For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto

Cover of the first edition
Author	Murray Rothbard
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Libertarianism
Published	1973 (Macmillan Publishers)
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	327 (first edition) 338 (second edition)
ISBN	(second edition) 0-945466-47-1 (2006 edition)
OCLC	75961482

For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973; second edition 1978; third edition 1985) is a book by American economist and historian Murray Rothbard. The work, in which Rothbard promotes anarcho-capitalism, has been credited as an influence on modern libertarian thought.

Rothbard advocates anarcho-capitalism, a strain of stateless libertarianism. Rothbard traces the intellectual origins of libertarianism back to classical liberal philosophers John Locke and Adam Smith and the American Revolution. He argues that modern libertarianism originated not as a response to socialism or leftism, but to conservatism. Rothbard views the right of self-ownership and the right to homestead as establishing the complete set of principles of the libertarian system.

The core of libertarianism, writes Rothbard, is the non-aggression axiom: "that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else." He points out that while this principle is almost universally applied to private individuals and institutions, the government is considered above the general moral law, and therefore does not have to abide by this axiom.

Rothbard attempts to dispel the notion that libertarianism constitutes a sect or offshoot of liberalism or conservatism, or that its seemingly right-wing opinions on economic policy and left-wing opinions on social and foreign policy are contradictory.

Tom G. Palmer commented in 1997 that For a New Liberty "provides a good overview of the libertarian worldview, although the chapters on public policy issues and on the organized libertarian movement are by now somewhat dated." Libertarian author David Boaz writes that For a New Liberty, together with Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) and Ayn Rand's essays on political philosophy, "defined the 'hard-core' version of modern libertarianism, which essentially restated Spencer's law of equal freedom: Individuals have the right to do whatever they want to do, so long as they respect the equal rights of others." British philosopher Ted Honderich writes that Rothbard's anarcho-libertarianism informed "one messianic part of the New Right".