 Earlier this week would have been Murray Rothbard's 90th birthday and in celebration of the man we held a reception at the Students for Liberty conference in Washington D.C. entitled Why Rothbard Matters where Bob Murphy spoke on the impact that Rothbard has had on his own work and why the assembled students of themselves go out and find and read Murray Rothbard and to help them do just that the Mises Institute has just released a new Rothbard reader which was edited by our own Dr. Joe Salerno and by Professor Matt McCaffrey at the University of Manchester in England who's a former fellow with us here at the Institute. So here to talk not only about the new Rothbard reader but also about Rothbard the man is our guest Professor Matt McCaffrey. So if you like Rothbard stay tuned for a great interview. Ladies and gentlemen welcome back once again to Mises Weekends and a special welcome to our guest Matt McCaffrey live this evening from England Matt how are you. I'm fine thanks Jeff. Well so the Rothbard reader is now available or will be mailed the print version will be mailed shortly. Talk to us a little bit about editing the Rothbard reader when you edit a book like this and you go through the voluminous work of Murray Rothbard do you feel like you get inside his head a little bit and you get to know him a little better? Yeah you certainly do I mean when you start reading Rothbard for the first time it's overwhelming just the sheer volume of work that he produced and it's on so many different subjects and on so many different levels and for different audiences I at least find it extremely overwhelming and so when we went through the editing process of this book when Joe Salerno and I were putting this together a couple of years ago it really just drives home to you how wide his understanding was his learning was and just the sheer number of topics that he wrote on is yet it's extremely humbling. But of course even within economics itself he's wide in other words he's a monetary economist really almost an unparalleled monetary economist from the Austrian perspective anyway but then as range goes out into movie reviews and politics and sports and philosophy did you read a lot of material that you'd just never seen before? Oh sure sure and we went back and looked at his essentially his complete bibliography of his writings throughout his life we found all kinds of materials that we didn't realize that he had ever written you know materials as you say on every different subject you know that had unfortunately been lost and one of the things we tried to do in this book is actually bring a few of those surprise articles back and get them published and in the public eye again. Well so obviously his big opus is man economy and state and there are selections from that contained within the reader. When I go back and look at man economy and state which really I think represents a revival of sorts in and of itself or the beginning of the new Austrian school you know he began this book in 1952 when he's only in his early 30s he finishes it in his mid to late 30s. Isn't that pretty staggering to you to think that he was able to write this so young? Oh yeah I mean it's really incredible that he managed to absorb so much of the economic doctrine not just of the time but for the you know the previous two centuries that he managed to absorb so much of this and then put it explain it systematically in man economy and state. I mean that book I think will always remain his crowning achievement certainly in economics. Do you think that's true of a lot of academics that their best their biggest achievement comes at a pretty young age just because the just like our muscles age our mental faculties age as well? Well it's certainly true for some economists. Joseph Schumpeter said that it's the decade between the ages of 20 and 30 that all economists do their most brilliant work. I don't think this is true for Rothbard. I don't think it was true for Mises and many other great economists because they you know continued to be you know extraordinarily productive economists throughout their lives and continued to add to what they had done at a very young age and certainly Rothbard falls into that pattern as he was a you know a very productive economist I mean right up to the end of his life. Well what some of our listeners might not know is that what's become sort of an addendum to the book man economy state called power and market was originally designed by Murray to be part and parcel of the book. It contains some provocative material including a chapter entitled defense services on the free market. Talk about why and how the original publisher thought that that was a bit much and and caused Murray to have to publish that separately. Right well when Rothbard first wrote man economy and state he initially envisioned it as a sort of a textbook version of Mises' human action a more accessible version of human action and it was as he started writing it that he started to realize that there were some topics that Mises didn't really go into in detail and that he was going to have to address these topics himself and in some cases actually develop a new sort of systematic approach to thinking about them from an Austrian economic perspective and one of these topics concerns the role of government which is what Rothbard talks about in those those chapters that are now the book power and market that are added to the end of man economy and state but at the time Rothbard was breaking a lot of new ground with these arguments arguing that in fact there is no economic justification for government that in fact the market can provide all of these so-called public goods that government usually provides and I think the publisher simply wasn't ready for this I think they considered it to be a little too controversial it's also the case that coming in at the end of man economy and state the book was already extremely long you know a thousand pages and so for those reasons the publisher asked Rothbard to cut a lot of those sections or at least trim them down a great deal and so Rothbard sort of took those chapters out and kept them on the side and then published them later as the standalone book power and market but fortunately now because of the Miesz Institute's reissuing of the scholars edition of man economy and state those two parts have been brought together again of the way that Rothbard originally intended Well you mentioned that it's that this book is perhaps more accessible than human action I hear this a lot that man economy and state is less daunting and hence a better introduction for the reader than human action do you think that's really true I mean I obviously part one of human actions can can be difficult conceptually but I almost find man economy state a bit more technical you know than human actions more graphs I won't say it's mathy of course but it's it seems to me a little more traditional in its approach to economics than human action relative to some other Austrian work I think that's correct as I mentioned you know it was originally conceived as a kind of textbook version of human action and it's for that reason that it has this sort of technical element to it as you said it's not too dense it's not like reading say you know a mainstream economics textbook I think it is more intuitive and more engaging than that but you're right when you say that there is this element of we might even call it dryness in some of the in some of the book Rothbard is much more careful in man economy and state than Mises was in human action to avoid being to value laden Mises was always always insistent throughout human action on you know champ championing the virtues of a free society because Mises is a utilitarianism he was very adamant always to talk about about the benefits of of society and of the division of labor and the problems with socialism and that kind of comes comes through in a certain sort of passion in his work and Rothbard in man economy and state I think is taking a more reserved tone as a teacher as someone who's trying to explain these problems in a very sort of sober systematic way and and I think that's why sometimes people might actually say that they prefer to read human action than man economy and state. Matt it's interesting that you bring up Mises utilitarianism because to put it mildly Rothbard countered that perspective in his book the ethics of liberty which is still very much a libertarian standard that a lot of people read today. I wonder if you think if it was tough for him as an academic and someone who admired Mises as much as he did to sort of go against him and write something contrary to him his own mentor. Oh I think it certainly was and in fact I believe Rothbard relates the story of when he first criticized Mises in public like criticized Mises to his face in his seminar when he presented a paper that was somewhat critical of Mises utilitarianism and I think he said that at the time his hands were shaking and he wasn't sure if he was actually going to make it through the presentation. So I think it certainly it was difficult for him and I mean I think it's challenging always for students even exceptional students to take issue with what their mentors have taught them. Because Murray wrote on so many topics he wrote on philosophy and ethics and libertarianism and political strategy sports and movies everything that we mentioned before do you think that this hurt him in terms of his reputations pure economist within the profession? Yes I think it did you know I think the broader the approach you take in academic writing and the less sense of specialization there is in your work the less appealing it's going to be to the profession at large and this is a trend that still happens today it's always harder to do interdisciplinary work than it is to specialize in very narrow topics and that's the way that the economics profession and the social sciences more generally have been moving in the past few decades and so I do think that to some extent Rothbard was a victim of that trend. But here's what's so interesting is today Rothbard is much better known for having written non-academic work for lay audiences than let's say Arthur Burns the former Fed chairman who tried to thwart his PhD thesis at Columbia right who can name the chair of the Harvard Department of Economics in 1975 today right so isn't that ironic that Rothbard by doing an end run of sorts around traditional academia is actually much better read and much more popular today? It is there is a certain irony to it but I think it's a testament to the fact that Rothbard was a talented and engaging writer and essentially on every topic that he wrote on you could at least be guaranteed that he would be write something witty and thought provoking and provide some excellent food for thought. The fact that so many of his colleagues who were at the time but much better known is a testament to the fact that they simply weren't able to do this specialization in this very sort of narrow academic sense it can certainly hurt you over time. I think Rothbard used to say that there was a problem with economists very famous economists specializing in doing the kind of work that they were worse at and I don't think Rothbard ever really himself specialized in anything so that was a I think a trap that he managed to avoid because he remained you know a broad interdisciplinary scholar his entire life. Well having edited this new reader if somebody was new to Rothbard they'd heard his name but they weren't familiar with any of his work they were sort of your typical libertarian with a healthy interest in economics what would you tell them where would you tell them to start? Well this book is designed to appeal first and foremost to people who are just in this in exactly this sort of situation they want to get more into Rothbard you know they're sort of curious but he wrote so much you just don't know where to start and so in general that's one of the reasons why we decided to edit this book with that in mind as an economist myself I of course gravitate most toward Rothbard's economic writings and in this book we've tried to sort of set out even though it's relatively short we've tried to use a small number of writings to let Rothbard outline his approach to economics to economic theory but also of course to economic policy and economic history and history of economic thought all the different aspects of the science they're all there and for me those have always been the most compelling aspects of his work at the same time though many other people would I think prefer to jump into his political philosophy into his more practical writings on things like the libertarian movement and libertarian strategy and so of course we had to include some of those writings as well. Well I have to say personally I don't believe it is one of the movies reviewed here but because of Murray Rothbard I went out and saw the movie Metropolitan a couple of years ago and it's really interesting to watch that movie knowing that Murray loved it it changes your perception of watching a movie after you read a Rothbard review that's for sure. Matt we only have time for one more question so let me ask you a highly loaded question if I may I would argue that today Mises legacy is secure in other words even his worst critic would now acknowledge that he was a giant of the 20th century it feels like Rothbard's legacy is not yet secured would you agree with that statement and if so why? I would agree with that statement the reason is that I think Rothbard's most important contributions to knowledge in the most general sense are his contributions to economic theory as encapsulated in man economy and state and a lot of his other sort of formal economic writings however even though these works are very commonly discussed I think that they are not read closely as often as people say and I especially think that his original contributions in these books continue to go under appreciated you know there are certain topics like his sort of anarchist political economy these tend to be very popular very widely read and everybody knows the basic arguments I think however what people tend to ignore are those core chapters of a book like man economy and state the one that deal with the more mundane topics the core price theory of the Austrian school the discussions of production and of monopoly and of entrepreneurship topics that you simply cannot do without in economics and which Rothbard in a sense completely revolutionized in that book but sadly those are the chapters that tend to be least read today and least discussed and for that reason I think people sometimes dismiss Rothbard and consider him not so much as a you know a path breaking economic theorist which I think he was but as rather only a sort of a radical political economist and libertarian activist of sorts professor Matt McCaffrey thank you so much for your time Matt is the editor of the new Rothbard reader which we have available on our website at mises.org if you want to purchase a physical copy it'll ship soon if you want to get an inexpensive e-book copy we will have that as well and we will have a free html and pdf in short order if you don't care to pay at all but you like to read it but if you're looking for an introduction to Rothbard or if you just like to add to your Rothbard collection I think it's going to be great so again Matt thank you for your time and ladies and gentlemen have a great weekend