Murray N. Rothbard, “Tolerance,” or Manners? (1991)

This file is a short single-author polemical essay. Its scope is narrow but pointed: Rothbard intervenes in an intra-libertarian quarrel over “tolerance,” political correctness, jokes, and civility. His thesis is that abstract appeals to tolerance often conceal a simpler social failure: bad manners. Rather than treating every clash as a philosophical dispute over ideas, he insists that many conflicts are really about conduct, intrusion, and boorishness.

Rothbard opens by mocking what he sees as a fashionable libertarian obsession. The essay’s first move is sociological: libertarians who imagine themselves independent thinkers are, he says, prone to intellectual fads.

The very latest trend among libertarians is to write vehemently, indeed “intolerantly,” about the importance of tolerance, and how much they grrr, hate “intolerant people.”

From there he turns the accusation back on those he calls “Modal Libertarians.” The charge is not merely that they defend tolerance inconsistently, but that they use tolerance-talk to evade ordinary standards of behavior. Rothbard describes a culture of unsolicited correction, doctrinal harassment, and social presumption. The conceptual shift is central: “tolerance” is treated as a misplaced abstraction when the operative issue is the etiquette of voluntary association.

The “philosophy” is really a smoke screen, for the real problem is decent manners and the lack of them; and when some of us react against those boors, we are of course denounced for being “intolerant.”

The essay’s positive norm is not elaborate deference or aristocratic punctilio, but minimal civility. Rothbard’s libertarianism here is not only about rights against coercion; it also depends on informal norms that make social life bearable. Manners become a nonstatist civilizing institution, a way of regulating association without legal compulsion.

Manners are vital to the quality of life; civility is a crucial requirement of civilization.

He then applies the distinction to political correctness. In his example of feminist objections to the word “actress,” Rothbard argues that supposedly “sensitive” language policing is itself a rude assertion of power. Formal rules of speech, when used to humiliate or dominate speakers, invert the very courtesy they claim to enforce.

But these formal rules are the reverse of manners, for they are used as clubs to impose one’s will on others, all in the name of “sensitivity.”

This is also where the essay clarifies its polemical target. Rothbard is not offering a general defense of insult; he is distinguishing accidental offense, ordinary usage, and deliberate social aggression. He rejects the idea that civility requires endless accommodation of those who violate civility first. The practical rule is common-sense reciprocity rather than universal indulgence.

For there is no obligation of any sort to be polite to rude people.

The final section extends the argument to private jokes. Rothbard treats humor as part of sociability and sees political correctness, and its libertarian analogue in “tolerance” discourse, as hostile to ordinary convivial life. His account is situational: a polite person should avoid telling a group joke directly to someone plainly belonging to the group targeted, but an offended listener who reacts with denunciation to an innocent mistake becomes the boor. The essay thus refuses both crude offensiveness and hypersensitive policing.

But hyper-sensitivity is one of the great barriers to civilized discourse and social relations, and can make such relations virtually impossible.

Its relevance lies in Rothbard’s attempt to relocate libertarian social theory below the level of rights and above the level of mere preference. He is defending exclusion, rebuke, and resistance as legitimate tools of civil society when manners are breached. The essay’s core move is to replace a philosophical binary—tolerant versus intolerant—with a social one: courteous versus boorish. For Rothbard, freedom of association requires not only liberty from coercion but also the informal discipline of manners, without which “dialogue” becomes domination and “sensitivity” becomes a weapon.