The Making of an Austrian Economist

Patrick Newman presents the book he and Joseph Salerno have written, Murray N. Rothbard: The Making of an Austrian Economist. He traces Rothbard’s path from a Columbia PhD steeped in the neoclassical synthesis, through his 1949 encounter with Mises and Human Action, to the writing of Man, Economy, and State—a project that began as a beginner’s textbook and grew into the treatise that stands beside Human Action at the core of the Austrian tradition. Along the way: Rothbard’s neglected theory of production, his reconstruction of welfare economics, and Mises’s own remarkable assessment of his heir.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 24, 2026.

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