In 1946 the fledgling Foundation for Economic Education published a pamphlet titled “Roofs or Ceilings: The Current Housing Problem.” It was a brief against rent control written by two young unknown economists: Milton Friedman and George Stigler. Of course they would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 and 1982, respectively.

That’s a remarkable story. But just as remarkable is that when the pamphlet was issued, Stigler, then teaching at Columbia University (his University of Chicago days were still ahead), told a young student about it, perhaps changing American intellectual history.

The student was Murray Rothbard.

“Rothbard,” writes Brian Doherty in Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, “was delighted to learn of an organization promoting his political and economic values…. By 1948, Leonard Read had already noted young Rothbard’s deep knowledge of market economics and libertarian principles (and their history) and began to lean on him to vet articles for FEE.”

On visits to FEE Rothbard got to know Frank Chodorov,  the prolific libertarian author who edited The Freeman the first year after Read acquired it. He became a mentor to Rothbard. “Chodorov helped introduce Rothbard to the works of [Albert Jay] Nock, Herbert Spencer, Garet Garrett, and Isabel Paterson, among others,” Doherty reports. It wasn’t long before he discovered Ludwig von Mises, who spent a good deal of time at FEE as an adviser to Read, and Mises’s magnum opus, Human Action.

Thus Rothbard, who went on to become one of the great natural-law libertarian figures in history and an indefatigable advocate/elaborator of Misesian (Austrian) economics in method and substance, can be said to have received vital intellectual nourishment at FEE’s Irvington-on-Hudson estate.

Rothbard, who died 15 years ago this month, was at once a beloved and controversial figure. There is no gainsaying that he was one of the very few individuals who shaped the modern freedom movement at its start. Even advocates of the freedom philosophy who never read a word he wrote — and he wrote quite a lot — have been influenced by him in countless ways. With a passion nonpareil, Rothbard set out to create a self-conscious libertarian movement, and he accomplished that through his activism and charisma, as well as through his writings — from the scholarly to the popular — in economics, history, political philosophy, and social criticism. For one man to have turned out Man, Economy, and State/Power and Market, America’s Great Depression, The Ethics of Liberty, Conceived in Liberty (four volumes on American history through the Revolutionary War), For a New Liberty — and so much more — is something astounding. We probably won’t see his likes again. (I refer readers to David Gordon’s Freeman article “Murray Rothbard’s Philosophy of Freedom.”)

I feel lucky to have known Murray. More than once I was at the famous book-lined Rothbard apartment in New York (the one the entire libertarian movement once could have fit in) and was privileged to have him as a guest in my home. I always found him a delight to be around, whether he was talking about some obscure historical figure, traditional jazz (before the electric guitar intruded),  classic movies, or the future of liberty. He was unfailingly optimistic and ever ready for a laugh — his high-pitched laugh was unmistakable and infectious. Rothbard was a great listener, too. He was what he called H. L. Mencken – whom he treasured: “the joyous libertarian.”

I, like Steven Horwitz and so many other colleagues in the freedom movement, were deeply influenced by Rothbard on many levels – not least by his legendary gusto in the intellectual struggle for liberty. I first met him and saw him speak in 1969 and 1970 when he lectured at weekend conferences in New York and Philadelphia put on by the old Society for Individual Liberty. Those were heady days for an eager libertarian college student, and I will never forget them. No one could be more informative, inspiring, and entertaining at the same time than Rothbard. After college I became a newspaper reporter, but I knew that I would eventually move on to full-time libertarian writing. Murray was as responsible as anyone for that. I will always appreciate his encouragement. (I was honored to contribute a chapter, about Rothbard’s earliest writings, to a festschrift [pdf] in his honor.)

Rothbard the Controversial

To say that Rothbard was controversial even within the freedom movement is an obvious understatement. The controversies could be both intellectual and strategic, economic and political, and he brought his characteristic enthusiasm to these disputes every bit as much as he did to his battles with statists. His application of libertarian and market principles to even the “traditional functions” of limited government — that is, his belief that the free market can and should provide all legitimate services competitively — is still hotly debated today. While his originality in the matter he called “anarcho-capitalism” (or individualist anarchism) is clear for all to see, he himself might say he was simply picking up the baton carried by the pioneering nineteenth-century free-market economist Gustave de Molinari, whose seminal essay, “The Production of Security,” Rothbard first brought to American libertarians.

Whatever one thinks of Rothbard’s answer to the question raised therein, there can be no doubting the value of the question itself; for it forces one to examine the contours of liberty, the nature of the State, and therefore the very possibility of limiting its powers.

Those who cherish liberty cannot calculate their debt to Murray Rothbard.