The Betrayal of the American Right

258 Pages·0.974 MB·English

by  Murray N. Rothbard, Murray Rothbard, Thomas E. Woods Jr

T B
HE ETRAYAL OF THE
A R
MERICAN IGHT
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T B
HE ETRAYAL OF THE
A R
MERICAN IGHT
MURRAY N. ROTHBARD
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
THOMAS E. WOODS, JR.
Ludwig
von Mises
Institute
AUBURN, ALABAMA
Copyright © 2007 Ludwig von Mises Institute
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any man-
ner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints
in the context of reviews. For information write the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, Alabama 36832 U.S.A.;
mises.org.
ISBN: 978-1-933550-13-8
To the memory of
Howard Homan Buffett,
Frank Chodorov,
and the Old Right

C
ONTENTS
Introduction by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Preface to the 1991 Revision by Murray N. Rothbard . . . . . . . . xxi
1. Two Rights, Old and New . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Origins of the Old Right I: Early Individualism . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Origins of the Old Right II: The Tory Anarchism
of Mencken and Nock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. The New Deal and the Emergence of the Old Right . . . . . . 23
5. Isolationism and the Foreign New Deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
6. World War II: The Nadir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
7. The Postwar Renaissance I: Libertarianism . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
8. The Postwar Renaissance II: Politics and Foreign Policy . . . 85
9. The Postwar Renaissance III: Libertarians and
Foreign Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
10. The Postwar Renaissance IV: Swansong of the Old Right . . 117
11. Decline of the Old Right . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
12. National Review and the Triumph of the New Right . . . . . . . 147
13. The Early 1960s: From Right to Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
14. The Later 1960s: The New Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
vii

I
NTRODUCTION
It is a cliché of publishing to observe, when a book appears
before the public years after it was first written, that it is more
relevant now than ever. But it is difficult to think of how else
The Betrayal of the American Right can be described. Murray N.
Rothbard chronicles the emergence of an American right wing
that gave lip service to free-market principles and “limited govern-
ment,” but whose first priority, for which it was willing to sacrifice
anything else, was military interventionism around the world.
That sounds familiar, to be sure, but as Rothbard shows, it is nei-
ther recent nor anomalous. It goes back to the very beginnings of
the organized conservative movement in the 1950s.
Since this book is likely to reach beyond Rothbard’s traditional
audience, an initial word about the author is in order. Murray N.
Rothbard was a scholar and polymath of such extraordinary pro-
ductivity as almost to defy belief. His Man, Economy, and State, a
1,000-page treatise on economic principles, was one of the great
contributions to the so-called Austrian School of economics. For a
New Liberty became the standard libertarian manifesto. In The
Ethics of Liberty Rothbard set out the philosophical implications of
the idea of self-ownership. He told the story of colonial America
in his four-volume Conceived in Liberty. His America’sGreat Depres-
sion, now in a fifth edition, used the explanatory power of the Aus-
trian theory of the business cycle to show that monetary interven-
tionism, rather than “capitalism,” was to blame for that catastro-
phe. He also wrote a great many groundbreaking articles. To name
just two: “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Eco-
nomics” laid out a distinctly Austrian approach to the contentious
area of welfare economics, and “Law, Property Rights, and Air
ix