A student recently asked me what was known of “Rothbard’s opinion on the events of early May, 1968 in France.” I turned to Joe Stromberg, Jedi Master of the Rothbard Archives, who kindly dug out for me two columns Rothbard wrote for the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph in 1968: “The Student Revolution” and “French Revolution – 1968.” For anyone curious about the results, here’s a brief summary:
Rothbard celebrates the French student revolt as a refutation of “the widespread myth that revolutions, whether or not desirable, are simply impossible in the modern, complex, highly technological world.” He describes the revolt as an instance of “that famous revolutionary weapon never until now successfully used: the general strike,” which he thinks has become more viable now that “complex technology requires skilled people to work it.”
Rothbard points to the “decade of near-dictatorship by Charles deGaulle,” an “archaic, bureaucratic” state education system, and “massive police brutality” as the chief causes of the revolt. While the students’ “aims are vague and confused,” they are “instinctive libertarians” with the right enemies if not yet the right goals. Contrary to those who describe the student rebels as Communists, Rothbard replies that the students in fact “tend to be anarchists” who “correctly regard the Communist Party as a pillar of the existing Establishment.”
Students who revere Mao and Che Guevara do so not because these men are Communists (since the students have no great affection for Brezhnev) but because they showed that in our “modern, complex, and militarized world” people are still “able to make revolution.”
