The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

The Essential Rothbard 67
Contrary to Strauss, Locke did not pervert natural law: he
developed further a common medieval understanding, exactly as
Rothbard maintained. True enough, Thomas Aquinas, the foremost
thinker of the Middle Ages, made no use of subjective rights. But
the great sixteenth-century Salamancan scholastic Francisco de
Vitoria found it an easy task to devise a natural rights theory on a
Thomistic basis. Once more, Strauss is confuted.
Strauss’s rejection of individual rights led him to espouse political
views that Rothbard found repellent.
We find Strauss praising . . . “farsighted,” “sober” British
imperialism; we find him discoursing on the “good” Caesarism,
on Caesarism as often necessary and not really
tyranny, etc. . . . he praises political philosophers for, yes,
lying to their readers for the sake of the “social good.” . . . I
must say that this is an odd position for a supposed moralist
to take. 180
Not only did Rothbard oppose Strauss’s anti-individualist
account of natural law; he also found risible the method of textual
analysis by which Strauss arrived at his conclusions. Strauss
believed that the great political philosophers faced a dilemma.
They often held views at odds with prevailing orthodoxy; should
they propagate their dissent openly, they faced persecution. In any
case, their doctrines were meant for an elite group of disciples, not
for an unlearned public unfit to judge them.
What then was to be done? According to Strauss, the philosophers
concealed their true opinions through esoteric writing.
Seeming contradictions in the text of a great philosopher were not
mistakes; they instead signaled the presence of a hidden message.
Rothbard, to say the least, found Strauss’s thesis unpersuasive.
Strauss’s most extended presentation of esoteric interpretation is
180 Letter to Kenneth Templeton, January 23, 1960; Rothbard Papers;
in Modugno, ed., Diritto, natura e ragione, p. 115.