The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

62 The Essential Rothbard
for the economy as well. “Using big government to create a perfect
economy seemed to parallel employing such government to
stamp out sin and create a perfect society.” 159 The PMP’s [postmillennial
pietists] gravitated to the Republican Party.
“On the other hand, all religious groups that did not want to be
subjected to the PMP theocracy . . . naturally gravitated toward the
laissez-faire political party, the Democrats.” 160 Rothbard maintains
that the struggle between the PMP’s and their Democratic
opponents lay at the heart of the political campaigns of much of
the nineteenth century.
Toward the end of the century, the Progressive intellectuals
often became secularized. Their emphasis shifted
more and more away from Christ and religion, which became
ever-vaguer and woollier, and more and more toward a Social
Gospel, with government correcting, organizing, and eventually
planning the perfect society. 161
Richard T. Ely and his student John R. Commons were crucial
figures in this transition. Another was
the prophet of atheistic higher Democracy, the philosopher
John Dewey. . . . It is little known that in an early stage of his
seemingly endless career, Dewey was an ardent preacher of
postmillennialism and the coming of the Kingdom. 162
Rothbard also considered the Progressives in his essay “World
War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.” 163 He documented
to the hilt that the progressive intellectuals, “advanced
159
Ibid., p. 201.
160
Ibid., p. 201–02.
161
Ibid., p. 204.
162Ibid., pp. 207–08.
163Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, no. 1 (Winter, 1984): 81–125.
Reprinted in John V. Denson, ed. The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic
Victories, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1999).