This book has been several years in the making. Originally we envisioned it as a collection of letters and unpublished monographs from the Rothbard Papers at the Mises Institute.
Murray N. Rothbard: The Making of an Austrian Economist
Murray N. Rothbard: The Making of an Austrian Economist by Joseph Salerno and Patrick Newman is an intellectual biography tracing Rothbard’s transformation from a neoclassically trained Columbia graduate student into Ludwig von Mises’s most important heir.
Drawing on letters, memos, and unpublished draft chapters from the Rothbard Papers, it tells the story of how Rothbard came to write Man, Economy, and State—a project that began as a commissioned textbook version of Mises’s Human Action and grew into a full-scale treatise. Following him from 1945 to 1962, the authors show how Rothbard broke from the positivism and Marshallian price theory of his training, drew on Böhm-Bawerk to rebuild the theory of capital and production, and developed his own systematic analysis of interest, monopoly, and government intervention. Their thesis is that Rothbard’s contribution was epochal, placing him at the culmination of the Austrian mainline running from Menger and Böhm-Bawerk through Mises and Hayek.
Murray N . Rothbard: The Making of an Austrian Economist is written for everyone interested in Rothbard’s economic theory and Austrian economics in general.
Murray Rothbard started his career with a foundational training in neoclassical economics.
Murray Rothbard’s economic perspective changed significantly in 1949 when he met Ludwig von Mises and read his magnum opus, Human Action.
Murray Rothbard’s project drastically changed in mid-1953. Unable to rely on Mises’s sparse treatment of production theory, Rothbard adopted his old Marshallian approach, focusing on an individual firm that faced fixed prices and restricted investment decisions.
With advances in the Austrian theory of the business cycle, Rothbard finally completed the monumental task of deducing the entire corpus of economic theory using the praxeological method.
In 1962, despite professional and institutional obstacles, Man, Economy, and State was finally published. With it, Rothbard greatly advanced the Austrian tradition and firmly positioned himself as Mises’s heir.
