The Weird One-Act Play Murray Rothbard Wrote about Ayn Rand

Was Mozart a Red?

As you may have gathered from last week’s deep dive, I have a complicated intellectual relationship with Murray Rothbard, and in that I am far from alone. I can hardly think of someone who wouldn’t have something to love and hate about the man, considering the vast breadth of his life’s work. An ardent Marxist-Leninist, perhaps? Not so fast. Here’s what Rothbard had to say about Che Guevara after Che was murdered in 1967:

Che is dead, and we all mourn him. Why? … What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution. … And furthermore, to paraphrase Christopher Jencks in a recent perceptive, if wrongheaded, article in the New Republic, we all knew that his enemy was our enemy—that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U.S. imperialism.

Left and Right (full archive here) was Rothbard’s journal from 1965 to 1968.

If this surprises you, you’ve probably barely scratched the surface of Rothbard’s intellectual biography. You can think of Rothbard as a sort of Forrest Gump figure for weirdo American politics in the second half of the 20th century. Like Forrest Gump, the interesting parts of Rothbard’s life run the duration of the Cold War. He was politically active from 1946 until 1995, and in the intervening half century there was, as the title of one of Rothbard’s essay collections puts it, “Never a Dull Moment.” Like Forrest Gump, Rothbard was involved, in rapid succession, with a broad cross section of American ideologues: Ayn Rand and the Objectivist cult; William F. Buckley, Jr., and the National Review right; the New Left; the Libertarian Party; the Cato Institute; Pat Buchanan and the paleoconservatives; and the Mises Institute. And like Forrest Gump, Rothbard never really fit in with any of them.

Perhaps the greatest difference between Rothbard and Gump is that, while Forrest Gump’s stupidity was supposed to make him agreeable, Rothbard’s wit and biting polemicism left him an outcast from nearly every intellectual movement he ever joined. It’s a testament to Rothbard’s personal geniality (as opposed to his professional antigeniality) that he wasn’t universally given the same obituary as Buckley had given him in the pages of National Review:

[M]uch of what drove [Rothbard] was a contrarian spirit, the deranging scrupulosity that caused him to disdain such as Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and—yes—Newt Gingrich, while huffing and puffing in the little cloister whose walls he labored so strenuously to contract, leaving him, in the end, not as the father of a swelling movement that “rous[ed] the masses from their slumber,” as he once stated his ambition, but with about as many disciples as David Koresh had in his little redoubt in Waco. Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom, and yes, David Koresh believed in God.

(“Stop, stop, he’s already dead!”)

Detailing all of Rothbard’s bizarre feuds and internecine intellectual disputes (or Buckley’s, for that matter) would take hundreds of pages and hardly be worthwhile. See the deep dive for a perspective on the last 20 years of Rothbard’s life, complete with insights into the viability of his political strategy. Today, I just want to cover one thing that I think is amusing: Rothbard’s brief stint and subsequent feud with Ayn Rand’s inner circle.

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The minimum necessary background is this: In 1946, Rothbard was introduced to libertarianism through the Foundation for Economic Education. FEE was always a part of that more practical wing of the libertarian movement, like Cato today, that sets aside discussion of rights and principles so that it can better appeal to political elites who don’t share their core values. For whatever reason, Rothbard was dissatisfied with this approach. (Rothbard’s letters and autobiographical writing are unclear on this, but the closest he comes to an explanation is that his hatred of the state was instinctual rather than reflective.)

Shortly after his introduction to FEE, Rothbard became an acquaintance of Ayn Rand, the foremost exponent of rights philosophy in the American libertarian tradition. In 1954, Rothbard began attending weekly lectures in the Great Woman’s apartment alongside his “Circle Bastiat,” a group of high school and undergraduate students with whom he also attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar.

According to Rothbard’s biographer Justin Raimondo, the Rothbardians and the Randians never got along. In fact, Rothbard and the Circle Bastiat stopped attending Rand’s lectures after a 17-year-old George Reisman and a 49-year-old Rand got into a shouting match over the merits of “the good old Utilitarian faith of our youth.”¹ Although Rothbard had agreed with Rand over Reisman, he wrote that he was “rooting like hell for George,” and that he had concluded that Rand was a pompous pseudo-philosopher who merely repackaged and perverted the writings of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Herbert Spencer, while making grandiloquent claims about human nature without bothering to test if they were empirically valid. Rand’s conviction that any person could master any domain of knowledge so long as they properly applied reason, for example, evinced ignorance of basic economic principles like marginal utility. It also implied—like the collectivist philosophies that Rand despised—that there is essentially no such thing as a unique individual.

According to Raimondo:

Rothbard noted that “George Reisman commented, and I think most astutely, that Ayn’s system is a perfect engine of complete totalitarianism, but that Ayn herself is a libertarian out of an irrational prejudice, and that fifty years from now some smart Randian disciple will see the implications and convert the thing into a horrible new Statist sect,” and speculated that “life in a Randian Rationalist society would be a living hell.” From the accounts of those ex-members who survived the experience, life in the Rand cult truly did replicate Hell in miniature.²

Yet, in 1957, after reading Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard’s faith in Rand was restored. He sent Rand a gushing letter that again earned him access to the inner sanctum:

Only twice in my life have I felt honored and happy that I was young and alive at the specific date of the publication of a book: first, of Human Action in 1949, and now with Atlas Shrugged. When, in the past, I heard your disciples refer to you in grandiloquent terms—as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, as giving them a “round universe”—I confess I was repelled: surely this was the outpouring of a mystic cult. But now, upon reading Atlas Shrugged, I find I was wrong. This was not wild exaggeration but the perception of truth. You are one of the great geniuses of the ages, and I am proud that we are friends. And Atlas Shrugged is not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction. Indeed, it is one of the greatest achievements the human mind has ever produced. And I mean it. If Zarathustra should ever return to earth, and ask me—as representative of the human race—that unforgettable question: “what have ye done to surpass man?”, I shall point to Atlas Shrugged.

Rothbard was welcomed back by Rand and her disciples. And upon his return, he quickly remembered why he had left Rand’s circle in the first place. As long as Rothbard was to remain in Rand’s good graces, the top Objectivists made clear, he was expected to sit at her apartment every night and be lectured by one of her surrogates—usually Rand’s paramour, Nathaniel Branden—about the Objectivist view on any number of things, from philosophy to politics to art, literature, and sex. At one point, Branden even demanded that the agnostic Rothbard divorce his Presbyterian wife or else be excommunicated from Objectivism. When Rothbard refused, Branden and the Objectivists accused Rothbard of plagiarizing from Rand the notion that the human mind is a tabula rasa and that reason is a better guide for human action than mysticism. They put Rothbard on trial, convicted him in absentia, and sentenced him to eternity as an outcast from the Light of Reason.

What’s more, Branden had also been Rothbard’s therapist, and after the break he publicly divulged secrets that Rothbard had told him in confidence. Scarred by the experience, Rothbard penned an essay in the early 1970s titled “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” in which he compared Rand’s absolute control over her inner circle to contemporary cults like the Manson Family. In Rothbard’s telling, Rand exercised a relentless petty tyranny over her acolytes’ lives. For example:

[S]moking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation. In my own experience, a top Randian once asked me rather sharply, “How is it that you don’t smoke?” When I replied that I had discovered early that I was allergic to smoke, the Randian was mollified: “Oh, that’s OK, then.” The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.) One suspects that the actual reason, as in so many other parts of Randian theory, from Rachmaninoff to Victor Hugo to tap dancing, was that Rand simply liked smoking and had the need to cast about for a philosophical system that would make her personal whims not only moral but also a moral obligation incumbent upon everyone who desires to be rational.

And, Rothbard concluded:

[T]he guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty—as it seemed to many young members—but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.

Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians, despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.

Around the same time, Rothbard had authored a one-act play, “Mozart Was a Red,” satirizing the Rand cult. Keith Hackley, the protagonist and a stand-in for Rothbard, is interrogated by author Carson Sand (a stand-in for Rand) after writing a letter praising her novel The Brow of Zeus:

CARSON: […] Mr. Hackley, perhaps we can approach your problem through aesthetics. What composers do you like, for example?

KEITH (sinks back, a bit relieved, feeling erroneously on safer ground): Well, the usual, you know. I’m not much of a musician—

CARSON (quickly): That’s all right. That doesn’t matter. Your taste reveals your musical premises.

KEITH (puzzled): Oh? Well, I like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, the standard—

GRETA: Oh!

CARSON: Keith, how could you? I, who know the depth of depravity to which most men sink, even I have to ask myself, how can they? Beethoven, Mozart, who reek of naturalism, whose whole work tramples on values, whose every note displays the malevolent-universe premise.

KEITH (stunned): Malev—?

CARSON: Oh, Keith, can’t you see the hatred of life in every bar of their music?

JONATHAN: Mr. Hackley, you told Carson in your letter that you liked The Brow of Zeus, because it opposes collectivism and totalitarianism.

KEITH (lights up): Yes, yes, exactly. I—

JONATHAN: Well, how in the name of reason can’t you see that a composer like Mozart, on the malevolent-universe premise, is on the same premise as the collectivists that you claim to despise? They are all part of the antimind, antilife Enemy.

KEITH (stunned again): Are— are you saying that Mo— Mozart was a collectivist?

CARSON: Oh, not in that very primitive kind of way. But the system of premises interconnect, on a deeper, and therefore on a more important level. Do you see?

The play didn’t make its stage debut until 1986, at Rothbard’s 60th birthday party. A video recording of the performance is available on the Mises Institute’s website.

The stage debut of “Mozart Was a Red.” From left to right: Jeffrey Tucker as Jonathan (Nathaniel Branden), Norma Marchman as Greta (Barbara Branden), Nando Pelusi as Keith Hackley (Murray Rothbard), Dyanne Petersen as Carson Sand (Ayn Rand), George Resch as George Kelly (Frank O’Connor).

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1. Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (New York: Prometheus, 2000), 92.

2. Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 110.