Lecture series
Austrian Theory
Austrian Theory is a free lecture series (16 recordings, 0.2 hours) you can stream or download at freecapitalists.org, with Murray N. Rothbard.
Short clips of Rothbard answering audience questions on Austrian economics. He covers Menger, Boehm-Bawerk, Marshall, Marx, the English Classical School, and Mises's theory of money and the business cycle, each in a brief answer of a few sentences to about a minute.
Cover painting: Berlin workers carry baskets and a wheelbarrow of banknotes from a factory gate, hyperinflation, autumn 1923. See every painting in the art gallery.
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01
0:24 Download MP3
Who has been generally credited with "founding" Austrian economics?
Rothbard recounts the accepted lineage runs from Menger as founder to student Boehm-Bawerk. Mises is named as Boehm-Bawerk's great successor in this line.
Read the transcript 58 words
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02
0:46 Download MP3
This view has changed to include Menger. How do you think this affects Austrian history?
Rothbard argues praising Menger as founder is a nihilist agenda that denigrates Boehm-Bawerk. This trend claims Menger and Boehm-Bawerk disagreed on almost everything, a distinction he calls artificial, since Menger's own papers have not even been studied yet.
Read the transcript 150 words
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03
0:19 Download MP3
What was one of Mises's favorite quotations?
Rothbard recounts one of Mises's favorite quotations, from historical-school economist Schmoller. Mises invoked the line to describe academic economists who serve the dynastic Prussian state rather than the truth.
Read the transcript 60 words
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04
0:51 Download MP3
What was Menger's basic contribution?
Rothbard argues Menger revived the scholastic and French tradition of subjective value theory. He held that consumers' own valuations of goods determine both prices and the value of the factors of production, sketching out the basic outlines of Austrian doctrine.
Read the transcript 126 words
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05
1:25 Download MP3
What is your view of the English classic school of economics?
Rothbard argues the English Classical School marked a detour from the pre-Austrian tradition. Adam Smith and Ricardo shifted value theory toward objective labor toil, an error later revived in England by John Stuart Mill largely out of filial loyalty to his father.
Read the transcript 221 words
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06
0:41 Download MP3
How do "mathematical economists" view the Austrian rejection of math?
Rothbard argues mathematical economists dismiss Austrian rejection of formal math as ignorance. Menger and Boehm-Bawerk were both trained in mathematics and understood it well, and George Stigler's dissertation attacking Boehm-Bawerk illustrates the hostility; deliberately rejecting math after mastering it is simply unthinkable to a mathematical economist.
Read the transcript 127 words
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07
1:55 Download MP3
What do you think of Alfred Marshall (author of 'Principles of Economics')?
Rothbard argues Marshall absorbed marginal utility theory into his framework but trivialized it. His famous supply-and-demand scissors let him sideline Jevons and the Austrians entirely, paving the way for the Keynesian takeover that followed.
Read the transcript 399 words
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08
0:25 Download MP3
How do you sum up Menger's contribution to Austrian Economics?
Rothbard argues Menger revived scholastic praxeology, grounding economics in individual action. He established that a consumer's subjective valuations determine the expected value of the factors of production entrepreneurs are willing to invest in.
Read the transcript 74 words
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09
0:46 Download MP3
What was Böhm-Bawerk's contribution?
Rothbard argues Boehm-Bawerk built out Menger's framework into a full value and price theory. He was long regarded as Menger's main-line successor until recent revisionists began recasting him as an outsider to true Austrianism.
Read the transcript 156 words
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10
1:29 Download MP3
What was Böhm-Bawerk's main criticism of Menger?
Rothbard argues Boehm-Bawerk thoroughly dismantled Menger's use theory of interest. Boehm-Bawerk showed there is no such extra payment, since buying something already buys its uses, and offered his own time-preference theory of interest instead.
Read the transcript 331 words
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11
0:38 Download MP3
Why has Böhm-Bawerk been attacked by "nihilist" forces within Austrianism?
Rothbard argues nihilist Austrians attack Boehm-Bawerk because his framework underlies Mises's theory. With both Mises and Boehm-Bawerk rejected, only the safely distant Menger is left for the nihilists to claim as the one true Austrian.
Read the transcript 137 words
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12
0:49 Download MP3
What is your favorite quotation on Marx?
Rothbard quotes a passage mocking Boehm-Bawerk's and H.W.B. Joseph's critiques of Marx's value theory as merely pedestrian, since even Marx's own followers never agreed on what he actually meant. Watching Marx's disciples argue among themselves is called a joy of an entirely different order, since none of them know what he meant either.
Read the transcript 145 words
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13
0:23 Download MP3
What is the function of the entrepreneur in economic equilibrium?
Rothbard argues Austrians study the real-world process by which markets move toward equilibrium. In that process the entrepreneur becomes the key figure, driven by the incentive to earn profits and to avoid losses.
Read the transcript 71 words
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14
1:06 Download MP3
What is Mises's theory of the business cycle?
Rothbard argues Mises fused a monetary theory of payments with Wicksell's interest-rate analysis. When bank-created money and credit push the loan rate below the natural rate, the resulting boom in prices and euphoria is inevitably followed by contraction, bankruptcy, and liquidation.
Read the transcript 190 words
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15
0:39 Download MP3
How do recessions end?
Rothbard argues a recession is the market's necessary liquidation of unsound investment. Recovery requires wage rates and capital-goods prices to fall so resources shift into consumer goods, but propping up wages, as the New Deal did, blocks that adjustment and drags out the depression.
Read the transcript 125 words
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16
0:39 Download MP3
What supply of money is optimal?
Rothbard argues any quantity of money the market arrives at is already optimal. Unlike growth in goods, services, or capital equipment, growth in the money supply raises no one's standard of living and has no social utility at all.
Read the transcript 116 words
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Recording dates and topics for 0 of these 16 lectures come from the Mises Institute's page for Austrian Theory, checked 2026-07-23. The series and lecture summaries above them are written for this archive from the transcripts.
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About this series
- Is Austrian Theory free to listen to?
- Yes. All 16 mirrored recordings stream in the browser or download as audio, at no cost and with no signup.
- How long is Austrian Theory?
- 16 recordings, 0.2 hours in total.
- Who lectures in Austrian Theory?
- Murray N. Rothbard.
- Is there a transcript of Austrian Theory?
- Yes. Every lecture in the series has one, 2,486 words in total, free to read on each lecture's page and searchable in the browser.
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