The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

68 The Essential Rothbard
contained in his Thoughts on Machiavelli. 181 About this work Rothbard
comments:
But it is one thing to look for circumspection, and quite
another to construct a veritable architectonic of myth and
conjecture based on the assumption of Machiavelli as an
omniscient Devil, writing on a dozen different levels of “hidden
meaning.” The Straussian ratiocination is generally so
absurd as to be a kind of scholarly version of the Great Pyramid
crackpots. 182
Rothbard offered this as an example of Strauss’s striving for esoteric
novelty:
Note the odd “reasoning”: “Since the Prince consists of
twenty-six chapters, and the Prince does not give us any information
as to the possible meaning of this number, we turn to
the twenty-sixth chapter of the Discourses.” Note the “since,”
as if this had the sweet logic of a syllogism. 183
In defending his view of libertarian natural law, Rothbard confronted
a challenge posed by Friedrich Hayek. Is not the attempt
to deduce from self-evident principles the precepts of law an example
of the “constructivist rationalism” that has been a principal
enemy of liberty? Rothbard vigorously disagreed: Hayek in his
view was an irrationalist. In a review, written in 1958, of the manuscript
of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, 184 Rothbard
expressed alarm. It is “surprisingly and distressingly, an extremely
bad, and I would even say evil, book.” 185 For Rothbard, intellectual
181 Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1958).
182 Letter to Ivan Bierly, February 9, 1960; Rothbard Papers; in
Modugno, ed., Diritto, natura e ragione, p. 118.
183 Ibid., p. 119.
184 Memorandum of January 21, 1958 on the unpublished manuscript
of Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty; Rothbard Papers; in Modugno, ed.,
Diritto, natura e ragione, pp. 77–78.
185 Ibid., p. 77.