend Leonard P. Liggio (1933-2014). I would never have imagined that several decades later I would be lucky enough to have Leonard as a professional colleague. During that meeting I spent time asking difficult questions, with implicit criticism, of many of the great economists of the day, including Milton Friedman. Rothbard and Leonard pulled me aside to congratulate me. I was only 26 years old and quite brazen.
Leonard told me many anecdotes about Rothbard. One of them was that he liked to work at night but not to get up early. He usually got up at noon. Another Rothbard scholar I met in those days was the Spaniard Jesús Huerta de Soto. Through his long career as a professor, Huerta de Soto helped to disseminate Rothbard’s writings more than anyone else.
We owe much to these great teachers. Murray supplemented his formal studies by attending the informal seminar run by Ludwig von Mises at New York University. I had the privilege of studying with Hans Sennholz (1922- 2007), another disciple of Mises, at Grove City College. Sennholz told me that Rothbard once asked him for help because his doctoral thesis at Columbia University was being rejected. Sennholz’s answer was very simple: «Your thesis is perfect, but it is very messy. Give the thesis to a professional stenographer, change nothing, and submit it again». Sennholz was right. Others say that Columbia’s Arthur Burns, a famous economist, did not want to approve Rothbard and that it was not until Burns went to work in the Eisenhower administration that his thesis was approved.
During those years my ideas gradually gravitated towards anarchocapitalism. After studying Rothbard’s books, I had a hard time, and still have a hard time, convincingly explaining why it is necessary to have an organization that has a monopoly on force, such as the State. I also have a hard time explaining why voluntary actions and the private sector cannot efficiently offer some necessary services.
I wonder what Rothbard would say about the current Argentine president. My intellectual, not my political, trajectory, is very similar to that of Javier Milei. Although I never had a passion for neoclassical economics, I had to study Keynesian theories to pass my exams. I began studying Austrian economics at 18, among the books were those of Rothbard. Javier Milei often mentions Rothbard in his speeches and defines himself as an anarchocapitalist. But Milei emphasizes: one thing is theory, and another is practice. Rothbard never had a role in government, and I also doubt that he has advised governments. Surely Rothbard, like his disciple Hans-Hermann Hoppe, would be criticizing Milei for his pro-Western (pro-US and pro-Israel) stance. However, he would be applauding Milei’s fiscal policy and his anti-woke stance and against the “Agenda 2030”.
In my last encounters with Rothbard he always used to criticize me, in a friendly way, for my Adam Smith ties. His questions were like «what are you doing with that socialist on your tie?». One of Rothbard’s most important disciples, Jesús Huerta de Soto, who gravitated towards and then stayed in the orbit of anarcho-capitalism, also often asks me the same thing. Rothbard thought that the regression that Adam Smith’s theory of value meant in comparison to the theory of value of the late scholastics was very damaging.
This takes me to one of Rothbard’s writings that forever influenced my intellectual career: New Light on the Prehistory of the Austrian School. It was in that 1976 essay that Rothbard first wrote anything relevant about late scholasticism. As one of my first academic roles was that of assistant professor of the history of economic thought, I devoted myself to furthering what Rothbard wrote about the contribution of Catholic religion to the origin of economic science and policy. Ten years later I published the result of my studies and Rothbard wrote a more than generous review in the «International Philosophical Quarterly», an academic journal of Fordham University. The editor of that journal was another mutual friend, Father James Sadowsky, SJ, who many say was instrumental in bringing Rothbard closer to the ideas of the doctors of natural law.
It is not necessary to agree with everything, especially with an author as controversial and challenging as Rothbard, to recognize that he inspired many of us to think the unthinkable, or “defend the undefendable” as the book by Professor Walter Block, another propagator of his ideas, is titled. Murray Newton Rothbard has gone down in history as the founder of anarchocapitalism and, although not a man of faith, he defended the tradition of the natural rights of the human person. It was a privilege to have known him and to have enjoyed his friendship and generosity.
