Who owns the children? To the parents or to the State? The libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard is back in the news on this topic and, a century after his birth, reminds us how the control of children’s thoughts is practiced in public schools
We have heard this question, mostly rhetorically, repeated countless times in recent months, especially regarding the terrible case of the so-called “family in the woods”. Whose children are they? Of the parents or of the State? Each offers his own answer, mostly spannometric. However, the most convincing, and probably also definitive, reflections on the topic are those proposed by Murray Rothbard, economist and philosopher among the tutelary deities of libertarian thought, whose hundredth anniversary of birth this year marks (he was born on 2 March 1926 in New York, where he died in 1995).
In a writing entitled The damage of state schools, now out by Liberilibri, the American thinker provides a small and precious concentration of his vision: “It is obvious that the natural situation is that the parents are responsible for the child”, writes Rothbard. «Parents are the true producers of the child, and the child has with them the most intimate relationship that two people can have. Parents have bonds of familial affection with the child. Parents are interested in the child as an individual and are the most likely to be interested in and learn about his or her needs and personality. Finally, if you believe in a free society, in which everyone is the master of themselves and their products, it is obvious that even their child, one of their most precious products, is under their responsibility. The only logical alternative to parents’ “ownership” of children is for the State to take them away from them and raise them completely on its own. To anyone who believes in freedom this must seem like a truly monstrous step.”
Rothbard, like all libertarians, considers the State the supreme enemy, but it is certainly not this overall generic aversion that interests us today. The true power of Rothbardian theses can only be grasped if we observe the brutal reality of the facts. And that is the homologation and sometimes even the indoctrination towards which public schools at every level and latitude tend. According to the philosopher, in this type of schools «techniques for inculcating respect for despotism and other types of “thought control” are bound to emerge». Overall, Rothbard argues, “modern education has abandoned the scholastic functions of education in favor of modeling the total personality, both to impose equality of learning at the level of the least educable and to usurp as much as possible the general educational role of the family and other influences.”
It is difficult to say that this is not true today, even in Italian schools, which sometimes appear to be the result of a fatal mix between the fake-romantic rhetoric of Dead Poets Society and the banal-progressive sadness of the film The School with Silvio Orlando. This is why a revival of the sharpest passages of Rothbard’s work is a healthy antidote to mass conformism these days, even if we consider some of its extremisms.
Rothbard’s sincere love of freedom remains a beacon, regardless of what one may think of the role of the state in the economy. After all, as a right-wing libertarian, he fought not only the interference of the State as such but above all the ideological poison embodied in what is now the prevailing thought. As Piero Vernaglione, a passionate scholar of libertarianism, explains to Panorama, Rothbard detested «some dominant ideas typical of the liberal elite. Multiculturalism, social justice, egalitarianism, dirigiste and collectivist environmentalism. He saw this pedagogical apparatus that he opposed implemented in public schools, and obviously in public universities.”
There is no point in denying it: Rothbard’s heated individualism – especially in these egotistical times – poses more than one problem, even for conservatives, especially those of a Catholic nature. How can this vision be reconciled with the openness to others so essential to Christianity? This question is answered by Beniamino Di Martino, priest and director of the magazine StoriaLibera, who for Giubilei Regnani has just edited an anthology of Rothbardian thought: Apologia del libertario.
«If we free the concept from frequent prejudices and common banalizations, by individualism we mean that method specific to the social sciences which, to analyze political problems, believes it must focus on individual choices», Di Martino tells Panorama. «Consequently the meaning to be given to the concept is the centrality of the human being. To understand what happens among men it is necessary to know what is specific to the individual and his choices. This may seem obvious, a statement devoid of liveliness. Yet ordinarily – even without realizing it – we slip into the error of believing that we must start from society, from collective entities (this also gives rise to the “personification” of the State), practicing an implicit and unconscious mental collectivism. From methodological individualism it will then be easy to get to the correct meaning of the concept by making individualism coincide with the very nature of the human being. To understand more easily, it can be concisely said that the opposite of individualism is collectivism. Attention: collectivism, not altruism or generosity. This means that condemning individualism by improperly confusing it with selfishness or insensitivity, with greed or cynicism entails even dramatic consequences because they are pregnant with totalitarian germs.”
According to Di Martino, «a good part of the criticism of individualism moved by Christian culture and Catholicism in particular (from parish homilies to papal encyclicals, there is no analysis of society that does not lament “current individualism” as the cause of the evils that afflict human coexistence today) is based on the misunderstanding that I have tried to schematize. A misunderstanding with certainly deep roots, but not therefore indisputable. In fact, a minimum of clarity would be enough to reposition the terms and to correctly pose the question by asking, with the great economist Ludwig von Mises, whether “the end is constituted by the individual or by society” having historically experienced how the good and development of every part of society is made possible only by individual freedom (while any attempt to bend the latter in the name of the common good has always caused regression for the entire society)».
As in Ayn Rand, individualism is the heart of libertarianism. «We certainly cannot be ashamed of individualism properly understood; indeed this quality must be reaffirmed as the great factor of strength and… generosity”, continues Di Martino. «Yes, because only by reaffirming the sovereignty of the individual, as opposed to the dehumanizing power of collective (or collectivistic) entities, can a society of free men who live according to God’s plan be ensured. After all, what else is individualism if not what Christian thought has always expressed as the “primacy of the person” over political and social structures?».
This is why, the priest concludes, Christians “should re-learn from Rothbard the double lesson of the value of individual freedom and distrust towards any centralization of political power. Catholics would have much to gain from the assimilation of what, in truth, they should be masters of given that, alongside rationality, the faculty of freedom is what makes man God’s partner. What, in fact, is the redemption offered by Christ if not a condition of full existential freedom? From Rothbard, then, believers should understand what it means to delegate increasingly larger spaces of life to the State. This is a naivety that everyone falls into, but for Christians it is an unforgivable fault in the face of history. Even more so because no group like the Church, in every century, has experienced persecution by political absolutism.” An absolutism that today manifests itself in more subtle forms than in the past, apparently gentler but equally dangerous.
Forms that Rothbard teaches to counter with courage.
