I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

180 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
person or readings—his ideas and influence certainly were. That summer changed my life
in so many ways, including deciding not to pursue a career in diplomacy or journalism but
instead going for a Ph.D. in political science and an academic career, softly pushed along—
across the Atlantic—by Liggio, Grinder, and Palmer. If Rothbard was my ideological compass,
the IHS was certainly the ship, the sails, the crew, the map, and the nautical training.
In particular, when I look back I can see that the IHS taught me two crucial pieces of
advice that were useful supplements to my Rothbardian premises. First, with opinions like
these, you have almost everyone against you, so if you want to do well academically, you
need to be at least as good at the mainstream stuff as the others. Second, you do not have
a moral obligation to shock and offend everyone else all the time. In fact, you can be both
radical and a nice guy. Not a bad thing to learn when you still have hormones and zeal
raging in your body and mind.
Eventually, I did meet Rothbard a handful of times at various Mises Institute events,
but alas far too few. The first was in 1989 at the Mises Institute Summer University at
Stanford, which I attended with my two Danish comrades, Otto Brøns-Petersen and Mikael
Bonde Nielsen. At the conference I circled around Rothbard for days but did not actually
talk with him; he was constantly under siege by a swarm of mostly younger acolytes, and
I was too much in awe to approach him. Then Sheldon Richman introduced me to the
Man, who was extremely friendly while I was a bumbling, star-struck neophyte. Much
more successful was one evening, when Pat Barnett and Hans Hoppe took Rothbard and
a couple of us kids out for dinner in Palo Alto and then eventually along to the local Denny’s.
There I enjoyed seeing, listening to, and quizzing the Man for hours. I still regret never
having asked him all the questions I had for him, but I shall always appreciate his friendliness,
humor, and patience for the questions I did get to ask.
By the late 1980s we in Denmark were a growing bunch of graduate students, who
had all become dedicated Rothbardians. In 1988 we launched the (unfortunately now
defunct) series of conferences and conference proceedings entitled Praxeologica. Two of us,
Nicolai Juul Foss and I, subsequently edited Etik, Marked og Stat: Liberalismen fra Locke til
Nozick (1992), in which Otto published the first lengthy, academically published review of
Rothbard’s ideas in Danish. We even founded a dinner-club, acronymed ABC, where we
would meet on Rothbard’s birthday, all wearing bow-ties, and include a toast in his honor.
Hey, if we were nerds, why not be radical nerds?!?!?
Our projects were fairly modest ones, but given that we were all in our early- to midtwenties
and the first of a breed, we almost felt we were walking on water, and we certainly
broke some ground. My own 1996-dissertation, published as Rational Choice, Collective
Action and the Paradox of Rebellion (1997), while not very libertarian and certainly more
public choice oriented than Austrian, quite visibly owes a great deal to Rothbard, who is
one of the most cited authors in it. His understanding of why some political movements
succeed and others do not is, I believe, one of the most overlooked aspects of his thought.
Let me also mention that I once wrote an outline for a science-fiction novel that I never
finished and which takes places in a penal colony in a galaxy far, far away. It was probably
all for the best that I never finished it, but it bears mentioning that one of the central
characters is a bow-tie-dressed intellectual rebel by the name of Mayer Aristotle Rosenbawm.