Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Murray Rothbard Puts It In Perspective!

Read this excerpt from and interview of Murray Rothbard for the Austrian Economics Newsletter.
AEN: You have apparently taken an interest in religion as it affects the history of thought.
MNR: Religion was dominant in the history of thought at least through Marshall. The Scholastics emerged out of Catholic doctrine. And John Locke was a Protestant Scholastic. I am convinced that Smith, who came from a Calvinist tradition, skewed the whole theory of value by emphasizing labor pain, typical of a Puritan. The whole objective cost tradition grew out of that.
AEN: Why has all this been overlooked?

MNR: Because the 20th century is the century of atheistic, secularist intellectuals. When I was growing up, anyone who was religious was considered slightly wacky or even unintelligent. That was the basic attitude of all intellectuals. This is the opposite of earlier centuries' attitudes when everyone was religious.

The anti-religious bias even shows up in the interpretations of the history of art, for example, in the secularist and positivist interpretation of Renaissance painting. When Jesus is painted as a real person, they assume that means it is a secular work, whereas the real point of the Renaissance was to emphasize the Incarnation, when God became flesh. Even if art historians aren't interested in theology, they should realize that the people they study were. The same is true for economics. In doing history, you cannot read your own values into the past.

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