Lew Rockwell - Life and Work

Life and Work

Rockwell was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1944. His father was a "Taft Republican", and Rockwell was exposed at a young age to military non-interventionism. He was introduced to the laissez faire thought of the French Liberal and Austrian schools of economics when he received Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson as a gift from a family friend on his twelfth birthday. Later in his youth, Rockwell describes feeling alienated from mainstream conservatism,

"Over time, I became aware that I was not only dissenting from the left but also from the conservative establishment, which was embroiled in the Cold War as a first principle. I grew increasingly skeptical of the official right, especially during the war on Vietnam.... I had been a reluctant Goldwaterite in 1964, but by 1968 I worked briefly for Gene McCarthy."