Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty

Murray Rothbard argues that libertarians misjudge liberty's prospects when they align themselves with conservatism. Liberty can have strong long-run prospects even when the next election offers little hope. The essay appeared in the spring 1965 issue of Left and Right and was reissued as a standalone booklet in 2010.

Rothbard's historical account starts from his taxonomy, in which classical liberalism was the radical opposition to inherited status and privilege and conservatism defended the Old Order that liberals attacked.

Partial victory, he argues, changed liberal doctrine. Once liberals held a share of power, many began defending existing arrangements and traded rights-based radicalism for expediency and gradual evolution. His treatment of Herbert Spencer shows strategy reshaping principle over the course of a career. Socialism, in this telling, inherited liberal aspirations to freedom and progress while adopting collective ownership, a means Rothbard judges incompatible with those ends. He separates authoritarian socialist strands from relatively antistatist ones, and he presses the antistatist strand with a hard question: how could collectively owned production avoid recreating a state to manage it?

Rothbard also traces how coalitions formed around state power changed political movements. Under social imperialism, welfare concessions at home could sit comfortably beside elite privilege and empire abroad, which is why Fabians, Tories and Liberal Imperialists could cooperate in Britain. A footnote rejects the conspiracy reading: the alliance shows shared conservative tendencies, with no secret direction implied. Rothbard then calls communism and fascism both collectivist while contrasting communism's displacement of old elites with fascism's consolidation of them.

Drawing on Gabriel Kolko's research on the Progressive Era, Rothbard treats the New Deal as an extension of a coordination between state and business that had older roots. Kolko argued that when competition kept breaking apart private mergers and price agreements, leading incumbent firms turned to federal regulation for the stability the market denied them. On this account a policy can be pro-business in the sense of protecting incumbents while closing off the free entry on which market competition depends. His labeling of Taft, Wilson, Hoover and the New Deal as protofascist is polemical classification layered on top of that research.

Political labels drift as well, and Rothbard illustrates the drift with Albert Jay Nock and H. L. Mencken, who opposed the New Deal alongside conservatives until a tactical alliance against one administration hardened into an accepted ideological identity, and opposition to war was reclassified as a position of the Right. Inherited labels, he warns, can hide militarism and statism among supposed friends.

His optimism rests on economics. Industrial civilization raises expectations of personal freedom and rising living standards that old hierarchies cannot satisfy, and the problem of economic calculation leads him to predict that central planners will retreat toward markets. His 1965 evidence came from Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and his remark that Yugoslavia was hardly more socialist than France is a dated appraisal. He concedes that the Western case is less clear, because mixed economies present a weaker contradiction. He therefore expects economic and political tension in the West without fixing a date for a crisis.

The objective conditions favor liberty, he argues, because people everywhere want higher living standards and freedom that statist regimes fail to supply; the missing subjective condition is a body of informed libertarians. Libertarian pessimism, in his view, misreads history, since earlier liberals faced worse odds and still joined theory to action, leading the public. Short-run optimism sours into disillusion, and the naive hope that educated intellectuals will convert the public until the state folds its tent ignores a ruling caste's refusal to surrender power. In the United States he places that problem far in the future, and the present work is movement-building, beginning with a realigned map of the ideological spectrum that shows libertarians their allies and their enemies. His final words are Randolph Bourne's, from the 1912 essay Youth, whose praise of remorseless questioning lends the movement confidence apart from the economic reasoning behind the forecast.

The 2010 Ludwig von Mises Institute standalone edition of Murray N. Rothbard's 1965 essay is copyright 2010 Ludwig von Mises Institute and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Unaltered copies of the publisher's PDF are available from the Towards Liberty Blossom server, the nostr.download Blossom mirror and the 24242.io Blossom mirror.