I may be described as (among other things) road-kill along the way to the definitive biography of Murray Rothbard. Ten years ago (two years after his passing) I undertook to organize such a project, with the knowledge of Lew Rockwell and the cooperation of his widow, Joann. All I managed to do, however, is fulfill the prediction, made more than once in my hearing, that this effort would overwhelm me. My enthusiasm for Murray’s story blinded me to the fact, obvious to everyone but me and perhaps my mother, was that I was simply not up to this gargantuan undertaking.
It is therefore a joy for me to note today, which would have been Murray’s 81st birthday, the recent publication of
The Essential Rothbard. I have not received my copy yet, but it is apparently a literary miracle: his friend,
Dr. David Gordon, has distilled the essence of Rothbard’s intellectual life (which would exhaust the intellectual lives of a team of ordinary mortals) in a book a fraction the size one would reasonably expect it to require. No one is more qualified to reveal the main roads and by-ways of Rothbard’s life of mind than David, with whom I have enjoyed exchanging ideas on and off for over twenty years. (Seated next to him at Murray’s 60th birthday celebration in 1986, I had my first, but not last, encounter with Gordon’s unique sense of humor.) For evidence of my claim, one should peruse the dozen-year online archive of his
Mises Review .
The Essential Rothbard will complement
An Enemy of the State (2000), Justin Raimundo’s “extended biographical sketch,” as he called it. The definitive life of Rothbard awaits its
Jörg Guido Hülsmann, whose
The Last Knight of Liberalism, the thousand-page life of Murray’s mentor and friend, Ludwig von Mises, is due out this fall.
Mises.org’s copy for
The Essential Rothbard now follows:
Here is the book for the Age of Rothbard, precisely the primer that is needed at a time when his influence—as the most radical and compelling intellectual force in the second half of the 20th century—is higher than during any time during his lifetime.
And so this book is a landmark in Rothbardiana: the first, full, rigorous intellectual biography of Murray N. Rothbard, one that takes a candid look at his public and private papers to cover not only his economic thought but also his historical method, his political ideology, the Rothbardian cultural outlook and social theory, and guides the reader through the whole of his vast output. It even includes a complete (and massive) bibliography.
The beauty of this book consists in its original research (David Gordon had full access to the private correspondence of his subject) and also its brevity: the biographical portion is 125 pages, and so the pace is super fast and the prose compact and riveting.
It is more difficult than it may seem to produce a book of this scale. The author must be well-read in five different fields, and have absorbed the whole of Rothbard's output. And there is the balancing act of not only covering all these fields but integrating them with unified themes, just as Rothbard did.
Here is where Gordon is most dazzling. He provides the reader an overview of Rothbard's thought and times but not in a piecemeal fashion but with an eye to conveying the Rothbardian worldview. All the while, he reports on such tantalizing treats as the notes that Murray took in graduate school. One can just imagine him scribbling furiously during class.
Those who remember Rothbard's own monograph The Essential von Mises know what an impact that had. This does the same for Rothbard. And so the book will be useful for students, professors, reading groups, or just the curious multitudes who are asking: who is this Rothbard anyway, and what did he contribute?
Gordon begins with his schooling, to show his early influences, and continues through his early career. He discusses how Rothbard slowly built the edifice, a full science of liberty, and how he managed to stay so active in public life as well. He even covers material that is yet to be published, so that the reader knows what Rothbard said about a range of topics that has yet to become part of the published corpus.
There are many Rothbardians but few are prepared to do what this author has done.
180 pages with index
Contents
Introduction
The Early Years
Rothbard's Treatise on Economic Theory
More Advances in Economic Theory
Rothbard on Money
Austrian Economic History
A Rothbardian View of American History
The Unknown Rothbard: Unpublished Papers
Rothbard's System of Ethics
Politics in Theory and Practice
Rothbard on Current Economic Issues
Rothbard's Last Scholarly Triumph
Followers and Influence
Bibliography
Index
Order it
here.
