The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

100 The Essential Rothbard
In doing so, he maintains, libertarians must adopt a revolutionary
strategy. Not for Rothbard is the path of compromise: all statist
ideologies must be combated root-and-branch. He notes that
Lord Acton, long before Leon Trotsky, advocated “permanent revolution.”
264
Rothbard, incidentally, disconcerted American Romantic conservatives
by arguing that Edmund Burke’s early Vindication of Natural
Society265 was not a satire but a seriously intended defense of
anarchism. If Rothbard is right, the chief icon of the American traditionalists
was once a libertarian. The article, “A Note on Burke’s
Vindication of Natural Society,” appeared in the Journal of the History
of Ideas. 266 It aroused much controversy, but the eminent
Burke scholar Isaac Kramnick speaks highly of it in his The Rage of
Edmund Burke. 267
Society, Rothbard has argued, rests on the division of labor.
Given the manifest advantages of peaceful cooperation that uses
human differences in abilities to the greatest extent possible, what
blocks human progress? Rothbard, in his essay “The Anatomy of
the State,” 268 identifies the chief obstacle to human betterment.
Unlike voluntary exchange, which by its nature benefits those who
freely choose to engage in it, the State rests on predation. Following
Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, Rothbard contends
that the State cannot create wealth: it can only take from some and
give to others. Like them, he contrasts the “political means” with
“the economic means.”
264 Ibid., p. 29.
265 Edmund Burke, Vindication of Natural Society (Indianapolis:
LibertyClassics, 1982).
266 “A Note on Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society,” in Journal of
the History of Ideas (January 1958).
267 Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke (New York: Basic
Books, 1977).
268 “The Anatomy of the State,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against
Nature, pp. 55–88.