Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty is the programmatic essay with which Murray N. Rothbard opened the first issue of his journal Left and Right in 1965. Its subject is the political spectrum itself: where the liberal tradition began on it, how the map was scrambled, and why the libertarian’s sense of who his allies are has been wrong for a generation. It supplies the historical case against reading libertarianism as a right-wing doctrine.
The Old Order and the Party of Hope
The essay begins from a periodization rather than a definition. Before the eighteenth century, Rothbard argues, Western Europe lived under an identifiable Old Order — feudal or despotic in form, and in substance “marked by tyranny, exploitation, stagnation, fixed caste, and hopelessness and starvation for the bulk of the population”. The liberal revolutions broke it open, and two ideologies crystallized around the rupture:
Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: the one was Liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the old order.
— Murray N. Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
On this reading the original spectrum was legible, and the original Left simply was classical liberalism: “Political ideologies were polarized, with Liberalism on the extreme “Left,” and Conservatism on the extreme “Right,” of the ideological spectrum.”
Socialism as the Confused Middle
The essay’s most-cited move is its refusal to treat socialism as liberty’s opposite. That place belongs to conservatism; socialism is a latecomer that borrowed from both:
Conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the road because it tries to achieve Liberal ends by the use of Conservative means.
— Murray N. Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
Socialism accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of reason, mobility and rising living standards for the masses, but “it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, Conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc.” Rothbard pairs this with an account of liberalism’s own decay: with partial victory won, “the Liberals increasingly abandoned their radical fervor, and therefore their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the uninspiring and defective status quo”.
The Wartime Misfiling
The last stage of the argument is American and, on Rothbard’s telling, largely accidental. Libertarians opposing the New Deal found themselves beside older conservatives and gradually took on their allies’ label; the Second World War fixed the arrangement, because anti-war and isolationist opinion was for once identified with the Right.
By the end of World War II, it was second nature for libertarians to consider themselves at an “extreme right-wing” pole with the conservatives immediately to the left of them; and hence the great error of the spectrum that persists to this day.
— Murray N. Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
What made the error durable is that libertarians forgot that “opposition to war and militarism had always been a “left-wing” tradition which had included libertarians”. The essay’s practical demand follows from the diagnosis: the libertarian must “drastically realign his mistaken view of the ideological spectrum; he must discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all perhaps, who his enemies are.” Rothbard illustrates the point through Albert Jay Nock, who in the 1920s was regarded — and regarded himself — as a man of the extreme left, and who accepted the conservative label and, on Rothbard’s telling, glided from Tory tactics to at least a partial Toryism of content.
Place in the Argument
The essay is the source of the originally Left answer set out in Left and Right, where it stands against F. A. Hayek’s neither and Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s properly Right. It also sits in visible tension with Rothbard’s own later For a New Liberty, which files libertarianism under a forgotten Old Right rather than a disinherited Left — a tension the concept article takes up rather than smooths over.
See Also
- Left and Right - the concept article this essay supplies the historical answer to
- Murray N. Rothbard - the author
- For a New Liberty - his later manifesto, which places the movement on the Old Right instead
- Albert Jay Nock - the worked example of a radical who accepted the conservative label
- Non-Interventionism - the anti-war tradition the essay reclaims as originally left-wing
- Political Means and Economic Means - the axis that survives when left and right are set aside
Sources
- Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty (Full Text) - the complete 1965 essay from the first issue of the journal Left and Right, republished by the Mises Institute