The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

The Essential Rothbard 65
is at once a factual statement and a value judgment? So Rothbard
maintained; the influential English philosopher Philippa Foot has
also defended this position in her Natural Goodness. 171
Though Rothbard and Strauss were here allied, they soon
diverged. Strauss contrasted natural and medieval natural law with
“modern” natural law, culminating in the thought of John Locke,
to the distinct disadvantage of the latter. As Strauss saw matters,
Machiavelli and Hobbes abandoned the classical pursuit of virtue.
Instead, they founded political philosophy on passion and selfinterest.
Locke, despite his professed adherence to natural law, was
a secret Hobbesian; he perverted true natural law. Strauss’s antipathy
to individualism, by the way, should not surprise us. As was
often the case, Strauss followed the thought of his much-admired
friend, the English socialist historian R.H. Tawney. 172
Rothbard left no doubt about his view of this interpretation:
Strauss, while favoring what he considers to be the classical
and Christian concepts of natural law, is bitterly opposed to
the 17th and 18th century conceptions of Locke and the
rationalists, particularly to their “abstract,” “deductive,”
championing of the natural rights of the individual: liberty,
property, etc. In this reading, Hobbes and Locke are the
great villains in the alleged perversion of natural law. To my
mind, this “perversion” was a healthy sharpening and developing
of the concept. 173
Rothbard has the better of the argument, if one takes account
of the major study of Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights. 174
As Modugno notes,
171 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford University Press, 2001).
172 See Simon J.D. Green, “The Tawney-Strauss Connection: On
Historicism and Values in the History of Political Ideas,” Journal of
Modern History 67 (June 1995): 255–77.
173 Rothbard Papers; Modugno, ed, Diritto, natura e ragione, p. 114.
174 Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights,
Natural Law, and Church Law 1150–1625 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997).