Lecture series
The History of Economic Thought
The History of Economic Thought is a free lecture series (15 recordings, 0.4 hours) you can stream or download at freecapitalists.org, with Murray N. Rothbard.
Short clips of Rothbard answering audience questions on the history of economic thought. He traces ideas from Cantillon, Turgot and the Physiocrats through Adam Smith and Marx to the marginal revolution, and covers the origins of paper money and nineteenth-century American pietism.
Cover painting: speculators trade John Law's Mississippi Company shares in the Rue Quincampoix, Paris, 1719. See every painting in the art gallery.
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01
2:22 Download MP3
What is the Key to Marx?
Rothbard concludes the key to understanding Marx is that he began as a committed communist. He traces how Marx fused Hegelian alienation with a class-struggle account of history, adding a labor theory of value only later to explain capitalism's coming collapse.
Read the transcript 461 words
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02
1:59 Download MP3
What is Marx's Theory of Value and its main flaw?
Rothbard says the opening pages of Das Kapital already contain Marx's core error. Having wrongly assumed equal value, Marx then searches for a common substance behind it and lands, without real argument, on labor hours as that measure.
Read the transcript 416 words
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03
3:30 Download MP3
What was the pietist movement in America that arose in the 1820s?
Rothbard recounts pietism, an emotional revivalist Protestantism, swept the Yankee North. Its evangelical quietist wing believed salvation required maximizing everyone else's salvation too, driving converts to use government to outlaw sin across the nineteenth century.
Read the transcript 521 words
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04
2:20 Download MP3
What or who was the beginning of modern economics?
Rothbard credits Richard Cantillon, a largely overlooked figure, as the true beginning of economics. He calls Cantillon's monetary analysis more sophisticated than Hume's later and better-known species-flow theory.
Read the transcript 314 words
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05
0:29 Download MP3
When was the first government paper money?
Rothbard dates the first government paper money to Massachusetts in 1690; before that, governments could only debase coins. He cites John Law persuading the French royal government to let him act as central banker and print money, an early case of officials believing inflation could erase public debt and bring prosperity.
Read the transcript 101 words
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06
2:57 Download MP3
Who were the Physiocrats?
Rothbard recounts that the Physiocrats began as a two-man school founded in July 1757 when Dr. Quesnay met the Marquis de Mirabeau, with Quesnay using his position as physician to Madame de Pompadour to gain influence at the French court. Believing that converting the king would install laissez-faire from the top down, they combined natural-rights and laissez-faire leanings with a mistaken belief that agriculture was the only productive activity.
Read the transcript 523 words
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07
1:14 Download MP3
What was Turgot's contribution to economics?
Rothbard calls Turgot one of history's most impressive economists, writing under severe time pressure. His Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth already contains complete laissez-faire theory along with Austrian-style time preference, capital theory, and monetary process analysis, decades ahead of its time.
Read the transcript 246 words
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08
2:40 Download MP3
Why do people think that Adam Smith 'founded' modern economics?
Rothbard argues the French tradition of Cantillon and Turgot was forgotten after the French Revolution. Turgot's political alliance with the discredited, monarchist Physiocrats dragged his ideas down, and even J.B. Say, his intellectual heir, never credited him, so Smith's cost-based system was remembered as the founding of economics.
Read the transcript 539 words
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09
0:36 Download MP3
Who was the first major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition?
Rothbard identifies Carmichael as first in the Scottish Enlightenment's economic wing. Carmichael in turn taught Francis Hutcheson, who taught Adam Smith, forming a direct chain from Pufendorf to Smith.
Read the transcript 106 words
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10
0:32 Download MP3
How do you differ from Hayek's interpretation of Mandeville?
Rothbard disagrees with Hayek's claim that Mandeville originated the idea of spontaneous order. He instead holds that Mandeville was fundamentally a statist making an early, pre-Keynesian case for the economic value of consumption.
Read the transcript 108 words
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11
2:55 Download MP3
What are Adam Smith's deviations from laissez-faire?
Rothbard catalogs a long list of Adam Smith's departures from laissez-faire. He argues these Calvinist and status-driven exceptions undercut Smith's reputation as laissez-faire's purest founder.
Read the transcript 496 words
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12
0:39 Download MP3
What was Adam Smith's labor theory of value?
Rothbard argues Smith made labor hours the source of value because he wanted a measurable theory. He calls this quest to quantify value one of the great dominant fallacies in the history of economic thought.
Read the transcript 116 words
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13
1:27 Download MP3
How does time preference relate to 'usury?'
Rothbard argues Boehm-Bawerk's and Fetter's theory answers a puzzle theologians could never solve. Because people value a good available now over the same good later, present goods command a premium that is the rate of interest, and Menger and Boehm-Bawerk also showed that capital and production have an underappreciated time structure.
Read the transcript 265 words
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14
1:17 Download MP3
What is the value paradox?
Rothbard explains Adam Smith's value paradox of cheap bread and water against costly diamonds. He says this false split set up much of the later left-wing distinction between production for use and production for profit.
Read the transcript 252 words
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15
1:31 Download MP3
How did the Marginal Revolution solve the diamond/water paradox?
Rothbard argues the marginal revolution resolved the diamond-water paradox: choices are marginal. Because bread is abundant, each additional loaf is worth little, while scarce diamonds command a high value per unit, which is also why water is prized highly in a desert but not where it is abundant.
Read the transcript 286 words
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About this series
- Is The History of Economic Thought free to listen to?
- Yes. All 15 mirrored recordings stream in the browser or download as audio, at no cost and with no signup.
- How long is The History of Economic Thought?
- 15 recordings, 0.4 hours in total.
- Who lectures in The History of Economic Thought?
- Murray N. Rothbard.
- Is there a transcript of The History of Economic Thought?
- Yes. Every lecture in the series has one, 4,750 words in total, free to read on each lecture's page and searchable in the browser.
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