In my previous article, I argued that Ayn Rand did not introduce Murray Rothbard to Aristotle. The evidence shows something more nuanced: Rand had a real influence on Rothbard’s appreciation of natural rights and natural law, but there is no convincing evidence that she was the original source of his Aristotelianism.
Newly discussed material from Daniel J. Flynn’s work on Frank S. Meyer strengthens that conclusion.
Flynn’s article on the newly discovered Meyer–Rothbard correspondence adds an important piece to the timeline. Rothbard and Frank Meyer began corresponding in 1954, before Rothbard became closely involved with Rand’s inner circle. Their friendship lasted until Meyer’s death in 1972. They worked in overlapping intellectual circles, both reviewed scholarship for the Volker Fund, and Meyer later served as a major conservative editor at National Review. More importantly, Rothbard used Meyer as a serious intellectual correspondent, someone to whom he could express his real reactions to Rand and the Objectivists while those events were happening.
The most important piece of evidence remains Rothbard’s October 10, 1957 postcard to Meyer. In that message, written around the time of Atlas Shrugged and before Rothbard’s deeper involvement with the Objectivist circle, Rothbard described himself as having “always been an extreme libertarian purist, anti-prudence, atheist, natural rightser, Aristotelian, etc.”
That sentence matters enormously.
It is not Rothbard writing decades later, after a public break with Rand. It is not Rothbard retrospectively trying to minimize Rand’s influence. It is not a defensive statement after Nathaniel Branden’s later accusation that Rothbard had plagiarized Rand. It is Rothbard, in 1957, privately telling Frank Meyer that Aristotelianism and natural rights were already part of his intellectual identity.
This does not mean Rand had no influence. Rothbard himself acknowledged that Rand helped introduce him to, or at least deepen his engagement with, the field of natural rights and natural law philosophy. His famous 1958 letter after reading Atlas Shrugged contains the line: “You introduced me to the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy.” That is a real admission, and it should not be dismissed.
But that is not the same thing as saying Ayn Rand introduced Rothbard to Aristotle.
The newer evidence clarifies the distinction. Rand may have intensified Rothbard’s interest in natural rights. She may have pushed him to think more systematically about ethics. She may have encouraged him to connect libertarianism more explicitly with a moral foundation. But the claim that she was the source of Rothbard’s Aristotelianism is much harder to defend.
The October 1957 postcard shows Rothbard already presenting himself as an Aristotelian. This is especially significant because it predates the major rupture with the Objectivists. It also predates the plagiarism controversy. That makes the Objectivist claim weaker, because Rothbard was not inventing an Aristotelian past after being accused. He was already using that language before the accusation became an issue.
The Meyer connection also matters because Meyer was not a random correspondent. He was an older intellectual friend, an ex-Communist, a conservative theorist, a National Review editor, and someone deeply concerned with the relationship between freedom, virtue, and the Western tradition. Rothbard was not writing propaganda to Meyer. He was thinking out loud with someone he respected.
This does not prove that Frank Meyer introduced Rothbard to Aristotle either. That would go too far. The evidence does not show Meyer as the origin of Rothbard’s Aristotelianism. What Meyer provides is something different: a dated witness. Rothbard’s letters to Meyer preserve Rothbard’s own intellectual self-description before the later Rand controversy hardened into camps.
That is why Flynn’s discovery is important. The correspondence does not merely add gossip about Rothbard and Rand. It helps reconstruct the chronology.
The timeline looks roughly like this. Rothbard first entered Rand’s orbit in the early 1950s, reportedly through Herb Cornuelle. He met Frank Meyer in 1954. By 1957, after reading Atlas Shrugged, Rothbard became intensely enthusiastic about Rand. In October 1957, he praised Rand extravagantly, but also told Meyer that he had “always” been an Aristotelian and natural-rights libertarian. By December 1957, Rothbard described himself as “98% Randian,” saying he liked the Objectivists’ “atheist-rationalist-libertarian-Aristotelianism,” while also already noticing the dogmatism and cultish atmosphere around Rand’s group. By 1958, the relationship had broken down badly.
This chronology supports a balanced conclusion. Rothbard was attracted to Rand because she seemed to systematize many things he already valued: reason, atheism, individualism, natural rights, and Aristotelian philosophy. But attraction is not the same as origin. Rand did not necessarily create Rothbard’s Aristotelianism. She gave it a dramatic, literary, polemical, and systematic form that temporarily impressed him.
The phrase “98% Randian” is useful here. It shows that Rothbard saw a major overlap between his worldview and Rand’s. But it also implies that he did not see himself as a convert from zero. He was not saying, “Rand created my philosophy.” He was saying, in effect, “Rand’s system is close to where I already am.”
This distinction is crucial because some Objectivist polemics have treated Rothbard as if he simply took Aristotle, natural rights, and free will from Rand without acknowledgment. Flynn mentions James Valliant’s claim that Rothbard “got Aristotle and natural rights straight from Ayn Rand.” But the 1957 Meyer postcard makes that claim historically dubious. If Rothbard was already calling himself an Aristotelian and a natural rightser before the later break, then the charge becomes much weaker.
There is another irony. Rothbard’s later attack on the Objectivist movement, “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” was itself shaped in part by Frank Meyer. Flynn notes that Rothbard modeled much of that essay on Meyer’s The Moulding of Communists. Meyer, as an ex-Communist, understood ideological movements from the inside. Rothbard later used Meyer’s analysis of Communist cadre formation as a template for understanding the Objectivist inner circle.
That does not directly answer whether Rand introduced Rothbard to Aristotle, but it deepens the story. Meyer was not only a witness to Rothbard’s pre-break thoughts about Rand. He also became part of Rothbard’s later framework for interpreting the Randian movement. In other words, the Rothbard–Rand story cannot be understood only through Rand and Branden. Meyer belongs in the background.
The new material also helps correct two opposite exaggerations.
The first exaggeration is the Objectivist one: that Rothbard got Aristotle from Rand and then failed to credit her. This now looks historically weak.
The second exaggeration would be an anti-Rand one: that Rand had no serious influence on Rothbard. That is also false. Rothbard clearly admired Atlas Shrugged intensely when he read it. He credited Rand with opening or developing his interest in natural rights and natural law. He temporarily saw himself as almost fully aligned with her system. To deny that would be dishonest.
The better view is this: Rand sharpened something in Rothbard that was already there.
Rothbard’s later philosophical work points in the same direction. In The Ethics of Liberty and elsewhere, he grounds his natural-law libertarianism in Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the broader Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. Rand may have helped sharpen his interest in natural rights, but Rothbard did not present his Aristotelianism as something derived from her. In his mature system, the lineage runs through classical and scholastic natural law, not through Objectivism.
She did not create his Aristotelianism out of nothing. She did not take a blank-slate economist and hand him Aristotle. Rothbard was already formed by Mises, the Old Right, natural rights libertarianism, and broader philosophical influences. But Rand gave him a powerful example of a secular, rationalist, rights-based moral defense of capitalism. For a time, he saw her as a genius and system-builder. Later, he came to see the movement around her as authoritarian, humorless, and cult-like.
This explains why Rothbard could both praise Rand and later reject the Randians so aggressively. His break with them was not merely philosophical. It was also personal, institutional, and psychological. But his philosophical independence seems to predate the break.
The larger lesson is that intellectual influence is rarely simple. It is tempting to ask: “Who introduced Rothbard to Aristotle?” But that may be the wrong question. A thinker like Rothbard did not receive Aristotle from one person in one moment. He moved through a network of books, friends, debates, letters, journals, mentors, and enemies. Rand was part of that network. Meyer was part of that network. Mises was central to that network. The Old Right was part of that network. Columbia, Volker, Circle Bastiat, and National Review all formed part of the ecosystem.
What the Meyer letters do is prevent a simplistic Rand-centered genealogy.
They show Rothbard already identifying with Aristotelianism and natural rights before the later Randian plagiarism charge. They show him discussing Rand with an older intellectual friend who was skeptical of Objectivism. They show that his early enthusiasm for Rand coexisted with his preexisting libertarian purism. They also show that his later critique of the Randians was not invented out of nowhere after the break, since he had already privately noticed the group’s strange and rigid atmosphere in 1957.
So the conclusion of the original article still stands, but it can now be stated more strongly.
Ayn Rand did influence Rothbard. She influenced his engagement with natural rights, and she temporarily gave him a powerful model of an integrated moral defense of capitalism. But the evidence does not support the claim that she introduced him to Aristotle. The Meyer correspondence suggests the opposite: Rothbard already considered himself an Aristotelian before the Randian controversy fully unfolded.
The real historical picture is not “Rand created Rothbard’s Aristotelianism.”
It is closer to this: Rothbard encountered Rand as someone already sympathetic to Aristotle, natural rights, atheism, reason, and radical libertarianism. Rand intensified and dramatized these themes for him, but she did not originate them. And once the personal and intellectual structure of the Objectivist circle became intolerable to him, Rothbard kept Aristotle, kept natural rights, kept reason, and rejected Randianism.
That is why Rothbard’s mature work cites Aristotle, Aquinas, natural law, and the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition without making Ayn Rand the source of that lineage. His final position was not Randian Objectivism. It was Rothbardian natural-law anarcho-libertarianism.
Rand was an episode in that development.
She was not the origin.
This article builds on Daniel J. Flynn’s 2025 study of the newly discovered Rothbard–Meyer correspondence, especially the October 10, 1957 postcard in which Rothbard described himself as already Aristotelian and committed to natural rights.
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