Would Rothbard be rolling in his grave over my book chapter? I've thought about this quite a bit, including the meta questions of to what extent this warrants thinking (caring) about.

On the one hand, there's a sense of wanting to do justice to someone's legacy, being "faithful" to their contributions, and not distorting or perverting their contributions to your own (inevitably political-in-nature) ends.

The worst case scenario with these considerations is something like the Objectivist movement, which suffered crushing (socially and psychologically) cultish tendencies in the attempt at doing justice to someone who influenced them greatly.

And on the other hand, there's a sense in which past thinkers are long gone and their contributions are just sitting here for the taking, so we should be liberal with what we might find valuable in isolation while discarding the rest with ease.

The worst case scenario with these considerations is probably the modern day Mises Institute because they primarily promote the anarcho-capitalist paleolibertarianism of late Rothbard instead of the cosmopolitan classical liberalism that Mises actually believed in.

So I guess we've gotta find some kind of golden mean here. We've gotta strive for doing justice in some sense to a thinker's contributions, while also being willing to build upon them and re-contextualize some of their ideas for new contexts and for your own ideas.

That's why I ultimately settled on "Two Cheers for Rothbardianism." That implies a 1/3 condemnation of Rothbardianism, which I spell out and offer solutions to (like becoming relational egalitarians).

But I haven't answered the exact question of if Rothbard would indeed be rolling over in his grave. I've only addressed what I take to be the spirit behind those kinds of questions and which guided my approach to his contributions.

I suspect 90s Rothbard, beleaguered by 1) decades of factional infighting and 2) increasingly contemptuous toward anything smelling of leftism during the onset of a new culture war, would indeed be rolling over in his grave.

I include both of those features of 90s Rothbard because the first leads me to believe he would just be hostile and aggressive towards anyone trying to use his ideas in ways he would disapprove of, while the second leads me to believe he would despise my specific way of doing it.

And obviously the modern day successors to 90s Rothbard will consider my chapter an utter perversion, constituted by bad faith distortions and malicious, left-wing aims. Hoppe wrote a whole book about this already.

Why they think I'm so eager to write (2/3rds) defenses of widely despised thinkers is beyond me. Trying to put Murray freaking Rothbard in conversation with modern day relational egalitarians like Anderson and feminists like Frye is *guaranteed* to draw ire from both sides.

I know this because this is just a very specific instance of the broader project I've participated in for the last 5 years through C4SS: trying to put libertarianism in conversation with leftism. If you haven't noticed, this just leads to both camps rejecting us!

There's no ulterior motives here. We're just a tiny group of people with really weird and incredibly niche ideas that piss off people from all over the political spectrum. We gain nothing from our heterodoxy!

ANYWAY. 80s Rothbard would probably roll over half way in his grave. He was less beleaguered than 90s Rothbard and less annoyed by letism. But he was still pretty annoyed by it. This was long after the collapse of the New Left that spawned his initial hostility towards leftism.

70s Rothbard was coming hot off the aftermath of failed alliances with the New Left and probably would have rolled 2/3rds in his grave because it was so fresh in his mind. After all, this was the decade he published the mostly dreadful Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature.

60s Rothbard would not roll over in his grave. He was optimistic about a libertarian to leftist dialogue (one reason he was rejected by Rand) and worked heavily with the New Left to oppose the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex more broadly.

This was the decade that Rothbard was most "leftist." He endorsed reparations, revolutionary violence against police and white mobs, turning over subsidized corporations to the workers, and experiments in participatory decision making in firms and grassroots movements.

During this decade, he was also greatly influenced by leftist ideas and thinkers (such as the power elite analysis by Mills and the revisionist history of the progressive era by Kolko) and himself greatly influenced New Left activists such as Carl Oglesby.

That said, even 60s Rothbard was fervently anti-feminist, however his anti-feminism took on a New Left vibe at this time (as opposed to his later paleoconservative anti-feminism), such as arguments that feminism detracted from the much more important struggles of race and class.

And 60s Rothbard was still a capitalist. Rothbard was NEVER not a capitalist. But I argue capitalism is not really essential to Rothbardianism as such and we can jettison it without losing the analytic power of his overall framework.

50s Rothbard wouldn't have rolled over in his grave either. He was much more intellectually curious at that time and would have probably just appreciated someone drawing on his work.

Anyway, let me know if you wanna a copy of the chapter. The book is unreasonably expensive and intellectual property is evil.