An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introduction to Rothbard's Life and Work
Review: Energetic and well-written, Raimondo's biography chronicles the life of seminal libertarian scholar and polemicist, Murray Newton Rothbard (1926'1995). Whether writing economic and historical treatises or squabbling with fellow travelers, Rothbard remained a tireless, happy warrior dedicated to fighting the welfare-warfare state.

Raimondo insists that Rothbard was a "thinker of similar importance" to Karl Marx (p. 157), but Rothbard's undeniable genius notwithstanding, this description seems an overestimation. For the moment, Mises, Hayek, and Milton Friedman loom larger in the firmament. What Rothbard did produce, among his many other accomplishments, was a multidimensional argument for anarchocapitalism. In life, he was a happy warrior on behalf of that as yet unrealized vision. He has been proved correct in his assessments of the signal importance of World War I for constructing the modern state and in identifying Hoover's policies as anticipating the New Deal. Perhaps his optimism regarding the feasibility of a stateless society will some day be validated. In the meantime, Raimondo has written an excellent introduction to Rothbard's life's work.

Rating:
Summary: Extensive, fascinating
Review: I enjoyed reading this extensive biography of Murray Rothbard, which is obviously a labor of love on the part of the author. Through this book we follow the thinker, economist, and philosopher Rothbard from his roots in the Old Right, through a brief stint in Ayn Rand's Objectivism, then to the New Left, the nascent Libertarian movement during the 1970s, and then back to the Old Right after the fall of the Berlin Wall made anti-interventionism acceptable on the right once again. Through it all, we see that Rothbard's political odyssey wasn't floundering at all but was guided by the two views which he was most adament about, his advocacy of economic laissez-faire and his solidly anti-war position. Ayn Rand, the New Left, and the William F. Buckley branch of conservatism are treated here with some disdain, which may turn off some readers. That caveat aside, this book should prove a fascinating read.

Rating:
Summary: Polemicist Rothbard
Review: Whole books could be written on Rothbard the Economist, or Rothbard the Historian. This book is about Murray Rothbard the Political Strategist and Polemicist. And that makes me happy, because it is *this* Rothbard that I personally recall so fondly from the old libertarian/anarchist trenches in the late '60s, early '70s, then again in the early '90s (when Rothbard and I last met).

Raimondo was there in those years 1978-1989 when I wasn't, when I largely fell away from the libertarian movement, and I enjoyed his coverage of those years in this book.

My only real gripe is that Justin sometimes lets his biases unfairly color his book, especially about periods where he wasn't personally present. One example is his "take" on Rothbard's alliance with Karl Hess in the late '60s. Hess was not quite so wooly or nutty as Raimondo paints him; you need only read Hess's writings in Rothbard's own "Libertarian Forum" newsletter from those days to see that Hess was a thoughtful Rothbardian anarchist during that period.

Anyway, thumbs up for Raimondo's biography of the heroic Murray Rothbard. But there are still more books to be written!