A Tribute to Professor Emeritus Butler Shaffer
RIP Butler Shaffer – from all his family and friends.
My husband, Butler DeLane Shaffer, died of prostate cancer at 3:28 pm on Sunday, December 29. He had a peaceful transition surrounded by family and love, in a wonderful Burbank hospital where he had been a patient several times. He always looked forward to their practice of playing lullaby chimes throughout the hospital when a baby is born, We were with him for his last breath, his last heartbeat. And an hour later the western sky gave us its most beautiful sunset ever, all purple (his favorite color) and red and gold.
On December 28, our 62nd wedding anniversary, our three daughters told the world on Facebook that Butler’s time on earth was limited. Almost immediately he began to receive dozens of messages of love and appreciation from people whose lives had been touched by his writing, his teaching and his very presence We read your words to him and felt on some level he heard them. Thank you all for your messages and know they are helpful to his family.
LRC and the Mises Institute, and especially the people there, meant a lot to Butler. He appreciated that you made it possible for his ideas, his writings to reach readers all over the world. His legacy lives on because of you. It also lives on through his three wonderful daughters and five grandchildren, all of whom share his views on human nature and the human condition.
A British psychiatrist wrote that “Grief is the price we pay for love.” We are paying that price now. Butler’s ashes will be placed in a bench in Wyuka Cemetery in Lincoln NE where we both have ancestors. The bench is in the oldest part of the cemetery, just inside the entrance and his words on the bench can be seen from the road: “Civilizations are created by individuals. They are destroyed by collectives.”
Butler had a special vibrant energy and if anyone could send a message from the grave, he would be the one. I am a confirmed skeptic, less spiritual than Butler who occasionally had prophetic dreams and firmly believed in Gremlins when something went wrong. But, on the day of and the day after his death, we had two strange occurrences that are probably just coincidence but do make us wonder. I received an Amazon package sent the day of his death with no paperwork enclosed. It was a singing bowl, something I would have wanted. Amazon tracking could give us no information, in fact, their records showed it should have been a clothesline and gone to a different address. And several hours after his death our oldest daughter was on her computer talking with a friend. Suddenly her iTunes opened up by itself. Thinking that was weird, she shut it down. Later she left the room. Returning to the room she heard music playing. iTunes was back up playing the Suzanne Vega song “Bound,” an album our daughter had bought several years ago but had never listened to. She had never heard the song before. The lyrics are here. The song ends with the words “When I said: I am bound to you forever, here’s what I meant: I am bound to you forever.”
We always said Butler made us think and he made us laugh. So I know he would appreciate these words from one of our sons-in-law who helped to put things in perspective; given that he was in no discomfort, surrounded by his family and their love. “…we need to be reminded that this is better than taking an arrow in the chest during the Crusades surrounded by screaming enemies as you lie writhing in the mud.”
Butler was never impressed with a person’s status, title, rank or position. He was always more interested in the nature of their character. Butler was never enamored with his own title as a law professor. On the first day of class, he asked everyone to simply refer to him as “Butler.” I recall him jokingly suggesting if people were uncomfortable with such lack of formality, they could simply call him God.
Butler simply never answered questions. It wasn’t because he didn’t have a well thought out answer. Butler believed if he gave an answer, thinking stopped. He saw his teaching role as creating chaos in the mind for the student to think about or “kick it around” as he would often say. It forced me to think it through myself.
I never met a person more committed to peace than Butler Shaffer. He opposed all coercive transactions and showed how we could achieve a wonderfully peaceful and effective society without any coercion. Whenever I raised a problem needing coercion to remedy, Butler simply guided me by agreeing with my observation then asking me what would happen next. I eventually saw how voluntary transactions would always achieve a creative solution.
I was always intrigued by Butler’s observation that all living things seek to, “connect up with the universe” as he would say. He saw us all as fundamentally connected. This gave Butler a deep respect for all living things which I admired greatly. He also always respected the peaceful views of all other people. He always paid great respect to the well thought out peaceful views of others who saw the world differently.
I always loved Butler’s exercise of describing yourself without reference to groups. It forced you to think more about character than credentials.
Butler showed how the power to interpret the constitution was most important. With Butler interpreting, (and playing the role of a big government inclined supreme court to make his point) nobody could draft a constitution to maintain a small government. It taught me that what truly resides in a person’s heart and mind is what matters rather than what is simply written.
Butler was the most insightful, thought-provoking, respectful, and mentally present person I ever met. He influenced my thinking more than anyone else. I never met anyone more dedicated to peace and freedom than Butler. He will inspire me for as long as I live. I’m a much better person because of him. I’m forever grateful to him.
Dear SCALE Alums,
I am writing to wish you a Happy and Healthy New Year and to share the very sad news that Professor Emeritus Butler Shaffer passed away on Sunday, December 29, 2019, just a couple of weeks shy of his 85th birthday. Rather than a formal funeral or memorial service, Butler’s ashes will be taken to Nebraska in the spring.
Butler joined Southwestern in 1977 because of the SCALE program. As many of you may recall, Butler was often heard to say that his goal in teaching was “ to help students learn to think, rather than teaching them what to think.” Butler was a strong supporter of the Socratic method. He often shared that students who found him difficult and challenging as a professor, came to appreciate him more than any other professor after years of practice.
I know that Butler touched the lives of many of you in his 40 years of teaching at Southwestern. I recall that many of you attended the special reception to honor Butler in February 2017 to show your appreciation and affection for this extraordinary professor. I know that he will be greatly missed.
All the best,
HARRIET M. ROLNICK
Associate Dean of SCALE
Associate Professor of Law
Southwestern Law School
We mourn the passing of our good friend Butler Shaffer, who died yesterday afternoon at the age of 84. Butler was a libertarian at a time when there were very few libertarians in the world. Like many supporters of the free market, he was first attracted to the Republican Party. He supported Barry Goldwater for President in 1964, but he soon came to realize that limited government was a chimera and that the State was by nature opposed to liberty.
As he put the issue in a letter to me in November 2014: “It was just a few months more than 50 years ago that I sat in the Cow Palace in San Francisco as part of my state’s delegation to the Republican National Convention (i.e., the Goldwater Convention). . . Afterwards, I was enjoying a drink at the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel with one of Goldwater’s advisors. I asked: “Now that Goldwater has the nomination, let us suppose that he gets elected president. What do you think he would do to begin cutting back on federal government power?” “What do you mean?” my acquaintance answered. I reminded him of Goldwater’s book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” wherein he proposed eliminating a few government programs (federal involvement in education being one area). The other man answered: “don’t be absurd: if Goldwater gets elected president, the most we would hope to accomplish would be to slow down the rate of growth of government.”
“This conversation helped to confirm the sentiments to which I was already becoming more firmly attracted. I went back home; walked away from any delusional thinking about ‘cleaning up the whorehouse’; and never looked back.”
With this view of the state, Butler was naturally attracted to the anarchism of Murray Rothbard and Robert LeFevre, and he wrote from this perspective for the rest of his long life.
His brand of libertarianism was decidedly un-PC. For example, he strongly opposed the extreme feminist view that abortion is always morally acceptable. In an article written in October 2015, he said: “If one is to avoid the inconstant fluctuations of fashion in designating who is/is not a “person,” the standard I have found to be less arbitrary than others is found in what gives each individual a sense of uniqueness: DNA. Once the sperm fertilizes the egg, a genetically distinct individual is in the process of development. The abortion defenders emphasize the “developmental” nature of what they label a “fetus,” a word chosen for its dehumanizing tendencies, so as to treat the being as little more than a form of protoplasm which, like the woman’s appendix, can be removed from her body by her will. I once had a feminist colleague try to convince me that a child did not acquire DNA until after it had been born!”
He had no sympathy for the deep state’s efforts to destroy Donald Trump. In a column for LRC on September 19, 2018, he said: “Celebrity entertainers have been quick to abandon the civilizing sentiments that otherwise make life peaceful and decent. It is the advantages associated with public fame that allows many of them to blithely speak of killing Donald Trump, blowing up the White House, or prancing across a stage with a mock-up of Trump’s severed head. That so little moral contempt has been expressed by those conditioned to laugh or applaud the performances of these people, tells much about the state of our culture.”
Butler belongs in the pantheon of genuine heroes, along with his friends Murray Rothbard and Burt Blumert. Fortunately for us, another of those heroes, Butler’s friend Ron Paul, is still here to lead us and inspire us. Wherever people value liberty, Butler Shaffer will be remembered with respect and admiration.
Yesterday afternoon, Butler Shaffer, one of the great pioneers of the libertarian movement, passed away, two weeks before his eighty-fifth birthday. In a column written in December 2014, he tells us, “My interest in what is now called ‘libertarian’ thinking was kindled in college in the late 1950s. There was no coherent philosophy by that name in those years, but I found myself attracted to such thinkers as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, the Stoics, and very much annoyed by the likes of Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, and my undergrad study of ‘economics’ taught by a prominent Keynesian. While in law school, I began my study of genuine economics with Prof. Aaron Director, and began my focused and energized inquiry into the kinds of ideas later to be described as ‘libertarianism.'”
Butler’s brand of libertarianism was exceptionally pure and consistent. As he explains in his superb monograph A Libertarian Critique of Intellectual Property (free here), he believed that rights stem from “the informal processes by which men and women accord to each other a respect for the inviolability of their lives — along with claims to external resources (e.g., land, food, water, etc.) necessary to sustain their lives.” (p. 18) The “informal processes” that Shaffer mentions proceed without coercion. In particular, law and rights do not depend on the dictates of the state, an organization that claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in a territory.
In adopting this stance, Shaffer puts himself at odds with much that passes in our day for wisdom among professors of law. “In a world grounded in institutional structuring, it is often difficult to find people willing to consider the possibility that property interests could derive from any source other than an acknowledged legal authority. There is an apparent acceptance of Jeremy Bentham’s dictum that ‘property is entirely the creature of law.'” (pp. 18–19) Butler explained his approach in great detail in his Boundaries of Order, a major contribution to libertarian political philosophy.
Butler taught at Southwestern Law School from 1977 to 2014 and influenced generations of students. He was a master of the Socratic method. He would sometimes read to his class a list of “progressive”-sounding measures that would usually command approval. He would then tell the students, “You just voted for Hitler!” His list had been taken from the Nazi Party platform. Butler always looked at things from an original angle, and in my many conversations with him, his ability to subject his own ideas to constant criticism and rethinking impressed me.
Butler continued to share his wisdom with us nearly to the end of his life, and his mordant criticism of the state brings to mind H. L. Mencken, a writer he greatly admired. In a column on LewRockwell.com published last August 13, he said,
Those who seek to control our lives must first gain control of our minds. If one of your neighbors went through the neighborhood with a gun, informing you that he was the sovereign authority therein, and that you were required to obey his orders, how would you respond? When, as a child, I visited my aunt and uncle on their farm, there was a retarded man in the neighborhood who informed us that he was the local sheriff and we had to do as he directed. Since he was completely harmless and pleasant, the neighbors tended to humor him and treat him with respect. But when you listen to the gaggle of Democratic Party presidential candidates with essentially the same baseless claim to run your life with policies that would be far more disruptive of your interests, you become aware that you are not hearing the voices of good-natured chuckleheads; but of men and women who fully intend to make their delusions enforceable through the coercive powers of the state.
Butler was my dear friend for many years, and now that he is gone what comes most to my mind is his sense of humor. He loved words and was a master of puns. Few things in my life brought me as much joy as a conversation with Butler, and now that is gone forever.
Butler is survived by his wonderful wife, Jane, to whom he was married for 63 years, their three daughters, and a number of grandchildren.
As I get older and people close to me pass away, the melancholy words of Ovid come to mind: Omnia perdidimus: tantummodo vita relicta est / praebat ut sensum materiamque mali — I have lost all; life alone remains / to give me the consciousness and the substance of sorrow.
Mises Institute