Brian Doherty, who’s shaping up to be the George Nash of libertarianism (that’s a good thing) has a really interesting piece on Murray Rothbard and his fights with such liberatrian titans as Hayek. This is the part that will probably interest most folks:

The most interesting part of Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, and the most important to libertarian intellectual history, is the notorious memo where he advised the Volker Fund, before the book came out, that F.A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty should not be supported, and should be strenuously attacked when it appears. (I heard more than one prominent libertarian thinker and activist refer to the memo as horrific or scandalous, and a massive black mark on Rothbard’s reputation that could not be washed away.)
Accidents of intellectual and institutional history, told at great length in my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the American Libertarian Movement, have linked as “libertarian” a set of thinkers who are actually in deep opposition on important questions regarding the intellectual justification for political and ethical beliefs, and of the preferred role for government.
All of these thinkers were bound by opposition to the post-New Deal consensus; all had economic beliefs either largely or totally in opposition to the postwar economic planning and manipulation system known as Keynesianism; and all were linked in a community of affinity and intellectual engagement, through organizations ranging from the Mont Pelerin Society to the Volker Fund to the Foundation for Economic Education.
But as Rothbard makes abundantly clear here, very important differences exist between the fallibilistic, utilitarian, small-government thinking of Hayek (and Friedman, and to a great degree Mises) and the rights-based anarchism of Rothbard and many of his followers, both of which coexist uneasily under the label libertarian.
In words that he never made or intended to make public in his lifetime, Rothbard calls Hayek’s most monumental statement about liberty and the political order “surprisingly and distressingly, an extremely bad, and, I would even say, evil book.” The “evil” part comes from the blow he thinks it will strike the libertarian movement, with Hayek then and even more later seen as libertarianism’s most respectable and brilliant exponent.

I do have one quibble with Doherty. At the outset he writes:

Let’s put it this way: When the likes of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman died, conservative flagship National Review could and did praise them pretty unreservedly. But when Rothbard died in 1995, his old pal William Buckley took pen in hand to piss on his grave. Rothbard, Buckley wrote, spent his life “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…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.”

Obviously, Doherty’s allegiances are to Rothbard, and that’s fine. And Buckley may have overstated the case against Rothbard here, particularly for an obit. But Doherty makes it sound like the fault all lies with Buckley, and that’s unfair. The two men had been “pissing” at each other for decades. As Doherty well knows, and acknowlegdes later, Rothbard was hardly above being mean and pissy himself. If the two men had died in reverse order, does Doherty doubt that Rothbard would have poured at least as much invective on Buckley? It’s not a big deal, but reading this passage — saying Buckley was his “old pal” for instance — an uninformed reader would think worse of Buckley (who was unsentimental in a great many eulogies for friends and foes alike) than is warranted.