Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty

by Stephan Kinsella on December 14, 2022

Murray Rothbard’s treatise, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998) is online in a couple of obscure places, and some of its individual chapters or portions is available online in separate articles. I’ve listed below those I am aware of:

pdf (pdf2)
audiobook
Hoppe’s Introduction: Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty
1: Natural Law and Reason, in Introduction to Natural Law
2: Natural Law as “Science,” in Introduction to Natural Law
3: Natural Law versus Positive Law, in Introduction to Natural Law
4: Natural Law and Natural Rights, in Introduction to Natural Law
5: The Task of Political Philosophy, in Introduction to Natural Law
6: “A Crusoe Social Philosophy,” in “A Crusoe Social Philosophy”
7: “Interpersonal Relations: Voluntary Exchange,” in “A Crusoe Social Philosophy”
8: “Interpersonal Relations: Ownership and Aggression,” in “A Crusoe Social Philosophy”
9: “Property and Criminality,” in “A Crusoe Social Philosophy”
12: “Self-Defense”
13: “Punishment and Proportionality”
14: “Children and Rights“
15: “Human Rights as Property Rights”
16: Knowledge, True and False
17: Bribery
18: The Boycott
19: “Property Rights and the Theory of Contracts”
- Note: The 1998 print version is missing some text on p. 139, that is present in the online version linked here. The bolded portion is the missing text:
  
  “Thus, if A agreed to sell a parcel of land in exchange for B’s agreed-upon payment of a money price, each would obligate himself to pay a certain sum, usually twice the value of his contractual obligation, in case of failure to pay. In the case of a money debt, called “a common money bond,” someone who owed $1000 agreed to pay $2000 to the creditor if he failed to pay $1000 by a certain date. (Or, more strictly the obligation to pay $2000 was conditional upon the debtor’s paying $1000 by a certain date. Hence the term “conditional penal bond.”)
  
  It may be considered more moral to keep promises than to break them, but any coercive enforcement of such a moral code is itself an invasion of property rights and therefore impermissible in the libertarian society.
  
  In the above example of a contract to perform personal service, suppose that the failure of the actor to appear cost the theater owner $10,000 in damages; in that case, the actor would sign, or “execute,” a penal performance bond, agreeing to pay $20,000 to the theater owner upon failure to appear.
20: Lifeboat Situations
21: The “Rights” of Animals
22: The Nature of the State (in: The State versus Liberty)
23: The Inner Contradictions of the State (in: The State versus Liberty)
24: The Moral Status of Relations to the State (in: The State versus Liberty)
25: On Relations between States (in: The State versus Liberty)
26: Utilitarian Free-Market Economics
27: Isaiah Berlin on Negative Freedom
28: F.A. Hayek and the Concept of Coercion
29: Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State
30: Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty