The Misesian: First, what was it like seeing a book that you edited, Murray Rothbard’s The Progressive Era, referenced in one of Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court opinions this cycle?
Patrick Newman: That was definitely a surprise. I was certainly thrilled. It’s great that Rothbard is getting this type of exposure for his history, being appreciated not just by Austrian economists but by a Supreme Court justice.
I thought it was a great insight that he used, quoting Rothbard on regulatory capture and how regulatory commissions often lead to profitable alliances between big business and government. This is something that could actually be quite momentous if other jurists recognize that regulatory capture is a real phenomenon, as illustrated in Rothbard’s history. It shows its relevance not just to issues in the past, but to the world that we live in today.
TM: Conceived in Liberty was also mentioned in Thomas’s dissent on the birthright citizenship case, particularly timely with America’s 250th anniversary. Why do you think Rothbard’s historical work continues to be so relevant? What is the value of Rothbard’s particular interpretation, even to those who might not even be interested in Austrian economics?
PN: I think one of the reasons why Rothbard’s history has found new fans is not only its incredible attention to detail, all of the special-interest connections that Rothbard brought up, and the ideological motivations of people, but also his overall interpretive framework, his foundational framework of liberty versus power. It looks at history from a perspective that individuals matter, their ideas matter, and they shape the world.
Rothbard is one of these old-school historians who analyzes American history in a way that looks at the major players through the lens of who were “the good guys” and “the bad guys.” A lot of that now has gotten completely swept aside by scholars who are looking at race, class, and gender and taking a negative view of the founding of the country or of Americans in the past: “Oh, it’s just a bunch of old white men.” But of course that doesn’t really change what happened in the past.
He also had a narrative, right? I mentioned the liberty versus power framework, but he also had a grand historical narrative that I think people are finding timely in a year when we’re reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.
TM: In recent years, we’ve seen a growing trend of what is called the “new history of capitalism,” from authors like Quinn Slobodian and Nancy MacLean, which almost has a conspiratorial bent regarding the influence of free market thinkers in what they call the “neoliberal project.” Do you think we need more history from an Austrian perspective to combat this narrative from the Left right now?
PN: Absolutely. I think history is very important. And of course, history is everything from Jamestown in 1607 to the financial crisis, or even covid, or technically even yesterday.
Most people learn through history.
This is something Rothbard pointed out in a memo when he was trying to start his Conceived in Liberty series. Your average person can often find economics hard to understand, very abstract, perhaps not interesting. But people learn through history. It can be easier to understand. It’s a way of communicating economic insights, among other insights, demonstrating to people that something can work in the present if it worked in the past. Or something can’t work in the present if it didn’t work in the past.
So if we want to talk about why the Federal Reserve in 2026 and beyond is a problem, it would help us to have good histories of why America’s previous central banks were problems, why the Federal Reserve has been a problem for most of its history, so on and so forth.
I think certainly there are also things to learn from other historians. Rothbard was a big fan of some New Left historians, such as Gabriel Kolko. Not necessarily because of their interpretation, but because of the facts that they were gathering, which he was able to apply a libertarian perspective to.
We can’t run away from history because that’s how we show the practicality of the ideas that we care about.
TM: Of course, you are someone who is actively pursuing this sort of work. Your newest book, Cronyism: Rise of the Corporatist State, 1849–1929, was just published. Can you share what you consider to be the grand narrative of this new work?
PN: The first book, Cronyism: Liberty Versus Power in Early America, was focused more on political parties and trying to show how the free market parties—first the Jeffersonian Republicans and later the Jacksonian Democrats—tried to restrain the state but failed for various reasons.
The new book is a sequel and is less focused on political parties, mainly because they’re less important. Both the Republicans and Democrats were basically just supporting different forms of cronyism at this time, though there are some exceptions. This book focuses much more on economics and the development of what I call the corporatist state, which is a system of government-enforced cartels and monopolies that we still deal with in the modern era.
You had all these special interests: different types of big businesses, intellectuals, smaller companies, unions, and so on, all lobbying governments to set up government-sponsored cartels and monopolies. I think there are several important insights from this. An important one is that these interests lobbied the government because their market cartels and monopolies failed due to pervasive competition. That’s something people don’t realize, and that’s important for us to hammer home—that on the free market, cartels and monopolies don’t succeed. Cartels break because of internal pressure, cheating, disagreements among the cartelists, and external pressure, such as new entrants. This is something that constantly happens in markets.
In today’s world, some people say, “Oh, well, there’s only going to be one company that will dominate social media.” Or they’ll say there’s only going to be one AI company. And we’ve already seen that that’s not the case. The only cartels and monopolies that do succeed are the ones created by the government. And those lead to reduced quantity, reduced variety, higher prices, and so on and so forth.
Another important theme is that when it comes to the creation of regulatory commissions, personnel is policy. You have all these different special interests lobbying for some sort of privilege; they all want something out of it. And usually the legislation or the regulatory commission that’s created as a compromise, whether it’s the Federal Reserve or the Federal Trade Commission, is controlled by one interest or group of interests, depending on the actual people appointed to run the agency.
TM: Like Rothbard, you’re an economist by trade who is writing about economic history. How much has Rothbard’s work influenced your career? What is the process of being an economist-historian and filling these gaps in the literature?
PN: The short answer is that Rothbard has influenced me tremendously. He’s the economist who’s influenced me the most. And he’s also the historian who’s influenced me the most. I’ve always been interested in history, even before economics, though the history I was interested in was just sort of, let’s say, general military or political history. I really fell in love with economic history when I discovered the Mises Institute and started learning about Austrian economics, and of course, started reading Rothbard’s economic history.
I’ve always appreciated how Rothbard could make things that could be so boring so interesting, and how he could discover all of these obscure connections.
Some of the very first Mises Institute lectures I listened to were Rothbard’s lectures on the Progressive Era. This was in 2010 and 2011. I was fascinated by how he was bringing all these different topics and facts together into an organized narrative. And that’s something that I realized I’d have to do too to create something interesting and that made sense, and to show how the history that we’re taught is not always the history that actually happened.
TM: After your second book on cronyism, you and Dr. Joseph Salerno coauthored Murray N. Rothbard: The Making of an Austrian Economist, which is the first biography of Rothbard since Justin Raimondo’s An Enemy of the State. What did you learn going through that process, and how did that project change your appreciation of Rothbard’s work?
PN: That book is an intellectual biography of Murray Rothbard and his development into a pioneering Austrian economist in the 1950s and early 1960s, which is when Rothbard wrote some of his best economics works: What Has Government Done to Our Money?, America’s Great Depression, Man, Economy, and State, and Power and Market, as well as some signature essays of his. It was a fascinating project.
I guess you could call it the culmination of a decade or so of research in the Mises Institute’s Rothbard Papers.
The first project I did in the archives was editing and publishing an unpublished chapter of Man, Economy, and State, chapter 5 on production theory. That led to the Progressive Era, and that led to the fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty. And around that time, Joe Salerno and I were looking through his letters and thought about writing a book.
We decided to tell the story of how Rothbard became an economist: What was it like for Rothbard before he discovered Austrian economics, before he discovered Ludwig von Mises? What was the process of writing Man, Economy, and State? I consider that to be his magnum opus. When it comes to books on Austrian economics, it’s that and Human Action, and I would probably actually put Man, Economy, and State first.
The book is about 150 pages, and it serves almost as a compendium to Man, Economy, and State. So someone who’s read that book will learn a lot by reading this new book. People who might be intimidated by Man, Economy, and State can also just read this and get a taste of what Rothbard was doing.
