The Progressive Era, by Murray N. Rothbard
EDITED BY
PATRICK NEWMAN
FOREWORD BY
JUDGE ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
In the last decades of Murray Rothbard’s life, he developed an important interpretative framework in understanding American history. This was prodded on by his careful study of the emerging “new political history” which was reinterpreting the dynamics of the ebb and flow of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious groups. This bold synthesis became the central focus of some of his greatest scholarly endeavors, particularly when it came to understanding progressivism as a secularized version of this postmillennial religious zeal.
In his brilliant book, The Progressive Era, (which I believe to be his greatest work) Rothbard provided the Rosetta Stone to understanding the origins of the welfare/warfare state in America: the role of postmillennial Protestant pietistic intellectuals and activists born in the crucial decade surrounding the Civil War who, because of the seductive allure and influence of the evolutionary naturalism of Darwinism, came of age increasingly secularized, but who did not forsake their faith in statism and elitist social control.
In particular, read the wonderful foreword to this book by Judge Andrew Napolitano. His experience studying the Progressive Era at Princeton amazingly mirrors that of myself at the University of Tulsa.
Each week, Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger and Misean economist Richard M. Ebeling discuss the hot topics of the day.
In the video below Jacob and Richard discussed the disaster of progressivism. I cannot stress enough the importance of this dialog. This concise 30 minute conversation encapsulates the most brilliant and enlightening synthesis of ideas and history concerning the origins and roots of this pernicious intellectual movement, both at home and abroad.
Ebeling concisely traces these concepts from their 19th century Marxian notions of the dynamic class struggle of history, that history, according to Karl Marx, inevitably moved in a “progressive” direction from primitive pre-industrial societies, to a feudal order, to industrial capitalism, will move onward towards socialism (and the dictatorship of the proletariat), finally to the ultimate stage of history, communism. Any movement away from this cyclical direction was “reactionary” or regressive.
In perhaps the highlight of his remarks, he builds upon the pioneering insights of Murray Rothbard and others in focusing upon the crucial development of the welfare-warfare state in Germany under chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and Bismarck’s co-opting of the collectivist program of the Marxian Social Democrats into a Bismarxian hybrid to enhance state power and control.
Again, as Rothbard elucidated, generations of key American graduate students attended German universities during this period, returning to the US transformed by these statist ideas they had absorbed. These persons, such as Richard T. Ely of the University of Wisconsin, became the first generation of progressive intellectuals and cogs within the state apparatus that moved America away from a classical liberal (libertarian) direction towards this collectivist hybrid known as progressivism.
Hornberger cogently points out the key role of the judiciary in the erosion of the constitutional safeguards against interventionism, and the pivotal model of Woodrow Wilson in establishing the matrix for all that followed. Wilson was a student of Richard Ely at Johns Hopkins.
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