Crack-Up Commercialism will be of interest to numerous readers of The Austrian since of what it says about Murray Rothbard; and for the a lot of part, I will restrict my review to discussing this. The bottom line of the book is simple to understand. In recent decades, the concept of a central state has come under fire in various methods, including efforts to secede, to develop “enterprise zones” within states, and to establish societies without a state at all. Quinn Slobodian, a professor of the history of ideas at Wesleyan University, does not authorize of these developments. They replace democracy with control by capitalists, who make use of workers by offering them low wages and suppressing labor unions and civil liberties.
Although Slobodian teaches the history of concepts, his own concepts do not have analytical sharpness. He believes in images, and undoubtedly is excellent at giving readers a brilliant sense of place. He is particularly reliable in describing architecture and has read a great deal. But that is about all I can say in his favor.
Let’s begin with a small example of his absence of rigor to show the issue. He keeps in mind that there are 2 sorts of libertarians. “Although libertarianism consists of lots of schools and tendencies, they are united by the belief that the state’s function is to safeguard the market, not to own property, manage resources, direct business, or deliver services like healthcare, housing, energies, or facilities. Upkeep of inner and external security, the security of personal property, and the sanctity of contract, these need to be the main function of the government. The primary difference … is between those who believe in a very little state (in some cases called minarchists) and those who believe in no state at all (called anarcho-capitalists.).” Slobodian does not observe that he has said both that libertarians are united by the belief that the state has limited functions and that some libertarians do not believe in a state at all. And if these limited functions should be “the primary function of the government,” does this suggest you can be a libertarian and believe the government can do other things also?
Now let’s see how he deals with Rothbard. According to Rothbard, everyone is a self-owner and can obtain property through a Lockean procedure of appropriation. However, says Slobodian, Rothbard thought it was all right to take away land from Indians. “Rothbard provided an unique status to the pioneer and the inhabitant, whom he viewed as the supreme libertarian star–‘the very first user and transformer’ of area. He put the ownership of ‘virgin land’ taken and made important by labor at the core of ‘the brand-new libertarian creed.’ To the objection that settlers never ever found any land genuinely empty of humans, Rothbard had a defense. The United States and Canada’s native individuals, even if they did have a right to the land they cultivated under natural law, had actually lost this right through their failure to hold it as people. Native individuals, he declared, ‘lived under a collectivistic program.’ Because they were proto-communists, their claim to the land was moot.”
Where does Rothbard state this? Slobodian refers us to a page in the very first volume of Conceived in Liberty, however the book is noticeably at difference with Slobodian’s account of it. The cited passage has to do with the effort of Roger Williams to buy land from Indians in Rhode Island. A couple of pages prior to, Rothbard states, “Williams proceeded to strike another basic blow at the social structure of Massachusetts Bay. He denied the right of the king to make arbitrary grants of the land of Massachusetts to the colonists. The Indians, he kept, appropriately owned the land and for that reason the inhabitants need to buy the land from them. This doctrine assaulted the entire quasi-feudal origin of American colonization in approximate land grants in the royal charters, and it also struck at the policy of ruthlessly expelling the Indians from their land. Williams, undoubtedly, was the uncommon white colonist bold sufficient to state that full title to the soil rested in the Indian natives, and that white title might just be validly gotten by buy from its true owners.”
Rothbard agrees with Williams’s doctrine. He says that individual Indians owned the land that they cultivated first, precisely the reverse of the view that Slobodian imputes to him, that these Indians lost this right since they ceased to cultivate the land individually. In the passage that Slobodian relies on, Rothbard also states, “While Williams’ heart remained in the ideal place in demanding purchasing all land voluntarily from the Indians, there was necessary aspects of the land issue that he had not thought through. While the Indians were definitely entitled to the land they cultivated, they also (1) laid claim to huge reaches of land which they hunted however which they did not change by cultivation, and (2) owned the land not as specific Indians, however as collective tribal entities. In many cases the Indian people might not alienate or offer the lands, however only rent making use of their ancestral domains. As a result, the Indians also lived under a collectivistic routine that, for land allotment, was hardly more simply than the English governmental land grab versus which Williams was properly rebelling. Under both programs, the actual settler– the first transformer of the land, whether white or Indian– needed to fight his method past a nest of arbitrary land claims by others, and pay their exactions till he might formally own the land.” Rothbard in the passage consistently maintains his libertarian position that individuals acquire land by bringing it into use. If somebody does this, he can’t be deprived of his land, and there are no exceptions for Indians or members of any other group.
Slobodian also uses a deceptive account of Rothbard’s position on the Civil War, in this case performing distortion through omission. Slobodian says that “Rothbard held a revisionist analysis of the Civil War. He compared the Union cause to the adventurist diplomacy of the United States in the 1990s: America roamed the world looking for beasts to kill in the name of democracy and human rights, a perverse project whose outcome was death and destruction instead of any of the stated objectives.” A few pages later on, Slobodian says, “Among the last talks Rothbard gave prior to his death took place on a plantation outside Atlanta and imagined the day when the statues of Union generals and presidents would be ‘fallen and melted down’ like the statue of Lenin in East Berlin, and monoliths to Confederate heroes be set up in their location.”
From Slobodian’s account, a reader would get the impression that Rothbard was a neo-Confederate who did not like statues that honored those opposed to slavery. He in reality opposed statues that honored those guilty of war criminal activities. He stated in the talk, “We remember the care with which the civilized nations had actually established classical global law. Above all, civilians need to not be targeted; wars need to be restricted. However the North insisted on producing a conscript army, a country in arms, and broke the 19th-century guidelines of war by specifically ransacking and slaughtering civilians, by ruining civilian life and organizations so as to decrease the South to submission. Sherman’s notorious March through Georgia was one of the terrific war criminal offenses, and criminal offenses against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half. Since by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal honors of the monstrous 20th century. There has actually been a great deal of talk in recent years about memory, about always remembering about history as retroactive penalty for crimes of war and mass murder. As Lord Acton, the great libertarian historian, put it, the historian, in the last analysis, should be a moral judge. The muse of the historian, he composed, is not Clio, however Rhadamanthus, the famous avenger of innocent blood. In that spirit, we should always keep in mind, we must never forget, we need to put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, those who, in contemporary times, opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians: Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln. Perhaps, some day, their statues, like Lenin’s in Russia, will be toppled and melted down; their insignias and battle flags will be desecrated, their war songs tossed into the fire. And after that Davis and Lee and Jackson and Forrest, and all the heroes of the South, ‘Dixie’ and destiny and Bars, will once again be truly honored and kept in mind” (focus original).
Slobodian likewise does not tell his readers that Rothbard strongly opposed slavery. Far from agreeing with attempts to make reasons for the “peculiar institution,” he composed this in a memorandum to the Volker Fund in 1961, and his position did not change after that: “The road to Civil War need to be divided into 2 parts: 1. the causes of the debate over slavery resulting in secession, and 2. the immediate reasons for the war itself. The reason for such a split is that secession need not have actually caused Civil War, regardless of the assumption to the contrary by most historians. The fundamental root of the debate over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist objectives of the Southern ‘slavocracy.’ Really few Northerners proposed to eliminate slavery in the Southern states by aggressive war; the objection– and definitely a correct one– was to the effort of the Southern slavocracy to extend the servant system to the Western territories. The apologia that the Southerners feared that eventually they might be surpassed and that federal abolition might occur is no excuse; it is the age-old alibi for ‘preventive war.’ Not only did the expansionist objective of the slavocracy to protect slavery by federal fiat in the areas as ‘residential or commercial property’ aim to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories; it even breached the principles of states’ rights to which the South was apparently devoted– and which would logically have actually led to a ‘popular sovereignty’ doctrine. It is here that we should split our analysis of the ’cause s of the Civil War’; for, while this analysis leads, in my view, to a ‘pro- Northern’ position in the slavery-in-the-territories battles of the 1850s, it leads, paradoxically, to a ‘pro-Southern’ position in the Civil War itself. For secession need not, and should not, have been combated by the North; and so we need to pin the blame on the North for aggressive war against the seceding South. The war was released in the shift from the initial Northern position (by Fort included) to ‘let our erring siblings leave in peace’ to the decision to squash the South to conserve that mythical abstraction known as the ‘Union’– and in this shift, we need to put a large portion of the blame upon the maneuvering of Lincoln to cause the Southerners to fire the first shot on Fort Sumter– after which point, flagwaving could and did take control of.”
Slobodian’s book has elicited appreciation from some distinguished leftist worthies, but it isn’t what it is cracked up to be.