A Libertarian Renaissance

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Extrait d'un e-mail que j'ai reçu annonçant quelques rééditions indispensables:

Pour ceux qui veulent une introduction "grand angle" au libertarianisme sérieux dans une prose relativement facile à lire, For A New Liberty est requis.

Et pour ceux qui veulent des explications par rapport à la faisabilité de l'état de droit en anarchie (en comparaison avec la logique du pouvoir politique) plutôt que des affirmations à l'emporte pièce, The Market for Liberty est requis.

You might have noticed that the Mises Institute has begun a grand program of making sure that libertarian classics are in print and available. We won't disguise the goal: to crush the existing political paradigm and replace it with a radical new approach.

American political culture says you have two choices. You can be a left-wing statist or a right-wing statist. How many people know that these are two flavors of the same poison? Once a government has power, no one can dictate what it will do, other than use the only tool it has—coercion—against its enemy and on behalf of its friends.

Freedom is very different indeed. It requires an iron-clad cultural commitment to fighting tyranny in all its forms. To assist, the Mises Institute is pleased to offer:

For A New Liberty - The Libertarian Manifesto, proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the two major political parties, the ideologies they embrace, and their central plans for using state power against people. Libertarianism is Rothbard's radical alternative that says state power is unworkable and immoral and ought to be curbed and finally overthrown.

To make his case, Rothbard deploys his entire system of thought: natural law, natural rights, Austrian economics, American history, the theory of the state, and more.

It is relentless, scientific, analytical, and morally energetic—a book that makes an overwhelming case. Indeed, it gave an entire movement its intellectual consciousness and earned Rothbard the titles "Mr. Libertarian" and "The State's Greatest Living Enemy."

Society without the nation state? Rothbard shows that this is the way for peace, prosperity, security, and freedom for all. In the entire history of libertarian ideas, no book has more successfully combined ideological rigor, theoretical exposition, political rhetoric, historical illustration, and strategic acumen. Rothbard poured a lifetime of research and all his intellectual energy into this project and he succeeded in writing a classic.

The book is the result of the only contract Rothbard ever received from a mainstream commercial publisher. He was asked to sum up the whole of the libertarian creed. Looking at the original manuscript, which was nearly complete after its first draft, it seems that it was a nearly effortless joy for him to write. It is seamless, unrelenting, and full of life.

He cut no corners and pulled no punches. It appeared in 1973 and created a whole movement that set out to crush the political monopoly.

From the day the book went out of print, the phonecalls and emails started coming into our offices, in hopes of a new edition. Thanks to benefactors that made it possible, this new edition from the Mises Institute is hardbound, beautiful, and affordable.

In subject after subject, this book is informative, bracing, challenging. It also features that characteristically clear writing style for which Rothbard is famous, which stemmed from his organized thinking and passionate drive to teach and change the world.

Also: it's finally here, the bound edition (two massive volumes, softcover) of the Libertarian Forum that serious collectors and readers only dreamed about a few years ago. Those who were lucky enough to have the complete set held onto them for dear life.

After all, their value was legendary: the Libertarian Forum, edited by Murray N. Rothbard from 1969 to 1984, had a small, even tiny, circulation but it forged the intellectual edifice known as libertarianism.

Month after month, the newsletter thrilled, enlightened, shocked, and awed its subscribers. Everything was on the table, and no thought or idea too. And here are all the issues again, as smart, gossipy, and fresh as they were when they were first written.

This was where Murray wrote his extraordinary movie reviews, his searing political commentary on everything from Nixon, Carter, and Reagan to the New Left and the New Right, and his contemporary history of the libertarian movement, from the founding of the Libertarian Party to the implosion of the movement in the 1980s. It is all bracing, fun, controversial, and fire hot.

As the saying goes, he was just one man with a typewriter, but he changed the world. The appearance of this incredible newsletter in book form brings joy to the heart. Murray would be exuberantly happy to see it all come back!

Making them available was originally Walter Block's idea. Initially it seemed impossible. We didn't have all issues. The costs would be prohibitive. The volumes would be too thick and unwieldy. Would their content still be relevant?

Once we began to look carefully at this treasure, it was clear that it had to be done.

It is still huge: 1202 pages! But we put it into two volumes to make it all manageable. And thanks to donors who also saw the need, and the many people who worked to find copies and send them to us, we put together an entire set, and now they are all available to make another huge dent in the history of the world.

It was a miracle publication in many ways--something that would never have been published by a mainstream house. It existed from 1969 to 1984. It was a passionate, smart, gossipy, and often shocking newsletter that is as fresh today as when it was written. It was low circulation but it exercised huge influence. It gave birth to the libertarian movement, raised it through its infancy and teen years, and gave it a farewell once it entered adulthood.

If you think libertarian ideas are marginal today, imagine what it was like in the 1970s. This body of ideas that consistently championed liberty in all its forms had been banished from the world ideas. But Rothbard's newsletter set out to change that. It quickly became the publication you had to read to understand the movement and the world, and it had a hand in shaping both. You will see many names that you recognize (Murray wasn't the only writer), and here the details on subject in libertarian history about which you have heard only rumors. You will discover how a brilliant intellectual read and understood the daily news from a radical libertarian perspective. In short, if you want to understand modern libertarianism—or even modern politics—these volume are not only essential; they are a priceless and indispensable resource.

Some great books are the product of a lifetime of research, reflection, and labored discipline. But other classics are written in a white heat during the moment of discovery, with prose that shines forth like the sun pouring into the window of a time when a new understanding brings in the world into focus for the first time.

The Market for Liberty is that second type of classic, and what a treasure it is. Written by two authors—Morris and Linda Tannehill—just following a period of intense study of the writings of both Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, it has the pace, energy, and rigor you would expect from an evening's discussion with either of these two giants.

More than that, these authors put pen to paper at precisely the right time in their intellectual development, that period rhapsodic freshness when a great truth had been revealed, and they had to share it with the world. Clearly, the authors fell in love with liberty and the free market, and wrote an engaging, book-length sonnet to these ideas.

This book is very radical in the true sense of that term: it gets to the root of the problem of government and provides a rethinking of the whole organization of society. They start at the beginning with the idea of the individual and his rights, work their way through exchange and the market, expose government as the great enemy of mankind, and then—and here is the great surprise—they offer a dramatic expansion of market logic into areas of security and defense provision.

Their discussion of this controversial topic is integrated into their libertarian theoretical apparatus. It deals with private arbitration agencies in managing with disputes and criminality, the role of insurers in providing profitable incentives for security, and private agencies in their capacity as protection services. It is for this reason that Hans Hoppe calls this book an "outstanding yet much neglected analysis of the operation of competing security producers."

The section on war and the state is particularly poignant. "The more government 'defends' its citizens, the more it provokes tensions and wars, as unnecessary armies wallow carelessly about in distant lands and government functionaries, from the highest to the lowest, throw their weight around in endless, provocating power grabs. The war machine established by government is dangerous to both foreigners and its own citizens, and this machine can operate indefinitely without any effective check other than the attack of a foreign nation."

Also overlooked is the Tannehill's challenging plan for desocialization or transition to a full free society. They argue against privatization as it is usually understood, on grounds that government is not the owner of public property and so it cannot sell it. Public property should be seized or homesteaded by the workers or by people with the strongest interest it in, and then put on the open market. If that sounds crazy or chaotic, you might change your mind after reading their case.

What's remarkable is how this book actually predates Rothbard's For A New Liberty. It has a huge impact when it came out in 1970, especially among the generation that was debating question of whether the state needed to provide "night watchman" functions or be eliminated all together. The authors were drawn to Rand's ethical outlook but Rothbard's economics and politics. But, clearly, they were surrounded by classics of all ages when they wrote. So this fiery little treatise connected with the burgeoning movement at the time, providing just the type of integration that many were seeking.

Since the 1980s, however, the book has languished in obscurity. If the authors are still around, no one seems to have heard from them, a fact which seems only to add to the mystery of this never-to-be-repeated book.

Who should read this book? It makes a bracing read for a person who has never been introduced to these ideas. No reader could be left unchanged by it. For the person who has an appreciation of free enterprise, this book completes the picture, pushing the limits of market logic as far as it can go. For those who have been drawn to the argument concerning insurance agencies in the free market, this explanation is still the most extended in print.