Cite articles as: Author, “Title,” Libertarian Papers [volume #], [article number] (year). Example: Jan Narveson, “Present Payments, Past Wrongs: Correcting Loose Talk about Nozick and Rectification,” Libertarian Papers 1, 1 (2009).
3. “Rothbard’s Confidential Memorandum to the Volker Fund, ‘What Is To Be Done?’”
by Murray N. Rothbard
Abstract: The libertarian-individualist cause is at a critical crossroads. To have a successful revolution in the minds of men, we must learn from the Leninists what “revolutionaries” can do to advance their principles: nourish and increase the hard core with an “open center” and support specific political actions through auxiliary organizations, while avoiding “left-wing opportunism” and “right-wing sectarianism.” Historically, it was from the post-war libertarian outposts that FEE was able to build and galvanize such a hard core open center, with members even radicalizing one another. But FEE attempted to be more populist than scholarly, driving away scholars once they had “graduated.” The Volker Fund filled this gap to some extent; but has started to go the way of the Earheart foundation’s efforts—since the scholars selected were not radical enough to maintain an open center, the hard core has been weakening and dissolving. The libertarian cause should de-emphasize drastically popular fronts with the conservative right, it should nourish and construct the hardcore libertarian movement with some form or forms of nucleus or center, and it must emphasize libertarian scholars and intellectuals primarily.
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There is a lot to be learned from this and Rothbard’s other prominent works, including Hoppe’s.
Brief sources:
- Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
- A Letter to Liberals by Leo Tolstoy
- Do You Hate the State? by Murray N. Rothbard
- On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution by Hoppe
- Strategy: Secession, Privatization, and the Prospects of Liberty by Hoppe
- How America Can Be Saved by Hoppe
- A Strategy for Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
- Ethics of Liberty: Chp 30. Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
After reading this you see how the Mises Institute and the Ron Paul/YAL movement fulfill the hardcore and the outreach part of Rothbard’s libertarian revolutionary strategy.
Interesting read.
A very interesting article, indeed!
In the podcast version, the cultural difference between 1961 (when the article was written) and 2009 (when the article was read aloud) shows up every time the narrator encounters the phrase “hardcore men”. He reads it with the emphasis on the word “men”, as if there were going to be some contrasting point about WOMEN in the next sentence.
The phrase should properly be read with the emphasis on “hardcore” because it was intended to contrast with wishy-washy men in the next phrase. Rothbard was writing in the days when one could use the word “men” to mean individuals of either sex, without raising an eyebrow.
Rothbard’s comments are particularly interesting to me as a hardcore libertarian Canadian because they so accurately reflect what is happening in Canada these days. The only intellectual society up here is Civitas, which contains a small minority of libertarians and a large majority of conservatives. Libertarians are too diluted to have much influence. We need something like the Mises Institute in Canada.
Peter Jaworski and 2 others have founded the Institute for Liberal Studies, a hardcore libertarian group, but it needs to grow.
[...] (or, in the case of Leoni, obscure and unavailable) works by towering thinkers such as Mises, Rothbard, Bruno Leoni, and Adolf [...]
[...] (or, in the case of Leoni, obscure and unavailable) works by towering thinkers such as Mises, Rothbard, Bruno Leoni, and Adolf Reinach. From the feedback I’ve received, libertarians everywhere [...]