The Late Murray Rothbard Takes on the Constitution
THE CONSTITUTION IS traditionally seen as the culmination of the American Revolution. But in the fifth and final volume of Conceived in Liberty, the libertarian firebrand Murray Rothbard portrays it as a reactionary counterrevolution against the Revolution’s radical principles, orchestrated by a powerful array of monied interests who hoped a more centralized government would reproduce many hierarchical and mercantilist features of the 18th century British state.
The first volume of Conceived in Liberty was published in 1975, launching a lengthy history of America from the founding of the colonies to the adoption of the Constitution. Three more volumes came out in due course, but the fifth, which promised to explore the period from the end of the American Revolution to the Constitution’s ratification, never appeared. Rumors circulated that Arlington House, the conservative publisher of the first four volumes, was not happy with Rothbard’s critical approach to the Constitution. But the actual explanation is probably more mundane, since Arlington House went out of business in the early 1980s.
By the time of Rothbard’s death in 1995, any trace of the fifth volume was thought to be irretrievably lost. But an early manuscript copy, partly typed but mostly handwritten, ended up in the Mises Institute archives. Now the economic historian Patrick Newman has painstakingly deciphered Rothbard’s scrawl and shepherded the book into existence.
When the first volume of came out, I was a graduate student, and my field at the time was colonial history. The volume’s 531 pages, written with the assistance of Leonard Liggio, covered the
