February 1995
Murray Rothbard
1926-1995
Murray Newton Rothbard, eminent economist, historian, philosopher, and former Libertarian Party official, died in New York City of cardiac arrest on Jan. 7, 1995.
The S. J. Hall distinguished professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and vice president for academic affairs at the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University, Rothbard was author of 25 books and thousands of articles, both popular and academic. He also edited the Review of Austrian Economics and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Born in New York in 1926, he received his Ph.D in economics from Columbia University in 1956, and from 1963 to 1985 taught at New York Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn.
"The world lost a great champion for liberty with the passing of Professor Murray Rothbard," said Steve Dasbach, Libertarian Party national chair. "His many works, particularly his classic book 'For a New Liberty,' have had a profound influence on the development of the modern libertarian movement."
Rothbard joined the Libertarian Party around 1974 and was active until 1989. He served several terms on the Libertarian National Committee and helped write sections of the Party's platform.
"Less than two weeks before his death, he wrote an outstanding essay for The Washington Post," said Dasbach, "taking exception to E. J. Dionne's recent characterization of Republican elites as being part of the libertarian revolution. He went on to clearly demonstrate that, while the forces that brought the Republicans to power have a strong libertarian undercurrent, the Republican leadership is clearly not libertarian." [Excerpts from Rothbard's essay appear on page 2.]
Dasbach also noted that "while Dr. Rothbard has passed from this world, his influence has not. As the libertarian revolution builds in the coming decade, his works are likely to grow in influence as well. Dr. Rothbard lived long enough to see libertarian ideas begin to take hold in society. The Libertarian Party remains committed to achieving his dream of a society that truly respects individual liberty."
Rothbard received the Ingersoll Foundation's Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters in 1994. The Foundation said Rothbard "almost defines the term intellectual maverick. A brilliant economic historian and philosopher, he has almost single-handedly revived the idealism of the old American Republic. He's an individualist to the core, but he has never for a moment lost sight of the social and moral dimensions of the marketplace." "Man, Economy, and Liberty" (1986) edited by Walter Block and Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., evaluated and celebrated his voluminous contributions to the theory and history of liberty.
As an economist, he was the leading contemporary exponent of the Austrian School, which emphasizes the role of human action in economic phenomena, and a student of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), the Austrian emigre who taught the Austrian School and free-market policies in post-war America. The first two volumes of Rothbard's history of economic thought, published by Edward Elgar, appeared in January 1995, and a two-volume compilation of his economic articles, totaling more than 1,000 pages, will appear this spring in Elgar's "Pioneers in Economics" series (Mark Blaug, ed.)
Rothbard was the author of Man, Economy, and State (1962), a treatise elucidating the full range of economics using logical methods he thought appropriate to the social sciences. Power and Market (1970), a policy-oriented elaboration, presented a taxonomy of political interventionism and a critique of all forms of regulation and taxation. Rothbard's America's Great Depression (1963), an empirical application of monetary theory to the business cycle, was also the first scholarly work to argue a non-market cause of the stock market crash and subsequent depression, as well as to reinterpret the presidency of Herbert Hoover as a proto-New Deal. Rothbard's thesis was adopted by Paul Johnson for the depression chapter in Modern Times.
The Panic of 1819 (1962), his Ph.D dissertation written under Joseph Dorfman and Arthur Burns, was the first full-scale economic and monetary study of this period. The Mystery of Banking (1983) argued for 100-percent reserve banking and a restoration of the gold standard, and his The Case Against the Fed (1995) favors the abolition of central banking.
Rothbard's methodological studies, which center on separating economics from positivism, and advancing praxeology, or the science of human action, as the foundation of social science, include "The Mantle of Science" in Scientism and Values (Schoeck, ed., 1960), "In Defense of Extreme Apriorism" in the Southern Economic Journal (1957), "Value Implications of Economic Theory" in The American Economist (1973), "Praxeology as the Method of Economics," in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences (1973), and the 1983 introduction to a reprint of Ludwig von Mises's "Theory and History."
In addition, Rothbard published notes, articles, and reviews in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Literature, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of History of Ideas, and many others. His economic studies concentrated on capital and interest, money and banking, utility and welfare science, economic history, comparative economic systems, the theory of law and externalities, and the history of economic thought.
As a historian, Rothbard reinterpreted events in American history in light of libertarian ideals and the struggle between the state and the individual. He was the author of "Conceived in Liberty" (1974-1979), a four-volume history of colonial America bringing to light episodes of resistance to government, tax revolts, and private militias, and celebrating the anti-federalist opponents of consolidated government. His essays "War Collectivism and World War I" and "Herbert Hoover and the Myth of Laissez Faire" appeared in "A New History of Leviathan" (Radosh, ed., 1972), and his "The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique" appeared in "The Great Society Reader" (Gettlemen and Mermelstein, eds. 1967).
"What Has Government Done to Our Money?" (1964), which appeared in five editions and in several foreign languages, traced the history of inflation and the American experience of monetary depreciation from the founding to the modern era. "The New Deal and the International Monetary System" appeared in "Watershed of Empire: Essays on New Deal Foreign Policy" (Liggio and Martin, eds. 1976) and "The "Foreign Policy of the Old Right" appeared in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.
As a political philosopher, Rothbard espoused natural law and natural rights in the Thomist tradition, private property in the Lockean tradition, and decentralized, libertarian legal institutions. His "Ethics of Liberty" (1982) was his systematic case for libertarian political institutions, and "For a New Liberty" (1973) applied this philosophy to contemporary problems in policy. He wrote the lengthy introduction to and exposition of "The Politics of Obedience" by 16th-century libertarian theorist Etienne de la Boetie. "Punishment and Proportionality" (1977) appeared in "Assessing the Criminal" (Barnett and Hagel, eds.) and "Education, Free and Compulsory" (1972) traced the history of public schools from the Protestant Reformation, and proposed complete privatization. "Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor" (1971) in Modern Age rejected all forms of egalitarian ideology as inconsistent with the rule of law. Often called the founder of modern "anarcho-capitalism," Rothbard was advisory editor to "The Right-Wing Individualist Tradition in America" (1972), a 38-volume reprint series from Arno Press.
As a journalist, he was editor of Left and Right (1965-1968), the Libertarian Forum (1969-1985), and the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (1990-1995), as well as a contributor to Chronicles, National Review, Reason, The Free Market, and Human Events, among many others. He wrote on economics and politics for the New York Times, the Journal of Commerce, The Washington Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Many other articles, popular and scholarly, are scheduled for publication in 1995 and 1996.
On military and foreign policy, Rothbard regarded himself as a member of the pre-1950s Old Right in the tradition of Robert Taft, and as such was a fierce opponent of the national security state. He actively opposed the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, and led the non- interventionist split from what he regarded as the pro-war conservatism of many of his contemporaries.
He was co-founder of the John Randolph Club, the Center for Libertarian Studies, and the Cato Institute. He is survived by his wife of 41 years, JoAnn, of New York City.
Contributions in his memory may be made to the Murray N. Rothbard Scholarship Fund, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, AL 36849-5301.
