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03-19-2009, 08:38 AM
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10682
I’m surprised that, for all its comprehensiveness, Radicals for Capitalism, fails to tell the real story of Cato’s founding: it was Rothbard who persuaded billionaire Charles Koch, in the winter of 1976, to set up a libertarian thinktank, along with a magazine (actually two magazines, Inquiry, an "outreach" publication, and Libertarian Review, a previously-existing movement bulletin), along with a student group. Indeed, Rothbard and his circle, along with Koch, held a private seminar at which they presented papers on different aspects of the task of setting up a functioning libertarian movement, and out of this collection of memos the constellation of organizations funded by the Koch family was born.
None of this is mentioned in Radicals for Capitalism, a curious omission in a tome that, by its sheer length, purports to be the definitive account of libertarian history.
This view of Rothbard as a disruptive influence – which Doherty does more than his part in spreading – is certainly true in a narrow sense, yet still it is an annoying trope because what Rothbard was disrupting needed a good kick in the pants, and he was very capable of delivering a very swift and painful blow to his erstwhile followers. If he were alive today, we would certainly be hearing yowls of pain from the "pragmatists."
After all, it wasn’t the Rothbardian wing of the movement, that, when push came to shove on 9/11, bowed its head to the war hysteria and jumped on the pro-war bandwagon. Yes, the official Cato line has been antiwar – to Cato’s great credit – but, as Doherty reports, the pro-war faction at Cato was very publicly, and loudly, pro-war – a vivid, and frankly quite sickening, demonstration of the practical consequences of the "radical"/"pragmatist" split. Cato’s turn toward Washington, exemplified by its physical move there in the late 1980s, was meant to take the "radical" out of "radicals for capitalism." For a good many of these types, the effort was all too successful.
Caught up in the war fever emanating from Washington, they sought to somehow reconcile libertarianism, which abhors the initiation of force, with the neoconservative project of world conquest. Not surprisingly, they failed, along with the neocons’ war of "liberation." Having abandoned their own ideological roots, and gone "beyond" Rothbard, these officious little know-it-alls fell into the same abyss wherein the neocons now reside.
I have a lot of nits to pick with this book, but I won’t bore my non-libertarian readers with the gory details. Suffice to say that citing my biography of Rothbard to somehow prove Rothbard got his ethical theories from Rand is absurd, especially when I spent nearly a whole chapter on the Rand-Rothbard conflict over the question of whether the founder of "Objectivism" did indeed "discover" ethical egoism. (Short answer: no.) Also: Gene Burns dropped out of contention for the Libertarian Party’s 1984 presidential nomination not because he wasn’t "thrilled" at the prospect of running, but due to the discovery that he advocated going to war with Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. He was dropped, and not vice-versa.
Stylistically, this book has a few noticeable problems: it could have used a good editor. I don’t know how many times the word "limn" or some derivative is used, but it is surely close to fifty or so in a 750-page book. Radicals for Capitalism is full of various annoying stylistic tics, and is overwritten in places. But I won’t quibble. Suffice to say that Radicals for Capitalism is a flawed, yet fascinating read, chock full of information: it will surely succeed in its apparent task of becoming the definitive history of the modern libertarian movement. That may not be an entirely good thing, for all the reasons given above, and yet on the other hand the author is visibly trying to be fair. The problem is that he writes as an insider and participant in events he is describing, and his institutional bias shows. With that in mind, however, he has performed a great service to libertarians, and political scientists, as well as the interested public, in detailing the storied history of the freedom movement. The sheer mass of information presented therein is, alone, worth the price.
I’m surprised that, for all its comprehensiveness, Radicals for Capitalism, fails to tell the real story of Cato’s founding: it was Rothbard who persuaded billionaire Charles Koch, in the winter of 1976, to set up a libertarian thinktank, along with a magazine (actually two magazines, Inquiry, an "outreach" publication, and Libertarian Review, a previously-existing movement bulletin), along with a student group. Indeed, Rothbard and his circle, along with Koch, held a private seminar at which they presented papers on different aspects of the task of setting up a functioning libertarian movement, and out of this collection of memos the constellation of organizations funded by the Koch family was born.
None of this is mentioned in Radicals for Capitalism, a curious omission in a tome that, by its sheer length, purports to be the definitive account of libertarian history.
This view of Rothbard as a disruptive influence – which Doherty does more than his part in spreading – is certainly true in a narrow sense, yet still it is an annoying trope because what Rothbard was disrupting needed a good kick in the pants, and he was very capable of delivering a very swift and painful blow to his erstwhile followers. If he were alive today, we would certainly be hearing yowls of pain from the "pragmatists."
After all, it wasn’t the Rothbardian wing of the movement, that, when push came to shove on 9/11, bowed its head to the war hysteria and jumped on the pro-war bandwagon. Yes, the official Cato line has been antiwar – to Cato’s great credit – but, as Doherty reports, the pro-war faction at Cato was very publicly, and loudly, pro-war – a vivid, and frankly quite sickening, demonstration of the practical consequences of the "radical"/"pragmatist" split. Cato’s turn toward Washington, exemplified by its physical move there in the late 1980s, was meant to take the "radical" out of "radicals for capitalism." For a good many of these types, the effort was all too successful.
Caught up in the war fever emanating from Washington, they sought to somehow reconcile libertarianism, which abhors the initiation of force, with the neoconservative project of world conquest. Not surprisingly, they failed, along with the neocons’ war of "liberation." Having abandoned their own ideological roots, and gone "beyond" Rothbard, these officious little know-it-alls fell into the same abyss wherein the neocons now reside.
I have a lot of nits to pick with this book, but I won’t bore my non-libertarian readers with the gory details. Suffice to say that citing my biography of Rothbard to somehow prove Rothbard got his ethical theories from Rand is absurd, especially when I spent nearly a whole chapter on the Rand-Rothbard conflict over the question of whether the founder of "Objectivism" did indeed "discover" ethical egoism. (Short answer: no.) Also: Gene Burns dropped out of contention for the Libertarian Party’s 1984 presidential nomination not because he wasn’t "thrilled" at the prospect of running, but due to the discovery that he advocated going to war with Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. He was dropped, and not vice-versa.
Stylistically, this book has a few noticeable problems: it could have used a good editor. I don’t know how many times the word "limn" or some derivative is used, but it is surely close to fifty or so in a 750-page book. Radicals for Capitalism is full of various annoying stylistic tics, and is overwritten in places. But I won’t quibble. Suffice to say that Radicals for Capitalism is a flawed, yet fascinating read, chock full of information: it will surely succeed in its apparent task of becoming the definitive history of the modern libertarian movement. That may not be an entirely good thing, for all the reasons given above, and yet on the other hand the author is visibly trying to be fair. The problem is that he writes as an insider and participant in events he is describing, and his institutional bias shows. With that in mind, however, he has performed a great service to libertarians, and political scientists, as well as the interested public, in detailing the storied history of the freedom movement. The sheer mass of information presented therein is, alone, worth the price.