Part III: A Böhm-Bawerkian Treatise, 1953–1955

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. But he soon recognized the pitfalls of Marshallian partial equilibrium and discarded it for Austrian general equilibrium, emphasizing the Böhm-Bawerkian capitalist-entrepreneur’s ability to invest in multiple firms across the structure of production and influence market prices. In doing so, Rothbard finished the Böhm-Baverkian system by integrating the pure time preference theory of interest of Frank A. Fetter and Ludwig von Mises into the production structure analysis of Knut Wicksell and F. A. Hayek. This interrelatedness approach led Rothbard to differentiate between factor incomes, apply Mises’s theory of the impossibility of socialist economic calculation to a vertically integrated firm, and expose the flaws of neoclassical monopoly and competition theory. With these theoretical breakthroughs, by 1955 Rothbard moved beyond his initial goal of “bringing to the surface and clarifying” his mentor’s “edifice” to deducing the architectonic edifice of praxeological economic theory along the lines of Mises’s “great book” suggestion.