I Unearth Another Rothbard Hater!

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Roderick Long shows that Rothbard employed a cartoon version of Plotinus -- kind of like his cartoon Rousseau, or his cartoon Smith, or his cartoon English Revolution.

Comments

  1. GilesS6:10 PM

    I was going to say like his cartoonish version of the Friedmans, but then I realised that didn't capture it.

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  2. Bob Murphy11:00 PM

    Except that Roderick didn't cast Rothbard into hell as an ignorant hack, as some other critics do whenever they find a mistake.

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  3. Brian N.11:01 AM

    I remember a bit from the translator's introduction to The Compendium of Theology...

    "scholars should be reading these pages in Latin"

    It reminds me of Rothbard's mishandling of Rousseau(1), and a very wise thing once said by Robert Heinlein:

    "The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots."

    (1) - He apparently learned to read French at some point, but he when he stated what he did about Rousseau, he was dependent upon the likes of Irving Babbitt. Granted that Babbitt was apparently a specialist in the field but he had an axe to grind.

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  4. master_of_americans1:13 PM

    Really? Heinlein didn't claim to know anything about anything that he couldn't read about in the original language?

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  5. Samson Corwell1:30 PM

    Cartoon English Revolution? I'm not familiar with his views on that one. In what way did Rothbard skewer it? Was it another case of him trying to proclaim X as libertarians (i.e., Edmund Burke) or Y as an example of his system in action (i.e., the Wild West)?

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