These short columns - usually no more than two typewritten pages each - appeared in the Freedom Newspapers, a chain owned by R.C. However, the magazine was a quarterly, not a good format for someone who wanted to comment on current events, and so when Robert Lefevre of the Freedom School contacted him to write a syndicated newspaper column for the School’s Pine Tree Features, Rothbard eagerly took up the task. He and Leonard Liggio had started Left & Right, a magazine directed at the burgeoning New Left movement, which was beginning to make waves, starting on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. An independent libertarian movement - organizationally separate as well as ideologically differentiated from National Review-style conservatism - was about to make its debut, in large part due to Rothbard’s efforts. The Buckleyites’ crazed desire for a nuclear showdown with Moscow was a bit too much for the old “isolationist” to take, and his refusal to show enthusiasm for World War III soon led to his excommunication from a church to which he had never properly belonged.īut no matter: the hegemony of cold war ideology was about to receive a serious challenge, as the 1960s dawned. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review was even briefer, as Rothbard’s patience with the warmongering that emanated like a radioactive cloud from that publication soon wore thin. His sojourn as an occasional writer for William F. Those rightist ministers thought he was a Communist! So there was a parting of the ways. As the cold war got colder there was less tolerance for the “isolationism” of the Old Right, which by that time was largely forgotten by the conservative rank-and-file. This lasted a few years but eventually he was let go: the right-wing Protestant pastors who were the main audience of Christian Economics were appalled by his anti-interventionist polemics when it came to the foreign policy issue. James Fifield, and devoted to economic laissez-faire. Later on, he was appointed “Washington Correspondent” for Christian Economics magazine, a publication put out by a group known as Spiritual Mobilization, headed up by the Rev.
In the 1940s he wrote a personal newsletter, The Vigil, which was typewritten and mailed to his closest friends and associates.
While he tended to write his more serious books and articles in the dead of night, staying up at all hours pounding away on his old-fashioned (even for the time) typewriter, his “mornings” (noonish) were devoted to relatively lighter fare - the polemical journalism which, over the years, found various outlets. Ever the happy warrior, he sought to bring the radical libertarian perspective to bear on the events of the day, and it was a task he delighted in. 1įor Rothbard, libertarianism wasn’t an intellectual parlor game, nor was it a personal affectation: for him, it was a banner that was meant to be carried into battle. If the advancement of liberty requires a movement as well as a body of ideas, it is our contention that the overriding goal of a libertarian movement must be the victory of liberty in the real world, the bringing of the ideal into actuality. As he wrote in a 178-page memo entitled “Strategy For Libertarian Social Change”: He didn’t live in an ivory tower: far from it. He wasn’t just the number one theoretician of the modern libertarian movement - author of the monumental Man, Economy, and State Conceived in Liberty, a four-volume history of the American Revolution the two-volume An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought and essays too numerous to list - he was also its most tireless publicist, at least in its early days.
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