Today is Murray Rothbard’s centennial birthday. 

Many things have been written about Rothbard’s legacy for libertarians more generally, but what about left-libertarians in particular?

Rothbard’s legacy? For left-libertarians? Most left-libertarians and most Rothbardians would recoil. Rothbard is usually viewed as either a right-wing villain or right-wing hero. Often, the right-wing classification has merit. But it’s more complicated than that. People mostly overlook Rothbard’s left-wing tendencies. These are most obvious during his brief time on the New Left, but they are not isolated to that period. In the spirit of other ideological audits of canonical libertarian thinkers from a left-libertarian perspective, I offer the following audit of Murray Rothbard. 

I’ll start with the more familiar right-wing aspects of his legacy. Rothbard:

• Thought egalitarianism was a revolt against nature (and that this was a revolt we should oppose)
• Helped launch the first distinctly capitalist branch of anarchism
• Held racist attitudes and endorsed “racialist science”
• Held sexist attitudes and attributed the feminist movement to man-hating and self-hating women
• Dismissed heterosexism, ableism, ageism and other “victimologies” 
• Called for unleashing the police, forcibly removing the homeless from the streets, and propagating conservative Christian morality (despite being an atheist)
• Endorsed the use of torture (seemingly only to acquire information from suspected murderers, and with the torturers of those who turn out to be innocent treated and charged as such)
• Engaged in Confederate and Nazi apologism
• Supported Strom Thurmond and Pat Buchanan
• Helped launch the paleo strategy, a branch of fusionism that became a significant part of the libertarian movement

Yes, alas, all that is true; but it’s not the whole story. There is another side to Rothbard’s legacy that should not be lost sight of. Rothbard also:

• Defended libertarian rights and the non-aggression principle on egalitarian grounds (it’s the only ethic that can be truly universal and practiced amongst moral equals)
• Drew heavily from free market socialists like Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner
• Supported slavery reparations (contra many libertarians’ apathy about historical injustice, Rothbard dealt heavily with rectifying unjust property titles, with three chapters of “Ethics of Liberty” touching on it; thanks to Jason Byas for this point)
• Supported workers expropriating some of the means of production (when the capitalists’ nominal ownership relied too heavily on state subsidies)
• Opposed colonialism and considered colonialist property titles bunk 
• Thought a lot of big business was only big because of neomercantilist barriers to competitive entry
• Supported black power and militant groups like the Black Panthers against the police and KKK (see Grant Babcock’s “Murray Rothbard on the Struggle for Black Dignity and Equality” and Thomas J. Webb’s “Murray Rothbard’s Black Nationalism”)
• Was unwaveringly pro-choice
• Described the parent-child relationship as a kind of class struggle and supported children’s rights (until the final few years of his life; see Charles Johnson’s “Rothbard against the Fugitive Child Act”)
• Supported free immigration (until the final few years of his life)
• Was a dialectical thinker (he recognized the interconnectedness of state, economy, and culture)
• Was extremely critical of Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, and Pinochet at times when too many libertarians were apologizing for them (or worse)
• Thought libertarianism and anarchism were best understood as left-wing ideologies, fundamentally opposed to the statism, militarism, and hierarchy of the right-wing (a crucial point echoed in the late 2000s/early 2010s left-libertarian resurgence, especially in Anthony Gregory’s “Carnage in the Middle of the Road” and Roderick Long’s “Rothbard’s ‘Left and Right’: 40 Years Later”) 

(Some issues are harder to classify. On intellectual property, Rothbard opposed patents, but supported a modified version of copyright. On Communism, Rothbard engaged in apologia for Mao and Che, but Communism is best understood as a right-wing ideology using left-wing language. On political strategy, Rothbard pursued a Leninist program of social change, which, like the Communist apologism, is only superficially left-wing. On the legality of neglecting children, Rothbard was horribly wrong — see Roderick Long’s “Abortion, Abandonment, and Positive Rights” — but not in a way that seems clearly left-wing or right-wing.)

So it turns out there are two Rothbards, or two strands in Rothbard: a left-libertarian, pro-worker, anti-racist, anti-ageist, egalitarian strand, and a right-libertarian, racist, sexist, pro-police, pro-hierarchy strand. Which strand represents the “true” Rothbard? Well, both of them; he just is precisely the person who tried to combine these two strands.

A better question is: which strand most accurately expresses his fundamental principles? And here it seems to me that the answer is: the left-libertarian strand (I argue at greater length for a “left-Rothbardianism” in my essay “Two Cheers for Rothbardianism”). The right-libertarian strand, as I see it, is in large part (albeit, people are complicated and this isn’t meant as a reductionist or morally exculpatory account) an expression of Rothbard’s personal prejudices and contingent political gamesmanship. His bigotry and desire to be part of some mass populist movement were often cause for some convenient exception or strange (mis)application of his fundamental principles. Occasionally that cut in the left-wing direction, but I think more often than not, it cut in the right-wing direction. 

If we simply consider in what direction a radically individualist, anti-statist, anti-war, dialectical, libertarian-anarchist ethic is most naturally developed, it’s left-libertarianism.