Anatomy of the State
Murray N. Rothbard
Language: English
Pages: 32
ISBN: 130068240X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the 20th century Murray Rothbard was known as the state's greatest living enemy, and The Anatomy of the State is his most succinct and powerful statement on the topic, a daring evidence of how he came to wear that designation proudly.
He explains what a state is and what it is not. He shows how it is an institution that purports to hold the right to violate all that we otherwise hold as honest and moral, and how it operates under a false cover now and always. He shows how the state wrecks freedom, destroys civilization, and threatens all lives and property and social well-being.
The essay is seminal in another respect. Here Rothbard binds together the cause of private-property capitalism with anarchist politics — truly the first thinker in the history of the world to fully forge the perspective that later came to be known as anarchocapitalism.
He took all that he had learned from the Misesian tradition and the liberal tradition and the anarchist tradition to put together what is really a new and highly systematic way of thinking about the entire subject of political economy and social thought.
Understanding his point of view has the effect on the reader of putting things together in a way that profoundly changes the way one sees the world.
And Rothbard explains all of this in a very short space — short enough to be read again and again as an inoculation against the creeping disease of statism.
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rightfully his. The property title has already been transferred. Old Jones’s contract is automatically binding upon young Jones, because the former had already transferred the property; young Jones, therefore, has no property claim. Young Jones can only claim that which he has inherited from old Jones, and old Jones can only bequeath property which he still owns. But if, at a certain date, the government of, say, Ruritania is coerced or even bribed by the government of Waldavia into giving up
France, Spain, and Sardinia against Austria, in the eighteenth century: at the siege of Milan by the allies and several weeks later at Parma . . . the rival armies met in a fierce battle outside the town. In neither place were the sympathies of the inhabitants seriously moved by one side or the other. Their only fear as that the troops of either army should get within the gates and pillage. The fear proved groundless. At Parma the citizens ran to the town walls to watch the battle in the open
followers who enjoy the prerequisites of rule, for example, the members of the State apparatus, such as the full-time bureaucracy or the established nobility.10 But this still secures only a minority of eager supporters, and even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege still does not obtain the consent of the majority. For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and
military.13 A venerable institution, furthermore, is the official or “court” historian, dedicated to purveying the rulers’ views of their own and their predecessors’ actions.14 Many and varied have been the arguments by which the State and its intellectuals have induced their subjects to support their rule. Basically, the strands of argument may be summed up as follows: (a) the State rulers are great and wise men (they “rule by divine right,” they are the “aristocracy” of men, they are the
the nonexistence of their Emperor’s clothes.18 It is also important for the State to make its rule seem inevitable; even if its reign is disliked, it will then be met with passive resignation, as witness the familiar coupling of “death and taxes.” One method is to induce historiographical determinism, as opposed to individual freedom of will. If the X Dynasty rules us, this is because the Inexorable Laws of History (or the Divine Will, or the Absolute, or the Material Productive Forces) have so