Murray Rothbard and Liberty Magazine

by Stephan Kinsella on July 6, 2026

Murray Rothbard and Liberty Magazine

July 6, 2026

[Editor’s note: As noted in Vance, Murray Rothbard and Liberty Magazine, this article was the basis for Laurence M. Vance, “Murray Rothbard and ‘Liberty Magazine,’” presented at the Mises Institute’s ASC 2012 on March 10, 2012 (mp3). For reasons unknown, it was never published, as originally planned, at either LewRockwell.com or Mises.org. It is published here for the first time. I have updated a few references and hyperlinks and footnotes. The archives of Liberty magazine are now hosted at my site here. —SK]

Murray Rothbard was at the forefront of the libertarian movement for over forty years. During this time, he made and broke many alliances and wrote for every conceivable libertarian publication, including some of his own, like Left and Right and the Libertarian Forum. One publication he was associated with from the beginning of its print run was Liberty magazine. This paper examines the relationship of Murray Rothbard to Liberty magazine, where he began as an editor and writer and later became an object of criticism and ridicule.

I don’t know what I could possibly say about Murray Rothbard that has not been said about him at the Mises Institute for the past seventeen years since his death in 1995. He was a student of Ludwig von Mises, a prolific author, an inspiring teacher, a revisionist historian, an astute political observer, the most comprehensive system-builder within Austrian economics, a libertarian icon, a joyful libertarian, and the greatest enemy the state ever had. In the words of his greatest student, Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

Rothbard has remained beyond his death without doubt the most important and highly respected intellectual authority within the entire libertarian movement, and to this day his rationalist-axiomatic-deductive-Austro-libertarianism provides the intellectual benchmark in reference to which not only everyone and everything within libertarianism is defined, but increasingly everyone and everything in American politics.²

The print edition of Liberty magazine was published from August 1987 until December 2010. It is now available only online. Each one of the back issues is now posted online at the Liberty website and also at the Mises Institute website. Liberty began as kind of a bimonthly, consistently publishing six issues a year, but in the months of January, March, May, July, September, and November. This began with the March 1988 issue, deviated a little in 1993 and 1994, and lasted until 1998. From 1999 until 2010, Liberty appeared monthly, with the exception of a combined September/October issue in 2003 and combined January/February issues in 2008, 2009, and 2010. The original size of 48 pages grew to 80 pages and then fluctuated among the page counts of 48, 56, 64, and 72. The original newsstand price of $4.00 remained unchanged throughout Liberty’s print run. The original subscription price was $18 per year. By the end of the magazine’s print run, this had only risen to $29.50—a bargain considering that the magazine was larger and published more often. There was a total of 208 issues of the printed magazine produced.

The founder, publisher, and editor of Liberty was R. W. Bradford, who also wrote under two pen names. According to an editorial titled “Why Liberty?” that appeared in the first issue, Liberty was to be “a journal produced by libertarians for libertarians, a journal with the space and inclination to discuss issues that interest libertarians, written from an unapologetically libertarian perspective.” The original associate editors were Murray Rothbard, Douglas Casey, Stephen Cox, and Ross Overbeek. Rothbard, whom Bradford says “didn’t know me from Adam,” was the second person he contacted after his old friend from college, Stephen Cox. Bradford says in his fifth anniversary retrospective “How We Started Liberty” that Rothbard “was immediately interested and encouraging.” Bradford also described Rothbard as “the best known of those involved in Liberty,” “perhaps the most influential living participant in the libertarian movement,” and “a first-rate writer who devoted incredible energy to shaping libertarian opinion.”

The editors settled on the name Liberty “mostly by default” since the other names they considered “seemed too cute or insufficiently descriptive.” Future “senior” editors (the position of “associate” editor was changed to “senior” beginning with the March 1989 issue) of Liberty included Karl Hess, John Hospers, and Harry Browne. Its many “contributing” editors over the years have included such libertarian giants as Ralph Raico, Sheldon Richman, and Robert Higgs. Rothbard’s last issue as a senior editor was that dated March 1990. After Bradford’s death in December of 2005, Stephen Cox assumed the position of editor beginning with the March 2006 issue.

I first noticed Liberty some time in the late 1990s on the magazine rack at my local Books-a-Million bookstore. I hesitated to subscribe after that because the subscription appeals I received in the mail attacked by name someone I knew and greatly respected named Lew Rockwell. After occasionally perusing Liberty for a few years at the magazine rack, I wrote my first article for Liberty in 2007 on victimless crimes, the second in 2009 on immigration, and some short reflections during and after that time on a variety of subjects. After all the back issues of Liberty were posted online a year or so ago, I began looking through them, first to help fix the Liberty archive on the Mises website, and then because of the great treasure trove of information about libertarianism and the libertarian movement that they contain. If you really want to get an insight into the history of libertarianism—and especially the disputes and controversies among libertarians—read the back issues of Liberty magazine. You may not like some of the things you read (like Rothbard “modeled his approach to ideology and social change on those of Marx and Lenin” or “one of the reasons I never became an acolyte of Murray Rothbard was his notion that he was Lenin and we had to obey”), but you will learn a great deal about libertarianism. One thing I quickly noticed in my reading of the Liberty back issues was the number of references to Murray Rothbard, not just when he served as an editor, but after his departure from the magazine in 1990, and even after his death in 1995.

Although Rothbard was only associated with Liberty for sixteen issues, he is actually mentioned in some way in 176 of the 208 issues that were printed. His enemies regularly invoke his name. Rothbard was certainly the most polarizing figure to ever be mentioned in Liberty. We can see this in a couple letters to the editor that appeared after the publication of Rothbard’s—in the words of R. W. Bradford, “delightfully vicious”—article “Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy” in the March 1989 issue:

Cancel my subscription to Liberty immediately. I don’t want another issue. Reason? That diatribe against Ronald Reagan by Murray Rothbard was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read.

Kudos for Murray! Though I have been a critic of Murray Rothbard from time to time, I think his greatest article to date is “Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy.” It was pure Rothbardian excellence!³

Murray Rothbard is mentioned 2,632 times in Liberty magazine. I know because I counted, documented, and examined each and every occurrence of Rothbard, Murray Rothbard, Murray N. Rothbard, Murray Newton Rothbard, MNR, Rothbard’s, Rothbards, Rothbardian, Rothbardians, and just plain Murray. I might have missed a few references to Rothbard when he was just referred to by the pronouns he, his, or him, but I think I got all the direct references. Rothbard is mentioned in every conceivable place in the magazine: on the cover, in the table of contents, in footnotes, in articles he wrote, in articles written by others, in reflections he wrote, in reflections written by others, in ads for books by Rothbard or others or for back issues of Liberty, in letters to the editor, in indexes, in booknotes and book reviews he wrote, and reviews of books by him, books about him, and books unrelated to him in any way.

All seemed well at the beginning of Liberty in August of 1987. Rothbard had given Bradford permission to publish and use as a subscription premium his essay called “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult.” Writing on Liberty’s fifth anniversary—two years after Rothbard’s departure—Bradford remarked about the bonus given to subscribers: “I have no doubt that it was an important factor in goosing the response to our advertising; we continue to use it from time to time, and it still pulls.” Beginning with the November 1988 issue, Rothbard’s essay was instead offered for sale for $4. This continued off and on for the next twenty years. Another way that Rothbard endured in a subtle way throughout the pages of Liberty was in regular ads for back issues of the magazine that mentioned the title and author of articles in each issue.

Rothbard’s name appeared on the cover of the first issue to promote his article endorsing Ron Paul for president in the 1988 election. Of the sixteen issues of Liberty that Rothbard was associated with, his name graced the cover of thirteen of them. After his departure from the magazine, Rothbard appeared on two more covers. The first was in the March 1995 issue that contained a tribute to him upon the occasion of his death⁴ and the second was in August 2004, when Liberty reprinted his “Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy” as part of a symposium on Reagan after the former president’s death. During his sixteen-issue period of association, Rothbard authored eleven full-length articles, twenty-two short reflections, five interviews or editorial commentaries, one booknotes column, and one book review. The only book Rothbard ever reviewed for Liberty was Crisis or Leviathan by someone well known to the Mises Institute, Robert Higgs. And yes, it was a favorable review. Only in the May 1988 issue did Rothbard not have something he wrote appear, although he is mentioned thirty-five times by others in that issue.

Ads for the Center for Libertarian Studies appeared in the first two issues of Liberty followed by eleven ads for the Mises Institute in the next fourteen and an ad for the Rothbard-Rockwell Report in the March 1990 issue—the final issue that Rothbard was associated with.

In 1988, Rothbard talked to an interviewer about Liberty:

The libertarian movement was beginning to crumble before Liberty was founded. Everybody was so concerned with talking to the outside, to Democrats or Republicans or whoever, that we forgot to develop our own thinking, our own ideology, our own point of view. Part of what the libertarian movement is about is developing an attitude, finding out about the world and commenting on it from a libertarian perspective, and reacting to it and trying to change it, so that libertarianism is not just an abstract ideology somewhere in a vacuum.⁵

This does not mean that there was no dissent from Rothbard’s views in the pages of Liberty. But aside from the denigration of Rothbard in letters to the editor, there were only three criticisms of Rothbard by name to appear in the magazine when he served as an associate or senior editor, and only one of them was a whole article devoted to rebutting something he had written. David Brown criticized Rothbard in a May 1988 piece over his hostility to “Rand’s person and to many of her ideas.”⁶ Jeffrey Friedman criticized Rothbard’s style of libertarian thought in the March 1989 issue.⁷ Also in that issue is a rebuttal by environmentalist Daniel Karlan to an earlier piece by Rothbard on environmentalism.⁸ Rothbard and Bradford replied to Friedman in the next issue.⁹ Here Bradford defended Rothbard against Friedman’s charge that he “has worked to make libertarianism into a narrow, dogmatic philosophy.” In Bradford’s analysis he sheds some light on Rothbard’s early relationship with Liberty and its editor:

[Rothbard] has contributed both his advice and writing freely, written a letter soliciting subscriptions, helped us recruit writers, and made frequent editorial suggestions. All this he has done on behalf of a journal that explicitly opens itself to the full range of libertarian thinking, including frequent criticisms of many of his own most passionately held beliefs. On more than one occasion, he has told me that some essay or another that we have published, including some written by me, have infuriated him. He has criticized my editorial judgment once or twice. But on no occasion has he suggested that we change Liberty’s open editorial policy. On no occasion has he argued that we should exclude one or another brand of libertarian thinking from our pages.

In the September 1989 issue, Bradford favorably reviewed Man, Economy and Liberty, a festschrift honoring Rothbard on his sixtieth birthday.¹⁰

The only controversy between Rothbard and Bradford during this time appears to be over Rothbard’s steadfast adherence to the libertarian non-aggression principle. Bradford had written an article (under one of his pen names) in the second issue of Liberty in defense of Robert Nozick in which he criticized “moralistic” libertarians and a libertarianism based on “the morality of non-initiation of force.”¹¹ Rothbard replied in the next issue.¹² Bradford responded to Rothbard’s reply and to the criticism of others in the following issue.¹³ There he accused Rothbard of not addressing his “central argument that the nonaggression axiom is unsatisfactory as a basis for libertarian theory.” This was followed by Bradford’s “The Two Libertarians” in the May 1988 issue.¹⁴ There he advocated a “consequentialist” libertarian position contrary to Rothbard’s “moralist” libertarianism. Although a major rebuttal to this was penned by Sheldon Richman in the September 1988 issue,¹⁵ there was nothing forthcoming from Rothbard. This difference of opinion was not personal. For as Bradford explained in his tenth anniversary editorial in the September, 1997 issue:

From the start, Murray understood that Liberty would be open to all libertarian opinions, and would make no attempt to follow the well-hewn “Rothbardian” line. At my first meeting with him, I warned him of my disagreement with much of his political theory and suggested that I might publicly disagree with him from time to time. This he accepted joyously. He always shared his pungent and powerful opinions, and cheerfully accepted the fact that sometimes his advice was not followed.¹⁶

By 1990, things between Bradford and Rothbard were not going so well. In his tenth anniversary editorial, Bradford maintains that Rothbard told him as early as 1987 “that he was thinking of abandoning libertarianism in favor of the political right.” And in 1989, says Bradford, Rothbard had decided, along with Lew Rockwell, to join “his erstwhile enemies, the conservatives, after first going through a transition phase as a ‘paleolibertarian.’” Bradford insisted that his relationship with Rothbard during this time “remained cordial” and that he “continued to contribute to each issue.” But after the publication of Rockwell’s “A Paleo-Libertarian Manifesto” in Liberty’s January 1990 issue and the responses it received—some of them “openly hostile” says Bradford—things went down hill. Bradford asserts that he received a fax from Rockwell telling him that “Murray had decided that he wouldn’t be writing for Liberty in the future, and would like to resign his position as Senior Editor.” Even so, Bradford claims that his relationship with Rothbard still “remained cordial,” even as his relationship with Rockwell had “deteriorated.” Between this time and Rothbard’s death in January of 1995, Bradford maintains that he and Murray “spoke occasionally and affably” even though he heard from time to time that Rothbard had “denounced” him “in the pages of his newsletter.”

As mentioned previously, the last issue of Liberty that Rothbard was associated with was that of March 1990. I am happy to report that his last published piece was a defense of the Mises Institute’s own senior scholar Hans Hoppe. After that issue, we begin to see more vocal criticisms of Rothbard in the pages of Liberty.

In an interview with Cato’s Ed Crane in the November 1990 issue, Rothbard’s name comes up quite a bit. Crane faulted Rothbard for the “unwillingness to pay any respect to people” who disagreed with him. He also charges Rothbard with intolerance: “There’s always been a kind of—I don’t want to say racist—a very intolerant attitude among people like Rothbard and Rockwell, on ethnic and cultural matters, and even on the question of sexual diversity.” Crane concludes about Rothbard: “I’m a little disappointed that Murray seems to be so motivated by hatred of all the enemies that he sees out there. I don’t advise anybody to get on his wrong side.”

A critical analysis of Rothbard’s libertarianism by Chris Sciabarra appeared in the January 1991 issue. After acknowledging that Rothbard’s “impact upon the modern libertarian intellectual movement has been so profound that it is difficult to assess libertarianism as a political philosophy without taking into account his enormous contributions,” Sciabarra maintains that Rothbard owes “a huge philosophical debt to Rand” and accuses him of rarely acknowledging “Ayn Rand as an intellectual forebear.”

In a November 1991 reflection titled “Rockwell rethinks Rothbard,” Brian Doherty accused Rockwell and Rothbard of “cozying up” to cultural conservatives and then blamed Rothbard for the unpopularity of libertarianism: “Perhaps the reason so many Americans disdain libertarianism is not they are libertine, drug-using, anti-traditionalist grifters (as Rockwell and Rothbard argue), but because they engage in political and moral thinking in the manner of Murray Rothbard.”

In the May 1992 issue, Bradford—again, writing under one of his pen names—despairingly states that Pat Buchanan’s libertarian political support is limited to Rockwell, Rothbard, and “a few of their minions.”

In the September and November issues in 1992, Bradford refers to Rothbard as the “former libertarian guru.” Nevertheless, in the September 1992 fifth anniversary issue, Bradford reprinted two articles from earlier issues: one from him and one from Rothbard.

Things were kind of quiet in 1993, but in the September 1994 issue, Bradford accused Rothbard, along with Rockwell, of leaving the mainstream libertarian movement in 1990 and spending “the next four years attacking their former allies, usually in lurid terms, and making themselves more palatable to conservatives by retreating from their own libertarian views.” In the next issue, Gus diZerega dismisses “Rothbard’s argument for an absolute prohibition on pollution, on the grounds that pollution constitutes trespass” as “extreme, even silly.” In the next, Robert Formaini maintained that Rothbard “always has an enemies list in his mind.”

Murray Rothbard died in January of 1995. I still have the postcard I was sent, as a subscriber to the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, announcing his death. There appeared a tribute to Murray in Liberty’s March 1995 issue consisting of short remembrances by Gary North, Ron Paul, Sheldon Richman, Robert Higgs, and others—including, of course, Liberty’s editor. There Bradford praised Rothbard and acknowledged him as “a founding editor” of Liberty. However, his assessment of Rothbard’s influence was premature: “In the end, his influence on libertarians waned, partly because of his apparent retreat toward his old nemesis, the political Right; partly because of his increasing relish for ideological infighting; and partly because a new generation of libertarian intellectuals found his brand of libertarianism too simplistic.” I think rather that now, in 2012, seventeen years after Rothbard’s death, his influence is stronger than ever and it is the influence on libertarians of R.W. Bradford that has waned.

In 1996 there were only eleven references to Rothbard in Liberty the whole year, and the first issue ever with no mention of him (November).

In March of 1997 there appeared a critical review of Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought by Robert Nelson. In the September 1997 tenth anniversary issue, Bradford insisted that the split between Rothbard and Karl Hess was because of “Murray’s insistence that movement ‘cadre’ accept the ‘correct, Rothbardian line’ on every issue.” Nevertheless, Bradford maintained that he preferred to remember Rothbard as “the charming, brilliant, and joyous friend he had been in Liberty’s formative years” and that he missed him “enormously.”

The year 1998 was quiet again, with only thirteen references to Rothbard throughout the year and another issue of Liberty with no mention of him (September).

In the February 1999 issue, Bradford maintains that Karl Hess resigned from The Libertarian in response to Rothbard’s denunciation of Hess for deviationism from the true “Rothbardian line.” Bradford further accused Rothbard of holding a “pro-Soviet interpretation of the Cold War” and having a “‘Rothbardian’ position on every issue.”

In an article in the May 1999 issue on the transformation of libertarianism, David Ramsey Steele writes one of the most vicious libertarian attacks on Rothbard I have ever seen. Steele tells us that Rothbard’s influence on libertarianism was a “historical accident,” that Rothbard holds no special merit when compared with the wider heritage of libertarian thought, that Rothbard wasn’t an outstanding thinker, that Rothbard made no lasting contributions to any branch of human thought, and that Rothbard made no enduring original contributions. Of course, anyone here who has examined the life of Murray Rothbard for more than a millisecond knows that Steele has things entirely backwards. But that isn’t all, Steele also says that that there was a “kind of dogmatic cultism about Rothbard’s following,” “a strain of angry orthodoxy and heresy-hunting in Rothbard,” and a “noticeable lack of self-criticism in his intellectual arguments.” Steele even charges that Rothbard’s intellectual arguments have something in common with Marx, Lenin, Bolshevism, and National Socialism.

In his December 1999 article on “The Poverty of the Non-Aggression Imperative,” Bradford insists that because only “a few doctrinaire libertarians” believe that “it is always wrong to initiate force,” the “Randian-Rothbardian typically has so little to show for his efforts.” He rejects Rothbard’s “facile but fallacious non-aggression imperative” and implies that Rothbard is a “puritan moralist.”

The January 2000 issue of Liberty began with a bang as Bradford, in an article on the libertarian of the century (the winner was Ludwig von Mises), accuses Rothbard of modeling “his approach to ideology and social change on those of Marx and Lenin,” not acknowledging his debt to Ayn Rand, and abandoning “the libertarian movement for conservatism.” He also charged Rothbard’s followers of promulgating the myth that the libertarian movement began in Rothbard’s living room.

Timothy Sandefer briefly criticizes Rothbard’s view of the Cold War in the July 2000 issue.

There is a vicious review of Justin Raimondo’s biography of Rothbard in Liberty’s December 2000 issue. But in addition to savaging Raimondo, the aforementioned David Ramsey Steele maintains that Rothbard “fancifully saw himself as something of a libertarian Lenin.” In a short piece by Mark Skousen that accompanies Steele’s review, the adjective libertarian is not even used: “If you crossed him, he could become incredibly cantankerous, divisive, and insulting. He was a Leninist who often disfellowed—and even excommunicated—his friends and disciples.” Skousen posits that there were “two Rothbards, a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The first Rothbard was the professional economist, the perspicacious scholar and persuasive writer; the second was the ideologue, the acerbic activist who frequently engaged in ad hominem attacks and political intrigue.” Then Skousen claims that “today Friedman’s influence is ten times Rothbard’s.” Of course, that wasn’t true in 2000 just as it wasn’t true in 2011 when Don Boudreaux said that “Rothbard wasn’t 1/100th the economist that Friedman was.”

There appears in Liberty’s June 2001 issue a short article on four principles to make “the world a more libertarian place.” Under tolerance, the author begins by saying: “One of the reasons I never became an acolyte of Murray Rothbard was his notion that he was Lenin and we had to obey. Rothbard was a great writer, but a bad political strategist. To paraphrase Grover Norquist, all ways of shrinking the state are good ways. Hunting down deviationists and heretics while government continues to grow is a waste of time and energy.” In Liberty’s October 2001 issue, Bradford accuses Rothbard of behaving like he was running a cult and requiring his followers “accept every jot and tittle of their belief, sometimes on faith, and excommunicate those who do not.”

In Liberty’s November 2002 issue, Bradford, in an attack on the Mises Institute, insists that “its real mission is to promote the thinking of Murray Rothbard, a student of Mises whose thinking and intellectual agenda was quite different from Mises.” “Rothbard was an anarchist,” says Bradford, “who more or less promulgated the Soviet view of American foreign policy, along with a ragbag of other beliefs having little or nothing to do with Mises’ thinking, which taken together, in Rothbard’s view, constituted an entirely new intellectual discipline.”

All was quiet on the Rothbard front in the 2003 issues of Liberty. So quiet in fact that there was no mention of Rothbard in the November and December issues. This is the first time that Rothbard failed to appear in two issues in a row. Actually three, because there is no mention of him in the January 2004 issue either. In the August 2004 issue, Bradford reprinted Rothbard’s piece on Reagan from the March 1989 issue, but in a note prefacing the article, Bradford incorrectly lists Rothbard’s year of death as 1996. This issue was the first and only time that Rothbard made the cover of Liberty after the March 1995 tribute to him after his death. This was followed by no mention of Rothbard in the rest of the 2004 issues.

The year 2005 saw a record four issues with no references to Rothbard (February, April, July, December). R.W. Bradford died in December of 2005. He was remembered in the March 2006 issue by one of the original associate editors, Ross Overbeek, as having “a deep aversion to Rand’s harsh reaction to opposing views and to Rothbard’s notion of the “The Plumb Line” or absolute standard by which to judge people’s ideology.” In 2006’s last issue, Mark Skousen criticized Rothbard’s opinions about Benjamin Franklin.

There began a celebration of Liberty’s twentieth anniversary in the August 2007 issue. In the next issue, the new editor, Stephen Cox, reprinted an article by Rothbard from the March 1988 issue with an editorial note earlier in the magazine devoted to Rothbard that said in part: “I disagreed with a lot of Murray’s ideas, but he always gave me a smile and a great line of talk. He was one of the most charming conversationalists I’ve ever met, and one of the best letter writers. He would sit at his typewriter and pound out thousands of words a day—unrevised except for some x’s here and there—and his words were always pungent, precise, and pointed.” Liberty’s October 2007 issue contained an ad for a Mark Skousen book that attacked the Mises Institute and called Rothbard its “patron saint.”

In Liberty’s May 2008 issue, George Smith criticizes Rothbard’s view of a libertarian just war theory, but concludes that “whatever the problems with Rothbard’s approach may be, it at least addresses in a serious way the complicated and disturbing problems raised by just war theory.”

In Liberty’s first issue of 2009, a libertarian writing about his experiences on a planning commission criticized Rothbard for waving off “all negative externalities with a call for enforcement of private property rights.” Later in 2009, editor Cox, in a discussion of the Old Right in a book review, credits Rothbard with popularizing the term, being an editor of Liberty, and being an esteemed libertarian activist.” And then he adds a personal note: “I knew Murray, and at his best, which was frequent, there was no conversationalist in the world like him, no writer of greater felicity, and no thinker of greater clarity and force.” Overall, Rothbard was only mentioned sixteen times in all of Liberty’s 2009 issues.

In the April 2010 issue of Liberty, Rothbard’s old nemesis David Ramsey Steele criticizes his idea of natural rights and charges that “the libertarian natural rights enterprise, in the style of Rand, Rothbard, or Hans-Hermann Hoppe, is an intellectual fiasco.” In the October issue, an old statement is quoted in which Rothbard is referred to as “the Karl Marx of Libertarianism.” This is the only “good” Rothbard-Marx connection ever mentioned in Liberty’s pages. Liberty’s editor Stephen Cox has the distinction of making the last of the thirty-four references to Rothbard found in Liberty in 2010.

I want to conclude with an explanation and some observations.

Although more insight might be gained into the subject of Murray Rothbard and Liberty magazine by talking with those who labored with Bradford and Rothbard in the early days of Liberty, I wanted to approach this topic solely from the perspective of what could be gleaned from the pages of Liberty. And I think the magazine has told us a great deal. I should also say that I have not chronicled the disputes that Bradford and others in the pages of Liberty have had with Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute, although some of that has come out because of the intimate connection between Rothbard and Rockwell and the Mises Institute.

The main criticisms of Rothbard in Liberty by other libertarians seem to be his acceptance of natural rights, his making of alliances, his steadfast adherence to the non-aggression principle, his moralistic libertarianism, his upholding of a plumb line or absolute standard by which to judge one’s libertarian ideology, and his intransigence and radicalness. But I think many of you will join me in asking: What’s wrong with any of these things?

There may be, as his critics frequently opine, a Rothbardian line on everything, but it is usually correct, insightful, and the most libertarian. Libertarians today still need the libertarian line of Murray Rothbard. Surprisingly, some libertarians have never heard of him. I was at a libertarian party event a couple of years ago in which a candidate for state LP president told me that he didn’t know who Rothbard was. He also acknowledged that he never read LewRockwell.com and was only slightly familiar with the Mises Institute. This can only be to the detriment of the LP and to libertarianism.

I don’t think we can study and emphasize Rothbard too much. I trust that this survey of Murray Rothbard and Liberty magazine will lead to a greater understanding of, and a greater interest in, Rothbard the man and his Rothbardian brand of libertarianism.

Laurence M. Vance, Ph.D., is a columnist and policy advisor for the Future of Freedom Foundation, an associated scholar of the Mises Institute, a contributing columnist for the New American magazine, and a columnist, blogger, and book reviewer at LewRockwell.com. He holds degrees in history, theology, accounting, and economics. [↩]
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Great Fiction: Property, Economy, Society, and the Politics of Decline, 2^nd ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2021), p. 387; previously published in idem, “Murray N. Rothbard: Economics, Science, and Liberty,” in: Randall Holcombe, ed., Fifteen Great Austrian Economists (Auburn, Al.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999). For further commentary on Rothbard, see the landing page for Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026). [↩]
For further commentary on Rothbard’s views on Reagan, see Josef Šíma, “Life in a World Without the Rothbardian One Big Liberty Master Button,” in Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, p. 251 & n7. [↩]
“Rothbard Remembered,” Liberty (March, 1995): 20–26 (various authors). [↩]
Quoted in R.W. Bradford, “At Liberty,” Liberty (September, 1997): 21–26. [↩]
David M. Brown, “The Critics of Barbara Branden,” Liberty (May 1988). [↩]
Jeffrey Friedman, “The End of Political Activism,” Liberty (March 1989). [↩]
Daniel M. Karlan, “An Environmentalist Contra Rothbard,” Liberty (March 1989), responding to Murray N. Rothbard, “Greenhouse defects,” Liberty (January, 1989): 13–14; see also John Hospers, “Property, Population and the Environment,” Liberty (January, 1989): 46–49; Rothbard, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,” in Economic Controversies (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011). [↩]
Rothbard, “Mr Friedman at the Apex Murray N. Rothbard,” Liberty (May 1989): 33–34; R.W. Bradford, “What’s Wrong with Friedman’s Pyramid,” Liberty (May 1989): 34–36. [↩]
R.W. Bradford, “Bestschrift,” Liberty (Sept. 1989), p. 63. [↩]
Ethan O. Waters [R.W. Bradford], “Reflections on the Apostasy of Robert Nozick,” in the “Living With The State” feature, Liberty (September-October, 1987): 14–17. [↩]
Rothbard, “Libertarians In a State-Run World,” Liberty (December, 1987): 23–25, also responding to Nathan Wollstein, “The Dilemma of the Gladiators Nathan Wollstein,” in the “Living With The State” feature, Liberty (September-October, 1987): 13–14. [↩]
Ethan O. Waters [R.W. Bradford], “Libertarians, Moralism, and Absurdity,” Liberty (March, 1988): 14–15. [↩]
Ethan O. Waters, “The Two Libertarianisms” (May, 1988, p. 7). See also Sheldon Richman, “The One Libertarianism” (September, 1988, p. 53), Waters, “The Two Libertarianisms Again” (September, 1998, p. 56); Waters, “The Two Libertarianisms, Again: What Is Wrong With Richman” (September, 1988). Bradford, “The Old Liberty and the New” (February, 1999), p.23, at p.26 n. 1, says, “For a more detailed discussion of the two schools of libertarian thought, see [the Waters and Richman pieces noted above,] David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (pp. 82-87); and “On The Duty of Natural Outlaws to Shut Up,” by Murray N. Rothbard (New Libertarian, April 1985, pp. 10-11) [“On the Duty of Natural Outlaws to Shut Up” [note: the Mises Institute version linked mangled the title, as can be seen in The New Libertarian, Vol. IV #13 — April, 1985 (pdf)] One issue, November, 1998, promised “Virkkala, ‘The Many Libertarianisms,’” but I cannot find it in the Nov. 1998 issue or elsewhere. —SK [↩]
Sheldon Richman, “The One Libertarianism” (September, 1988, p. 53). See also Kinsella, Richman on Inalienable Rights. [↩]
Bradford, “At Liberty.” [↩]