Murray N. Rothbard’s “On Resisting Evil” is a short September 1993 polemical essay addressed to libertarian and conservative activists. Its scope is moral and strategic: it asks why people who once recognized statism and cultural decay as evil stop resisting them, and it argues that neither careerist compromise nor separatist purity can excuse abandoning the fight.
How can anyone, finding himself surrounded by a rising tide of evil, fail to do his utmost to fight against it? In our century, we have been inundated by a flood of evil, in the form of collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, and nihilism.
This opening fixes the essay’s governing terms. Rothbard treats opposition to collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, nihilism, and the State as a moral obligation owed to one’s family, posterity, neighbors, country, and comrades. The problem is not apathy among the uninformed, but defection by those who once understood the cause.
He first confronts defeatism. Even if history seems to be moving against liberty, he argues, apparent inevitability does not justify surrender. Delay can matter; resistance has value in itself; and events can reverse expectations, as the collapse of Communism had recently shown.
Sometimes, people give up the fight because, they say, the cause is hopeless. We've lost, they say. Defeat is inevitable.
Rothbard’s answer is deliberately combative rather than therapeutic. Fighting evil is not merely a grim duty but a way of refusing submission, irritating the enemy, and keeping open the possibility of victory.
And finally, what the heck, if you fight the enemy, you might win!
The essay then turns to its central typology: two modes of abandonment within libertarian and conservative circles. The first is the sellout, especially the young radical who enters Washington intending to “roll back the State” and is gradually absorbed by Beltway incentives—status, access, contracts, jobs, and trivial procedural victories. The moral danger is assimilation: the activist comes to resent principled allies more than statist enemies.
And pretty soon you and The Enemy have an indistinguishable face.
The second failure is “retreatism,” Rothbard’s name for the impulse to escape into Galt’s Gulch, survivalist enclaves, captured towns, islands, forests, or backwoods communities. He distinguishes this from the sellout morally—retreatists may sincerely hate corruption—but not strategically. They still vacate the public battlefield on which liberty, property, society, and country are being contested.
In each case, the call arises to abandon the wicked world, and to form some tiny alternative community in some backwoods retreat.
Rothbard’s key conceptual move is to reject the opposition between “pragmatism” and “purity.” Pragmatism becomes betrayal when it merges with power; purity becomes evasion when it deserts the real world. His anti-statism is therefore not anti-social or anti-American. Drawing on Randolph Bourne and Dos Passos, he separates country from State and imagines America as divided between corrupt official institutions and an older, truer nation worth reclaiming.
We propose to continue to fight to save the values and the principles and the people we hold dear, even though the battlefield may get muddy.
He also answers the charge that militants dwell on “the negative.” For Rothbard, hatred of evil is the defensive expression of love for the good; negation and affirmation are inseparable when cherished values are under attack.
Why do we fight against, yes even hate, the evil? Only because we love the good, and our stress on the “negative” is only the other side of the coin, the logical consequence, of our devotion to the good, to the positive values and principles that we cherish.
The conclusion insists that inner freedom is insufficient. Rothbard rejects the consolation that one may remain spiritually free while materially dispossessed or imprisoned. Liberty must exist in “the external, real world of space and dimension,” especially in property and public life. His final imperative condenses the essay’s relevance for dissident political movements: resistance must remain worldly, public, and persistent.
Let’s put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties, our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never.
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