Murray Rothbard

Murray Newton Rothbard (1926–1995) was an American economist, historian, and political theorist who became the leading systematiser of the radical libertarian wing of the Austrian School of economics. His work fused Ludwig von Mises's economic theory with a strict natural-rights ethics to argue for a stateless property-rights order he called anarcho-capitalism.

Rothbard was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. He earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in economics from Columbia University, completing his dissertation on the Panic of 1819 in 1956. He attended Mises's seminar at New York University and became one of his closest students. For most of his life he supported himself through writing, foundation grants, and a long teaching post at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn before moving to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1986.

His major books include Man, Economy, and State, Power and Market, America's Great Depression, the four-volume Conceived in Liberty, and the ethical treatise The Ethics of Liberty. He helped found the Cato Institute in 1977 and the Ludwig von Mises Institute in 1982 and edited the Review of Austrian Economics.

Politically he moved across the spectrum, allying at different times with Old Right conservatives, the New Left, and paleoconservative circles, while remaining a sharp critic of central banking, war, and the welfare state. He died of a heart attack in New York City.

The given name Murray is a Scottish habitational name from the region of Moray in northeastern Scotland, of uncertain Pictish origin. It became a popular Jewish-American given name in the early twentieth century. He carried it through a long campaign against the state.