Conceived in Liberty Volume 5: The New Republic

Conceived in Liberty #5

by Murray N. Rothbard, Patrick Newman (Editor), Andrew P. Napolitano (Foreword)

Murray Rothbard was not just a remarkable economist and political thinker, but one of the best revisionist historians of the 20th Century.One of his greatest career accomplishments was Conceived in Liberty, a masterful analysis of the libertarian origins of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States. Written with his lens of "Liberty vs. Power", this book demonstrated both his brilliance and originality — deftly handling a huge amount of research including a vast array of hitherto unknown facts.Unfortunately, due to a tragic technological failing, the original print run of Conceived in Liberty only included the first four of a five-volume work. The fifth volume focusing on the adoption of the Constitution and the Washington Administration, sat dormant for decades as a complete, but handwritten, manuscript.Enter Patrick Newman.As a young Research Fellow at the Mises Institute, Patrick Newman has made incredible use of the Rothbard Archives here in Auburn, AL. Some of his early career achievements include unearthing an original chapter of Man, Economy, and State — providing a fascinating look at Rothbard's own growth as an economist — and editing The Progressive Era, another work focusing on a pivotal period of American history.While none of those projects compared to the work required to translate Murray's handwriting into a complete book project, it provided him with the tools he needed to get the job done. The result is the remarkable resurrection of what will become an important work in the libertarian historical canon.The Fifth Volume of Conceived in Liberty highlights the most important battle of the American project — one that continues to this day - the conflict between those that want to centralize power, and those that choose to stand to defend the American heritage of liberty. This book features a forward from Judge Andrew Napolitano, a preface by Dr. Thomas E. Woods, and an introduction from Dr. Patrick Newman.

Genres: History, American History, Philosophy, American Revolution, Politics, Nonfiction

341 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 22, 2019

About the author

Murray Newton Rothbard was an influential American historian, natural law theorist and economist of the Austrian School who helped define modern libertarianism. Rothbard took the Austrian School's emphasis on spontaneous order and condemnation of central planning to an individualist anarchist conclusion, which he termed "anarcho-capitalism".

In the 1970s, he assisted Charles Koch and Ed Crane to found the Cato Institute as libertarian think tank.

Reviews

[Ben House · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been said that while history may not repeat itself, historians repeat each other. Years of reading histories of different events confirms that as a general truth. Loving history and loving stories (both are intricately connected), a reader does not mind tramping along on the same battlefields, witnessing the same political risings and fallings, and hearing the same anecdotes, with a few new ones added on.

But one thing that slowly dawns on the eager college kid who is majoring in history is that “the story” is not “a story.” As Dr. Thomas Wagy repeatedly says, “If you want truth, go to the religion or history departments. History is art.” It is well that he repeated this often, for it took me years to grasp what he was saying. History is built upon layers of interpretation, presuppositions, viewpoints, angles of observation, and preferences.

New information often not only sheds more light on a topic of historical study, but it changes the contours of the study. Every subsequent event in history changes the way the previous events were viewed. The rise and fall of Nazism not only altered the understanding of World War II, but it altered the understanding of World War I, the career of Bismarck and the unification of Germany, and the history of Europe. In short, you never learn history, but you are always learning history.

Generally, there are two major sources or streams of thought that affect the understanding of history. One is the work of the popular, usually narrative historians. Their books are the ones found in the large book chains and that show up in the New York Times Book Reviews. Authors such as David McCullough, Rick Atkinson, Andrew Roberts, Joseph Ellis, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and others are among our most gifted and popular historians. In an earlier era, the works on the Civil War by Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote were among the most popular treatments. Far from criticizing such writers and writing, I love them. The authors are generally well trained academically and vetted by fellow authors and historians. Their writing styles are superbly readable. Books like Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie were influential in luring me into a life of reading history.

The other current comes from the academic historians. These works are usually written by professors in universities. The works are more weighty, more heavily documented, less dependent on secondary sources, and more analytical. They are usually printed by university presses and are rarely found on the shelves in the book chains. I love them! Books pouring off the presses from Oxford University Press, Oklahoma University Press, the University of North Carolina Press, Kansas University Press, and more are weighting down my shelves and bookstands.

Some authors, by the way, manage to score on both fronts. They maintain their academic standing and produce the less widely distributed and more scholarly studies while producing some more popular books for a wider reading audience. Mark Hall, who is a political theorist rather than a historian, has written or contributed to quite a few serious, scholarly works. But his book Did America Have a Christian Founding? was published by Thomas Nelson and is reaching a much wider audience.

So we have three kinds of historians or history writing types: The popular narrator, the academic analysist, and the rare bird that combines both traits. Now, let’s add a fourth type: the outlier. (I will refrain from examining the kooky historians who load down their books with bogus references and bizarre twists.)

The outlier, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s term, refers to the scholar or writer who presents viewpoints and interpretations, heavily documented from solid or overlooked sources, that run roughly against the grain of the accepted and majority views. Some of the writers in this category are not historians by profession and training. Rodney Stark, for example, is a sociology professor at Baylor University, but his history writings on Christianity are outstanding. Paul Johnson is a journalist and an art student, but his history writings are among the best around. R. J. Rushdoony was a theologian and pastor, but he wrote several fine works on history. Shelby Foote, named above for the popularity of his Civil War trilogy, was a novelist who turned his skills to writing about the Late Unpleasantness.

Groupthink is both a useful method and a questionable one. You go to college and study history in order to think like a trained historian. That is why I hate the term “history buff” and get really irritated when someone calls me that. If it is my medical doctor saying that, I want to return the favor and call him a “medicine buff.” A liking of the History Channel (which at least used to have history documentaries), historical novels, and historical anecdotes are all good things, but that is not what historians do. The goal of historical training is to proscribe bad analytical thinking and prescribe sound thinking. But, the group, in this case the academic historians, often narrow their vision and embrace certain orthodoxies of historical interpretation.

Along comes the outlier, that is, the man or woman who approaches the same historical period, the same huge ocean of facts, and the same events, but says, “I don’t think so” in terms of causes, effects, or actual occurrences. Sometimes, they are disparagingly labeled as “Revisionists.” But all historians are, even within the orthodoxies, seeking to do some degree of revision. And often, the novelty of the differing interpretations, the revealing of overlooked sources, the guiding presuppositions gets the unorthodox historian ruled out of court, with or without a hearing.

Many paragraphs into this, I now can mention the name of Murray Rothbard. The guy was brilliant, incredibly well educated, scholarly, meticulous, and guided by a set of ideas. He was a libertarian, although we might humorously call him a far right libertarian, because he tended toward believing in anarchy or no or almost no government. He was an economist, associated with the Austrian school (another rich source of outliers). Although he served as a professor at several schools, he was always on the fringe of academia. And, he always managed to attract and educate a small remnant of willing students.

He wrote many books, mainly on economics, but also on history. Called upon the write on the history of the United States, he published four volumes under the title Conceived in Liberty during the middle to late 1970s. This history, beginning with early colonization only reached as far as the end of the War for Independence. By the way, he also wrote books on the Great Depression and the Progressive Era. A fifth volume on the Conceived in Liberty venture remained unpublished until recently.

The text was written in longhand, which according to those who saw it, was undecipherable. Some brave soul labored through it; the Ludwig von Mises Institute published it; and now we have it.

In part two of this review, I will actually discuss the book!

[Spencer Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finishes the previous volumes, taking us up to the ratification of the Constitution, just as good as previous volumes!

[Anthony Rozmajzl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal exposition of the events leading up to the drafting and eventual ratification of the Constitution. The reader will quickly understand that the Philadelphia Convention was nothing more than a coup (Founders swore themselves to secrecy and held the convention outside of the public purview) to establish a strong central government, essentially voiding many of the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence.

This book is essential for uncovering the Founders' true motives behind drafting our Constitution, and I can guaranteed your K-12 education has taught you none of it.

[Derek Kreider · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a massive work. I’m sure there’s bias involved, but there is so much information here, it would be easy to verify. The author shows how freedom leads more to justice (or a lack of injustice, at least) and power tends towards corruption (seen in a number of figures like Thomas Paine and Roger Williams). He also highlights how figures like Washington and Franklin were avaricious self-promoters, but how they get written into history over other truly heroic and accomplished individuals.

There is so much in this work to sift through.

[Bernard English · Rating 5 out of 5]

The shortest of the 5 volumes and published posthumously, it is perhaps the most relevant to contemporary Americans as it covers the US Constitution. It's the sad story of the contrast between the American Revolution as "liberal, democratic, and quasi-anarchistic; for decentralization, free markets, and individual liberty; for natural rights of life, liberty, and property; against monarchy, mercantilism, and especially against central government" and the creation of the counterrevolutionary Constitution. The Federalist supporters of the Constitution forced its adoption through very unsavory means such as
"propaganda, chicanery, fraud, malapportionment of delegates, blackmail threats of secession, and even coercive laws." Some aimed at creating a nation modeled on Great Britain and others aimed at pursuing centralization and the power to confer special privileges on the commercial class at the expense of the non-commercial (especially small farmer) class. Empire was very much on the minds of some of the Federalist leaders and unfortunately their dreams have been fulfilled.

[Miles Foltermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, this is the strongest entry in the Conceived in Liberty series. It's scholarly, yet accessible, thorough yet crisp. Rothbard does an admirable job of conveying the gravity of the American Constitutional coup. He made me want to read more about this topic.

Patrick Newman's helpful introduction discusses Rothbard's approach to history and summarizes the first four volumes. The introduction is comprehensive enough such that one doesn't have to read the preceding volumes to understand or appreciate this one.

[Webalon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essential reading to understand the facts behind the myths of America’s founding.

[Russ Lemley · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Murray Rothbard died in 1995, tucked into his files were a handwritten draft of the fifth volume of his fourth-volume history of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty. While the Mises Institute were aware of this draft, Rothbard's scribblings were nearly impossible to decipher. However, thanks to the diligent efforts of Patrick Newman, a young scholar trained in the Austrian school of economics, Rothbard fans are able to read this book.

That's not to say that the story itself is a good yarn. Rothbard documents the highly coordinated and energetic efforts of the "conservative" wing of the American political elite to further consolidate power away from the states and towards a national government. While the desires of these elites varied, ranging from seeking the increase of pure, consolidated power to bondholders wanting a national government to redeem government debt at par, the conservative wing coordinated their efforts so as to effect they changes they successfully sought.

Rothbard pulls no punches as he weaves together the facts behind the process of creating and adopting the Constitution into his narrative of viewing history as a struggle between liberty and power.