1. Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Murray N. Rothbard, a scholar of extraordinary range, made major contributions to economics, history, political philosophy, and legal theory. He developed and extended the Austrian economics of Ludwig von Mises, in whose seminar he was a main participant for many years. He established himself as the principal Austrian theorist in the latter half of the twentieth century and applied Austrian analysis to topics such as the Great Depression of 1929 and the history of American banking.

A person examining the books and articles of Murray Rothbard without prior acquaintance with their author could not help wondering whether five or six prolific scholars shared the name “Murray Rothbard.” Surely one man could not alone be the author of books in so many different academic fields, as well as hundreds of articles on contemporary politics. Anyone who had met Murray Rothbard, however, would experience no such bafflement at the scope of his immense intellectual productivity. His amazing mental quickness and energy made what would be a puzzle in almost anyone else a matter of course for him.

Rothbard was no ivory-tower scholar, interested only in academic controversies. Quite the contrary, he combined Austrian economics with a fervent commitment to individual liberty. He developed a unique synthesis that combined themes from nineteenth-century American individualists such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker with Austrian economics. A new political philosophy was the result, and Rothbard devoted his remarkable intellectual energy, over a period of some 45 years, to developing and promoting his style of libertarianism. In doing so, he became a major American public intellectual.

I shall endeavor in what follows to provide a guide to the main lines of Rothbard’s thought, through an account of his major books and a number of his articles.