Zwolinski on Rothbard: “Libertarianism, Oversimplified”

by Stephan Kinsella on January 9, 2026

The Spring 2024 issue of The Independent Review (Vol 28, no. 4) contains a symposium dedicated to Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (first published over 50 years ago, in 1973), with the following contributions:

A Vision of a Productive Free Society: Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty, by Robert M. Whaples
For a New Liberty after Fifty Years, by David Gordon
Libertarianism, Oversimplified, by Matt Zwolinski
Seeing the State through For a New Liberty, by Jason Lee Byas
Privatize the Public Sector: Murray Rothbard’s Stateless Libertarian Society, by Randall G. Holcombe
Conservation, Ecology, and Growth in For a New Liberty, by Peter C. Earle, Ryan M. Yonk
Murray Rothbard on War and Foreign Policy, by Christopher J. Coyne, Yuliya Yatsyshina

This was called to my attention by Matt Zwolinski’s facebook post. I’ve so far only read Whaples’s and Zwolinski’s entries. It seems to me odd that the symposium did not include a contribution from the leading Rothbard scholar, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It would have been fitting for the symposium to have included a companion to Hoppe’s magnificent “Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty,” his introduction to the new edition of Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998). ¹. ))

Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023) (hereinafter LFFS).

In any case, a few comments on Zwolinski’s piece.

axiom

nap fundamental

absolute

The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (Matt Zwolinski & Benjamin Ferguson, eds., 2022)
The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, by Matt Zwolinski & John Tomasi (2023)
What is Libertarianism? Feat. Prof. Matt Zwolinski (Youtube)

https://x.com/mattzwolinski

In Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know (2023), p. 38 seems to imply he’s a libertarian as does his Twitter bio (“Bleeding Heart Libertarian”); in The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, by Matt Zwolinski & John Tomasi (2023): “We both have long identified ourselves as libertarians.”

Here, he is more ambiguous; this is really more a question of semantics and classification. I would view it this way:

anarchist libertarians: fully consistent modern libertarians (starting in the 1950s or so)
minarchist libertarians: not fully consistent modern libertarians
19th century “libertarians”: varied in consistency but not fully modern, but also influenced by classical liberals, and the precursors of modern libertarians (Zwolinski’s “primordial” wave of libertarians) ²
classical liberals: precursors to modern libertarians, even less consistent than minarchists
Hayek, hardly even a classical liberal

But there are different ways to see this and break it down. Zwolinskinsi’s is not unreasonable especially given his own non-anarchist (and non-minarchist and non “strict” libertarian) classical liberal perspective.

In The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (Matt Zwolinski & Benjamin Ferguson, eds., 2022):

But suppose one had a syllabus consisting of just libertarians, broadly construed. If we put to the side the differences between this group and the broader political culture, and focused instead on differences within the group, what would we find? The answer, we propose, is that a sharp difference would soon emerge between what we might call strict libertarians, on the one hand, and classical liberals on the other. Strict libertarianism, as one of us has defined it elsewhere, is “a radical political view which holds that individual liberty, understood as the absence of interference with a person’s body and rightfully acquired property, is a moral absolute or near- absolute, and that the only governmental activities consistent with that liberty are (if any) those necessary to protect individuals from aggression by others.” This view emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain, France, and the United States in the writings of individuals like Herbert Spencer, Frédéric Bastiat, and Lysander Spooner, and was carried on in the twentieth century by figures like Nozick, Rothbard, and Rand.

Strict libertarianism is a radicalized form of classical liberalism that is, characteristically, rationalistic, monistic, and (relatively) absolutist in its approach to political principles. The paradigmatic strict libertarian sees almost their entire political philosophy as flowing from a single axiomatic principle, such as Herbert Spencer’s “Law of Equal Freedom” or Rothbard’s “Nonaggression Principle.” This axiomatic principle is thought to provide guidance on all questions pertaining to the use of political coercion, from minimum wage laws, to women’s rights, to the conditions for just war. That guidance is, moreover, thought to be almost always dispositive. The fact that libertarian principles might produce unwanted consequences, or that they might require the radical revision of existing social institutions, is neither here nor there to the strict libertarian. Let justice be done, though the heavens (or the state) fall.

In contrast, classical liberals like Hayek and Friedman, or (to name some non- economists) David Schmidtz and Loren Lomasky, adopt an approach that is generally more empiricist, pluralistic, and presumptive. Not all classical liberals are strict consequentialists, in the sense of thinking that only consequences matter in the moral evaluation of political institutions. But classical liberals do generally give consequences greater moral weight than strict libertarians, and therefore generally put greater emphasis on the importance of empirically evaluating the likely effects of different policies before passing judgment on them. Because they tend to be pluralists, classical liberals often combine this concern for consequences with many of the same moral commitments as strict libertarians – the principle of individual self- ownership, for instance, or freedom of contract. But for classical liberals these commitments tend to be moral presumptions, rather than absolutes.8 They establish a default for public policy, but it is a default that can be overridden by sufficiently weighty considerations of an opposing sort. Classical liberals thus tend to hold that governments may, in some circumstances, legitimately extend beyond the narrow functions of protecting individual rights and engage in other forms of socially beneficial activity such as (limited) redistribution, the regulation of monopolies and externalities, and the provision of economic public goods.

I might quibble with some of this—with referring to strict libertarianism as monist and absolutist. Principled, radical, propertarian libertarians are often adherents of Mises and his dualist approach which treats causal matters distinctly from teleological realms of phenomenon (human action). This approach also contemplates other types of dualisms: descriptive and causal analysis, on the one hand, versus prescriptive, moral and normative analysis, oh the other; ³; the methods appropriate to the study of purely causal laws, namely the scientific method, as contrasted with the (also descriptive) methods appropriate to the study of economics, that is, the (teleological) consequences of (purposive) human action; and so on. ⁴

I also find it usually inaccurate to refer to libertarian principles as “absolute”; it is just that they are principles, that is, as Nozick called them, side-constraints. This does not mean they are “absolute,” whatever that means. There can be nuances, gradations, grey areas, context, and even exceptions, properly understood, but the libertarian view is simply that aggression is unjustified. This is certainly a principled position but I do not know what it adds to say that it’s “absolute.” Usually what the critic means is that for them, liberty is not the only value. Thus, for them, certain state laws or policies can be justifed even if it commits aggression. That is, their view is that while liberty or rights might be important, it can be outweighed by other values since liberty “is not the only value.” So when they say that we strict libertarians view liberty or rights as absolutes, what they mean is that we view rights as side-constraints: that is, we view aggression as unjustifiable. They, by contrast, might usually oppose aggression, but for them, as it’s just one value among many, we can balance them out and sometimes support aggression. So what they really mean, in attacking “absolutism,” is that they condone aggression (in some cases). I.e., because they have “many competing values,” they denigrate principled libertarianism as being absolutist, even though it is not: we do not believe liberty is the only value, we simply believe aggression is wrong, unjustified. ⁵

And by the way, not all “strict libertarians,” in their framework, are “absolutists,” in their terminology, because minarchists do not oppose aggression on principle; like classical liberals or, even worse, people like Hayek and Friedman, they are perfectly willing to endorse institutionalized aggression precisely because they have no principled opposition to it. Minarchists support the institutionalized aggression of the state monopoly on force and usually of taxation; ⁶ ciassical liberals, whom I classify as precursors to libertarianism, not as libertarians proper, favor even more state invervention beyond the night-watchman or ultra-minimalist state; and those like Milton Friedman and especially Hayek seem to be barely even classical liberal, with all the interventions they support. ⁷ as modern libertarians, much less strict libertarians, at all) as compared to classical liberals

***

leaves no room here for minarchism in his attempt to contrast strict libertarianism from classical liberalism–or leaves no room for distinction