“As any Marxist can tell you, ideology can blind one to the insights that might disrupt one’s political adhesions, often against one’s own best interests,” explains Michael Rectenwald in a recent article for the Mises Wire. “Only it was Marxist ideology itself that blinded me.”
Rectenwald, professor emeritus from New York University, has provided a concise intellectual confession in this piece, and yes, “How a Marxist of Twenty-Five Years Became a Misesian Libertarian” is worth reading.
His own experience is far different from mine. Not having pursued an academic career, my first-hand experience with the academic left has been limited to “the funny papers,” as we used to say about real life and mainstream news reporting. He was intimate with it, and deep, deep, deep . . . into the muck of it.
While I was grew up in a mixed-political, evangelical Christian household, and then set on my quasi-career circling literary libertarianism (with occasional forays into advertising), Michael Rectenwald gave up his lucrative advertising career to become an academic, where his literary interests were . . . perverted, you might say. “An antiliterature agenda had advanced so far in English studies by this time that at one conference, a professor of English at Berkeley decried the fact that other attendees had presented papers about novels. How regressive!”
There is a lot of ‘anti-’ this and that in the leftist Academy.
Rectenwald flirted with (and was rejected by) many varieties of “Marxism,” but, as he explains, “something within [him] incessantly rebelled against the dogmatism.”
I early on latched to liberty, not “social justice,” but something within me resisted the air of certainty that certain labels suggest. A friend called my position “agnarchism.”
Thankfully, after Rectenwald’s notorious brouhaha with woke de-platforming, he read Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism, seeing the logic of Mises’
- attack on Marxist “polylogism” (one logic for ‘the bourgeoisie,’ another for the proletariat!),
- defense of consumer sovereignty, and
- Mises’ brilliant explication of socialism’s biggest failure, the state’s inability to calculate economic value without prices.
So he finally liberated himself from Marxian shackles.
This is worth confronting, because America is right now getting a double-barrelled exposure to several very dangerous forms of Marxism.
Though Rectenwald’s account would probably interest me even had he not come close to my position in politics, his “Misesian libertarianism” is more than welcome. But note: I wouldn’t say I am a “Misesian libertarian,” exactly, mainly because Herbert Spencer has had a much bigger influence on me — as have Gustave de Molinari and my footman guide to political philosophy, Robert Nozick, whose Anarchy, State and Utopia was the first work of modern phiosophy I ever read. But, nevertheless, Nozick’s “framework for utopia” and Molinari’s non-anarchy quasi-anarchy (panarchy) put me awfully close to Mises’ (dare I say it?) Liberalism!
Which is now libertarianism. More or less.
Note: Lee Waaks and I interviewed Michael Rectenwald last year:
Wirkman Comment 