Murray Rothbard - Life and Work

Life and Work

Rothbard was born to David and Rae Rothbard, who raised their Jewish family in the Bronx. His father, a chemist, "emigrated to the United States from a Polish shtetl in 1910, impoverished and knowing not a word of English," while his mother came from Russia. "I grew up in a Communist culture," he recalled. He attended Columbia University, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and economics in 1945 and a Master of Arts degree in 1946. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in economics in 1956 at Columbia under Joseph Dorfman.

During the early 1950s, Rothbard studied under the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises at his seminars at New York University and was greatly influenced by Mises' book Human Action. Rothbard attracted the attention of the William Volker Fund, the main group that supported classical liberal scholars in the 1950s and early 1960s. He began a project to write a textbook to explain Human Action in a fashion suitable for college students; a sample chapter he wrote on money and credit won Mises’s approval. As Rothbard continued his work, he transformed the project. The result, Man, Economy, and State published in 1962, was a central work of Austrian economics.

From 1963 to 1985, Rothbard taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, in Brooklyn, New York. From 1986 until his death he was a distinguished professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Rothbard founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1976 and the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977. He was associated with the 1982 creation of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and later was its academic vice president. In 1987, he started the scholarly Review of Austrian Economics, now called the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

In 1953, in New York City, he married JoAnn Schumacher (1928–1999), whom he called the "indispensable framework" for his life and work. He died in 1995 in Manhattan of a heart attack. The New York Times obituary called Rothbard "an economist and social philosopher who fiercely defended individual freedom against government intervention." JoAnn died four years later from the aftereffects of a stroke.