Murray N. Rothbard

Murray N. Rothbard was born on 2 March 1926 in New York. He studied mathematics and economics at Columbia University, where, as his biographer David Gordon notes, he was taught no Austrian economics at all. Through the Foundation for Economic Education he met Ludwig von Mises and became an active member of his seminar at New York University. In 1956 he received his doctorate, under the economic historian Joseph Dorfman, with a dissertation on The Panic of 1819.

With the support of the William Volker Fund he set out to write a university textbook presenting Human Action; the project grew into a treatise in its own right. He taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, and from 1986 until his death he held the post of S.J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In 1977 he founded the Journal of Libertarian Studies and in 1987 the Review of Austrian Economics. From the founding of the Mises Institute in 1982 he was its academic vice president.

In Man, Economy, and State (1962) he developed the whole of economic theory systematically from the action axiom; the part on state intervention, which had been published in truncated form in the first edition, later appeared in full as Power and Market. In America’s Great Depression (1963) he interpreted the crisis of 1929 as a consequence of state intervention, not of unhampered capitalism. For a wide readership he wrote What Has Government Done to Our Money? and the textbook The Mystery of Banking (1983), defending the classical gold standard and 100-percent-reserve banking. In For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973) and The Ethics of Liberty (1982) he grounded the political philosophy of libertarianism in self-ownership. In the four volumes of Conceived in Liberty (1975–1979) he brought out the libertarian roots of the American Revolution.

He died of a heart attack in Manhattan on 7 January 1995. His main studies in economic theory were collected after his death in the two volumes of The Logic of Action (1997). The journals he founded are still published by the Mises Institute — the second under the title Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics — which states that it works in the tradition of Mises and Rothbard.

Sources: Mises Institute — Murray N. Rothbard (David Gordon) · The New York Times — obituary (1995) · Wikipedia — Murray Rothbard

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