Murray Rothbard died 21 years ago today, and while he pioneered new scholarship in many areas — including anarcho-capitalism, welfare economics, and more — Rothbard is also largely responsible for making Ludwig von Mises known to us today. Rothbard’s activism — and his cooperative work with the Mises Institute — was of course key in popularizing the work of Mises, but he also took the scholarly work of Mises, extended it, and made it accessible to a new generation of scholars. Only a scholar and economist could take Mises’s complex and penetrating scholarship and apply it to a new time and place, and Rothbard did exactly that with works like Man, Economy, and State, and The Essential Von Mises.
Indeed, as an introduction to the works of Mises, The Essential Von Mises is among the best. It can be found here on mises.org:
A year following the death of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard wrote the book designed to inspire a new generation to take up the Misesian cause in economic theory and political action. His task was to provide an overview of Mises’s writings and place in the social sciences. The essay achieved extraordinary fame. We might even say that “The Essential von Mises,” distributed in the form of a mini-book, was more responsible for immortalizing Mises than any other essay ever written.
