Rothbard reads Frank S. Meyer less as the successful theorist of fusionism than as evidence that fusionism cannot stand as an independent political philosophy. The conservative coalition, he argues, was historically held together by opposition to the New Deal, not by a coherent doctrine. When Meyer tries to mediate between traditionalist moral order and libertarian freedom, Rothbard finds that the mediation repeatedly dissolves: on the decisive issues, Meyer’s arguments are libertarian.
The central issue is virtue and coercion. Rothbard credits Meyer with seeing that moral action requires freedom; externally compelled virtue is not virtue but conformity. This is why Meyer’s defense of the freedom to choose wrongly becomes, for Rothbard, the core libertarian insight of the essay.
Unless he can choose his worst, he cannot choose his best.
Rothbard then distinguishes freedom as a political principle from freedom as a complete philosophy of life. Libertarianism, in his account, does not deny moral truth, religious seriousness, or ethical hierarchy; it only specifies when force may legitimately be used. This lets him answer the conservative charge that libertarians make liberty the highest human good. They need not do so. They hold that liberty is the highest political condition because coercion corrupts moral agency.
libertarianism is strictly a political philosophy, confined to what the use of violence should be in social life.
On this basis Rothbard reinterprets Meyer’s criticism of some libertarians. Meyer’s target, he argues, is not libertarianism as such but utilitarian liberalism, especially versions that substitute efficiency, pleasure, or social calculation for justice and natural right. Meyer’s natural-law commitments therefore place him not outside libertarianism but within its rights-based wing, against economists and legal theorists who drain liberty of moral content.
The same pattern governs Rothbard’s treatment of community. Traditionalists often speak as if society, nation, or community has claims prior to and above those of persons. Rothbard insists that Meyer does not really accept this collectivist premise. Meyer values family, association, inheritance, and moral culture, but he does not grant them political authority over unwilling individuals. For Rothbard, that is decisive: genuine community is voluntary or it is not community in the morally relevant sense.
For libertarians, communities are simply voluntary groupings of individuals, with no independent rights or powers of their own.
Tradition is the hardest case for Rothbard’s interpretation, because Meyer sometimes tries to make reason function within inherited order rather than above it. Rothbard treats this as Meyer’s one serious inconsistency. Tradition can preserve wisdom, but it can also preserve evil; it cannot judge itself. If one must distinguish sound traditions from corrupt ones, then some standard beyond tradition is already being used. Rothbard therefore reads Meyer’s best arguments as rationalist and natural-law rather than traditionalist, despite Meyer’s desire to hold the conservative synthesis together.
The question of order reinforces the same conclusion. Rothbard rejects the traditionalist contrast between liberty and order, replacing it with a contrast between coercive order and voluntary order. Markets, customs, associations, and shared practices can generate coordination without state command. State-enforced order, by contrast, produces dependence and artificial hierarchy. Meyer’s defense of ordered liberty thus belongs, in Rothbard’s reading, to the libertarian tradition of spontaneous social order rather than to conservative authoritarianism.
Rothbard also suggests that the old conservative triad of traditionalism, libertarianism, and anti-communism misses another axis: populism versus elitism. Libertarians may distrust mass passions, but they locate the permanent institutional danger in the state and its coercive elites. Meyer is again placed nearer this suspicion of power than to aristocratic traditionalism or state-centered conservative populism.
The conclusion is deliberately deflationary. Meyer may have called himself a fusionist, and he may have served a coalition that needed such a label, but Rothbard denies that the label names a stable theory. Where Meyer is strongest, he makes libertarian arguments: virtue must be chosen, force must be limited, community must be voluntary, tradition must answer to principle, and order must arise through liberty rather than command.
In all the crucial aspects of political philosophy, Frank Meyer was a libertarian.
This work was divided into 8 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 8 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian