Rothbard on Hazlitt on Keynes
January 10th, 2008 by 
bkmarcus
I came across this rave review in a letter dated July 18, 1959 from Murray Rothbard to the Volker Fund:
In a forthcoming review of Henry Hazlitt’s The Failure of the "New Economics" in National Review, I write that this is the best book on economics to be published since Mises’s Human Action, ten years ago. I do not think this an exaggeration. Exempting reprinted books, such as Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit or the Böhm-Bawerk volumes, what book can compete with this one? (Mises’s Theory and History and Hayek’s Counter-Revolution of Science are more philosophical or epistemological than straight economics). […]
Frankly, I didn’t realize that Henry had it in him. I always knew that he was an excellent journalist, and that he faithfully applied Misesian principles to his journalistic work, a difficult task in itself. And I knew that his Great Idea [Time Will Run Back] was a highly underrated work, and because cast in novel form, didn’t get the recognition that its acute discussion of economic principles deserved. Still, I did not realize that Henry would be so fine on the highest scholarly levels, as he has here shown himself to be. This is, in short an excellent work, at long last providing us with a minute, bit-by-bit, and yet also overall critique and demolition of the Keynesian heresy. There is no hesitation here, no namby-pamby ritualism about how "Keynes, despite his many errors, really contributed a great deal, etc." Keynes contributed only mischief, fallacy, and obfuscation, and Hazlitt is courageous enough to call a spade a spade.
[…]
Some may say (and I understand that Buchanan said something like this in his review) that an analysis of Keynesianism is not important nowadays. It is true that Keynesianism is not seemingly a hot issue today, although even here Hazlitt shows how Keynesianism is at the root of the current national income and "economics of growth" analyses. But, on the other hand, the real reason why Keynesianism is not a hot issue is because it has been so thoroughly accepted, especially by the so-called "conservative" side in the political debate. It is unquestioned by any prominent conservative or business magazine that, let the first sign of depression appear on the horizon, and the sure way to cure it is to have government deficit spending and inflation. Nobody believes in a balanced budget during depressed times anymore. This is the measure of the mass and intellectual acceptance of Keynesianism. And, as a matter of fact, the Chicago economists like Buchanan have the very neo-Keynesian virus in them. So let it never be said that Henry’s book is not important or timely. It should be read by every economist or everyone interested in fundamental economic problems. […]
Posted in economics, literature | 
4 Comments »
Scott Lahti said,
Henry Hazlitt definitely held his own with the academics, to say the least, and not just with The Failure of the “New Economics”, or his near-million-selling Economics in One Lesson. His whole life was testament to the power of well-directed self-education, maintained across almost 99 years. Take a look at his library sometime at FEE in Irvington. Or read, e.g., such non-economic works as Thinking as a Science (1916); The Way to Will-Power (1922), virtually impossible to find outside university libraries (I own two of the only privately-held copies in all of Christendom); The Anatomy of Criticism (1933), a charming “trialogue” on the principles of literary judgment, and *summa* of his three-year stint as literary editor at The Nation; The Foundations of Morality (1964), an erudite tome on ethics; or The Wisdom of the Stoics (1984), a selection from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, assembled with wife Frances as old age found stoicism of more than scholarly interest.
I had the good fortune of meeting Hazlitt while on spring break in 1982 in Wilton, Connecticut, where I lived while in high school five miles or so from Hazlitt. He was then 87. Two letters from him are in my files. Try to imagine him running regularly in the latter-day incarnations of Newsweek or the Reader’s Digest, as he did for decades surrounding the mid-century last.
“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” – Julius Caesar
“So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” – “THE PUNCH LINE,” Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
Gil Guillory said,
Suh-weet! Ordered The Way to Will-Power on ILL. I can only hope that it will come in…
Scott Lahti said,
Gil:
Back in 1999, I requested an interlibrary loan myself from the Portland, Maine, Public Library, which loaned me a copy borrowed from, I think, Dartmouth College:
http://tinyurl.com/3d44z9
I had a friend and colleague photocopy it, two pages a side over two sides per sheet, and recommend your copying it in turn, as your odds of finding it used are almost nil. It’s about 160 pages.
Five years ago, I even surprised an old Californian Objectivist classmate from my NYU days (Foundations of Capitalism with Mises student Israel Kirzner), and had his local PL track down a distant copy, then sprung the news. He was pleased.
Here are two pages from FEE I recommend highly as background. Sheldon Richman provides a revealing glimpse into the genesis and aftermath of the book (”Hazlitt as a Thinker”):
http://www.fee.org/pdf/the-freeman/richman1104.pdf
And here is Hazlitt’s own Epilogue from the 1969 reissue by Nash of his first book, Thinking as a Science, first published fifty-three years earlier, in 1916:
http://www.fee.org/Publications/the-Freeman/article.asp?aid=6687
Several editions of the latter book are for sale widely across the internet. I envy those about to read either or both of Hazlitt’s first two books. Wherever you end up in your social philosophy and in professional specialty, the example of Hazlitt’s broad sunlit nineteenth-century style of literacy, and unshakable intellectual independence, will prove as powerful an inoculation I know against the ghettoed and tribalist bunker mentality to which those captivated by free-market doctrines in our day
are sometimes all too prone.
Scott Lahti said,
“A fellow Rothbardian, whose name rhymes with Phil Filigree” – BKM
Good Heavens, it took me all of two years or so since discovering your blog via your flattering “Austrian Puns” post
http://www.bkmarcus.com/blog/2005/12/austrian-puns.html
quoted above to discern who you name-checked thus: where once the late Prince of Denmark commanded “Get thee to a punnery” unto this too, too flaccid flesh before you, he now orders “Gil thee to a Guillory” unto all prophet-seeking and aromatic, myrrhy RothBardolaters seeking the One True Way to “Will”-Power: And thus once more as so often before, Henry Hazlitt The Fire This Time…