One of the most successful strategies of the Left’s social democrats and socialists has been their takeover of academia. Over decades, this has gradually transformed the nation’s colleges and universities into hotbeds of anticapitalist and proregime sentiment. From the schools, left-wing ideology has been able to infiltrate nearly all of America’s other institutions as well. There’s a reason why most of America’s media professionals, corporate C-suite managers, and medical personnel generally share a similar antifreedom ideology. Most of them spent years being told what to think at American colleges.
At the Mises Institute, we’ve long been offering an antidote to the Left’s indoctrination through our academic programs, where dissenters can actually learn, teach, and complete research on topics that are often verboten in the nation’s alleged places of higher learning.
This antidote has always depended on the work of great scholars to create an intellectual foundation from which we can fight the battle of ideas.
For example, after Ludwig von Mises’s death in 1973, the Austrian School—and therefore the undiluted cause of liberty and prosperity—was in the doldrums. There were great Austrian economists teaching, preeminently Murray N. Rothbard, but they were isolated. The great books were difficult to come by, and young people had almost no place to go to learn about the real free market, sound money, and their intellectual foundations.
You can understand why Margit von Mises was so thrilled to learn of Lew Rockwell’s plans for a Mises Institute a few years after her husband’s death and gave Lew her blessing. When Lew told Rothbard, he literally clapped his hands in glee. Since then, the Austrian School has blossomed, and not only in the United States but around the world. We have numerous brilliant professors and scholars, and masses of brilliant students and alumni. Top journalists and businessmen, as well as financiers and professionals swell our ranks too.
At the core of the Austrian revival—which continues to this day—was Murray Rothbard himself. Rothbard took the inimitable work of Mises, as set down in his groundbreaking treatise Human Action, and expanded it further.
In this issue of The Misesian, we continue our Year of Rothbard with a new essay from Academic Vice President Joseph Salerno, who takes a close look at what made Rothbard’s work in Austrian economics so notable. He explains how in the late 1950s Rothbard began to write an economics textbook that became his “pathbreaking twovolume treatise Man, Economy, and State (MES), in which the entire corpus of economic principles was deduced using Mises’s step-by-step praxeological method. This was a feat which even Mises himself had not accomplished.” Moreover, Rothbard carried Mises’s work even further: “When Rothbard began to write MES, his use of the praxeological method quickly led him to realize that Mises’s treatise had left large gaps, particularly in price theory and production theory, and that these areas required significant elaboration. Rothbard made the momentous decision to expand his project from a college-level textbook into a full-blown treatise.”
In addition to Salerno’s essay, you’ll find in these pages a new book review from David Gordon, as well as new lectures by Chris Calton and Connor O’Keeffe from our recent event California’s Decline: A Warning to America. You’ll also find updates about the Institute’s publications, events, and scholars.
Today the Mises Institute’s scholars continue to build on the Austrian School’s foundations, just as Rothbard built on Mises. Needless to say, this is a much-needed counterattack against the antiproperty and antifreedom Left, which continues to use its position in academia to push its agenda.
