Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty

Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty” (1965)

This file is a single political-theoretical essay/chapter. Its scope runs from the Old Regime and the liberal revolutions to socialism, fascism, American Progressivism, the New Deal, and Cold War libertarian strategy. Rothbard’s thesis is that libertarianism belongs to the revolutionary Left of classical liberalism, not to conservatism, and that its proper mood is strategic long-run confidence rather than conservative despair.

But this chapter contends that, while the short-run prospects for liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude for the Libertarian to take is that of unquenchable long-run optimism.

Rothbard begins by detaching liberty from conservatism. Conservatism is treated as the lingering ideology of the ancien régime: hierarchy, militarism, theocracy, caste, and exploitation. The great modern break was not monarchy or mercantilism, which he sees as “super-feudal,” but the liberal revolution and the market society it made possible.

The Old Order was, and still remains, the great and mighty enemy of liberty; and it was particularly mighty in the past because there was then no inevitability about its overthrow.

The essay’s first major conceptual move is to redraw the ideological spectrum historically. Liberalism was originally radical, anti-feudal, anti-statist, internationalist, and future-oriented; conservatism was reactionary. Rothbard invokes Acton to describe liberalism as a permanent moral challenge to inherited authority, then argues that nineteenth-century liberalism decayed when natural rights gave way to utilitarian compromise and evolutionary gradualism.

Political ideologies were polarized, with liberalism on the extreme "left," and conservatism on the extreme "right," of the ideological spectrum.

Socialism then enters as a confused successor to liberalism rather than its simple opposite. Rothbard’s crucial distinction is between ends and means: socialism often inherited liberal goals—mobility, secularism, industrial abundance, anti-feudalism—but tried to reach them through the conservative instruments of state power, planning, and collectivism.

It was, and still is, middle-of-the-road because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means.

This lets Rothbard distinguish left socialism from right socialism while identifying fascism, social imperialism, and welfare-state militarism as modernized conservatism: monopoly privilege, nationalism, bureaucracy, and war adapted to industrial society. His American application is especially polemical. Progressivism and the New Deal were not socialist ruptures, he argues, but continuations of state monopoly capitalism, anticipated by World War I planning and Hooverite intervention. Following Gabriel Kolko, he presents regulation as a means by which business secured stability and privilege it could not win in open competition.

Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and antibusiness.

This reframing explains Rothbard’s criticism of mid-century libertarians. Because they fought Roosevelt alongside conservatives, and because antiwar “isolationism” was recoded as right-wing during World War II, libertarians forgot that anti-militarism had historically belonged to the radical Left. Nock and Mencken are honored as libertarians but faulted for pessimism: despair turns radical doctrine into conservative posture.

The final section converts this history into a prognosis. Rothbard argues that the liberal revolution permanently awakened mass expectations for liberty, land, peace, mobility, and rising living standards. Statist systems cannot satisfy these demands. Socialist economies must retreat toward markets; undeveloped peoples will resist feudal orders; Western mixed economies will face inflation, militarization, unemployment, and youth revolt.

For only liberty, only a free market, can organize and maintain an industrial system, and the more that population expands and explodes, the more necessary is the unfettered working of such an industrial economy.

Yet the essay is not merely educational gradualism. Rothbard insists that objective conditions are insufficient without a self-conscious libertarian movement able to identify allies, enemies, and the realities of power. Its continuing relevance lies in this reorientation: libertarianism must recover its radical, antiwar, anti-privilege inheritance and reject both conservative nostalgia and short-run electoral hope.

For libertarians face not only a problem of education but also a problem of power, and it is a law of history that a ruling caste has never voluntarily given up its power.