Murray Rothbard

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Murray Newton Rothbard

Template:LibertarianismMurray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 - January 7, 1995) was an American economist and political theorist belonging to the Austrian School of Economics who helped define modern libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism.

In the course of his life, Rothbard was associated with a number of political thinkers and movements. During the early 1950s, he studied with the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and began working for the William Volker Fund. During the late 1950s, Rothbard was briefly an intimate of Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden, whom he would later criticize strongly, and who criticized anarcho-capitalism as pro-statist. In the late 1960s, Rothbard advocated an alliance with the New Left anti-war movement, on the grounds that the conservative movement had been completely subsumed by the statist establishment. It was during this phase that he associated with Karl Hess and founded Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought with Leonard Liggio and George Resch. From 1969 to 1984 he edited the Libertarian Forum.

During the 1970s and '80s, Rothbard was active in the Libertarian Party. He was frequently involved in the party's internal politics: from 1978 to 1983, he was associated with the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, allying himself with Justin Raimondo, and Bill Evers and opposing the "low tax liberalism" espoused by 1980 presidential candidate Ed Clark and Cato Institute President Edward H Crane III. He split with the Radical Caucus at the 1983 national convention, and aligned himself with what he called the "rightwing populist" wing of the party, notably Ron Paul, who ran for President on the LP ticket 1988. In 1989, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party and began building bridges to the post-Cold War right. He was the founding president of the conservative-libertarian John Randolph Club and supported the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992. However, prior to his death in Manhattan of a heart attack, Rothbard had become disillusioned with the Buchanan movement.

In addition to his work on economics and political theory, Rothbard also wrote on economic history. He is one of the few economic authors who have studied and presented the pre-Smithian economic schools, such as the scholastics and the physiocrats. These are discussed in his unfinished, multi-volume work, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought.

Rothbard opposed what he considered the overspecialization of the academy and sought to fuse the disciplines of economics, history, ethics, and political science to create a "science of liberty," as reflected in his many books and articles. His approach was influenced by the arguments of Ludwig von Mises in such books as Human Action and Theory and History that the foundations of the social sciences are in a logic of human action that can be known prior to empirical investigation. Rothbard sought to use such insights to guide historical research, especiallly in his work on economic history, but also in his four-volume history of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty.

Rothbard attended the Birth-Wathen Lenox School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He then enrolled in Columbia University, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree (5 June 1945), a Master of Arts degree (4 June 1946), and a Doctor of Philosophy degree (11 October 1956).

He was the academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies, was a distinguished professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and edited the Rothbard-Rockwell Report with Lew Rockwell.

External links

• "Murray N. Rothbard: A Legacy of Liberty" by Lew Rockwell, also includes links to audio recordings of Rothbard and the complete text of several books.
• Murray N. Rothbard Library and Resources
• BlackCrayon.com: People: Murray Rothbard
• Bibliography of Murray Rothbard
• Archives of the Libertarian Forum
• An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard, by Justin Raimondo, Prometheus Books, 2000

Criticism

• "Why anarcho-capitalism is a non-starter", a criticism of Rothbard by Geoffrey Sampson