Race! That Murray Book — Summary

“Race! That Murray Book” is a brief 1994 polemical essay occasioned by the controversy over Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Rothbard treats the book less as a new empirical discovery than as a cultural event: for him, its importance lies in making public discussion of race, intelligence, heredity, and group differences suddenly permissible after decades of taboo. The essay’s organizing claim is that the controversy exposed a broader system of intellectual policing by liberal, left, and egalitarian institutions.

Under the spell of a misplaced analogy from Darwinian theory, analysts for over a century liked to think of social change as necessarily gradual, minute, and glacial.

Rothbard rejects gradualist accounts of cultural change and instead describes October 1994 as a sudden break in public discourse. He argues that earlier racialist or hereditarian writing had not been defeated by argument so much as excluded from respectable debate. In his narrative, Boasian anthropology, Communist antiracism, and later Political Correctness converged to identify candid discussion of race with Nazism or fascism, thereby making inquiry socially and professionally dangerous.

The basic tactic of the egalitarian left rulers was, of course, not to dignify any books engaging in candid inquiry into the race question by openly rebutting them.

The essay’s polemical force comes from this account of suppression. Rothbard presents hereditarian claims as “home truths” privately known but publicly unsayable, and he casts critics of racial science as guardians of orthodoxy rather than as scientific opponents. His rhetoric is therefore not only about race and IQ; it is about taboo formation, elite respectability, and the politics of who may speak. Scientific controversy becomes, in his telling, a struggle over permission.

In a deep sense, this was an early manifestation of Political Correctness, after which other virulent forms of PC were added on top of this previous foundation.

Rothbard then turns to media institutions. He treats the reception of The Bell Curve—especially serious attention from elite newspapers and reviewers—as evidence that the old rules had collapsed. The book’s size, technical apparatus, and authors’ credentials mattered because they made it harder for opponents simply to dismiss it. Rothbard stresses that Herrnstein’s Harvard position, Murray’s policy-world standing, and support from conservative and neoconservative institutions helped transform an excluded topic into a legitimate controversy.

But in October, 1994, with incredible speed, the entire culture did a 180-degree turn.

The middle of the essay explains this shift through both science and sociology. Rothbard claims that hereditarian evidence had accumulated beyond suppression, but he also insists that truth alone rarely wins without institutional backing. This produces one of the essay’s more revealing tensions: it celebrates science as eventually triumphant while also arguing that public “truth” depends heavily on status, sponsorship, and the political uses available to elites.

The essay is not simply a defense of The Bell Curve. Rothbard also distances his paleolibertarian position from liberal and neoconservative uses of IQ research. He argues that liberals and neoconservatives are interested in group intelligence because they administer schools, welfare programs, quotas, bureaucracies, and meritocratic sorting. Such uses, in his view, risk justifying rule by planners and credentialed elites. The paleolibertarian interest should be different: not social management, but the defense of free inquiry, private property, and market outcomes against egalitarian redistribution.

Thus the essay’s final political movement is anti-statist. Rothbard’s preferred use of racialist science is apologetic rather than administrative. If unequal outcomes emerge in free markets, he argues, hereditarian explanations can be invoked against claims that inequality proves discrimination or requires state correction. The result is a characteristic late Rothbard fusion: anti-PC rhetoric, racial hereditarianism, hostility to egalitarian welfare politics, suspicion of neoconservative technocracy, and a libertarian defense of market inequality.

Historically, the essay is significant as an artifact of the 1990s Bell Curve controversy and of Rothbard’s late paleolibertarian turn. It offers little original empirical argument; its importance lies in how it interprets the controversy as a dramatic collapse of taboo and as an opportunity to align racialist claims with anti-state politics.