Murray N. Rothbard's great treatise Man, Economy, and State and its complementary text Power and Market, combined into a single edition as they were written to be, provides a sweeping presentation of Austrian economic theory, a reconstruction of many aspects of that theory, a rigorous criticism of alternative schools, and an inspiring look at a science of liberty that concerns nearly everything and should concern everyone.

The Mises Institute's new edition of Man Economy, and State, united for the first time with its formerly sundered companion volume Power and Market, is a landmark in the history of the Institute. It takes this book out of the category of underground classic and raises it up to its proper status as one of the great economic treatises of all time, a book that is essential for anyone seeking a robust economic education. The revealing new introduction by Joseph Stromberg uses material from the Rothbard Archives, including his personal notes during the research and writing phases, to reconstruct the intellectual setting in which the book was written, and its initial and widening impact.

For years, the Mises Institute has kept it in print and sold thousands of copies in a nice paperback version. Now in our twentieth year, we decided to take a big step and put out an edition worthy of this great treatise. It is the Scholar's Edition of Man, Economy, and State—-an edition that will immediately become definitive and used throughout the world. The footnotes (which are so brilliant and informative!) are at the bottom of every page. The index is huge and comprehensive. The binding is impeccable and its beauty unmatched.

Students have used this book for decades as the intellectual foil for what they have been required to learning from conventional economics classes. In many ways, it has built the Austrian school in the generation that followed Mises. It was Rothbard who polished the Austrian contribution to theory and wove it together with a full-scale philosophy of political ethics that inspired the generation of the Austrian revival, and continues to fuel its growth and development today.

Economics in Rothbard's wonderful book emerges as the beautiful logic of that underlies human action in a world of scarcity, the lens on how exchange makes it possible for people to cooperate toward their mutual betterment. We see how money facilitates this, and allows for calculation over time that permits capital to expand and investment to take place. We see how entrepreneurship, based on real judgments and risk taking, is the driving force of the market.

What's striking is how this remarkable book has lived in the shadows for so long. It began as a guide to Human Action, and it swelled into a treatise in its own right. Rothbard worked many years on the book, even as he was completing his PhD at Columbia University. He realized better than anyone else that Mises's economic theories were so important that they needed restatement and interpretation. But he also knew that Misesian theory needed elaboration, expansion, and application in a variety of areas. The result was much more: a rigorous but accessible defense of the whole theory of the market economy, from its very foundations.

But the publisher decided to cut the last part of the book, a part that appeared years later as Power and Market. This is the section that applies the theory presented in the first 1,000 pages to matters of government intervention. Issue by issue, the book refutes the case for taxation, the welfare state, regulation, economic planning, and all forms of socialism, large and small. It remains an incredibly fruitful assembly of vigorous argumentation and evidence.

A major advantage of Man, Economy, and State, in addition to its systematic presentation, is that it is written in the clearest English you will find anywhere in the economics literature. The jargon is kept to a minimum. The prose is crystalline and vigorous. The examples are compelling. No one has explained the formation of prices, the damage of inflation, the process of production, the workings of interest rates, and a hundred of topics, with such energy and clarity.

Over years, students have told us that this book is what made it possible for them to get through graduate school. Why? Because Rothbard takes on the mainstream in its own terms and provides a radical, logical, comprehensive answer. If you have read the book, you know the feeling that comes with reaching the last page: one walks away with the sense that one now fully understands economic theory and all its ramifications.

It is a shame that the authentic edition of the classic that Rothbard wrote fully 40 years ago is only now coming into print. And yet the good news is that, at last, this remarkable work in the history of ideas, the book that makes such a technically competent, systematic, and sweeping case for the economics of liberty, is at last available.

Download Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market (The Scholar's Edition)

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Man, Economy, and State:
Copyright  1962 by William Volker Fund and D. Van Nostrand
Copyright  1970 by Murray N. Rothbard
Copyright  1993 by Murray N. Rothbard, revised edition
Copyright  2001 by Ludwig von Mises Institute
Copyright  2004 by Ludwig von Mises Institute, second edition, Scholar’s Edition
Power and Market:
Copyright  1970 by Institute for Humane Studies
Copyright  1977 by Institute for Humane Studies, second edition
Copyright  2004 by Ludwig von Mises Institute, third edition, Scholar’s Edition

ISBN: 0-945466-30-7

Introduction to Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market
by Joseph R. Stromberg

Why a scholar’s edition of Man, Economy, and State?

Those who have some inkling of the significance and content of the late Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State may ask just why the Ludwig von Mises Institute has prepared a new scholar’s edition of a work that has been nearly always in print since its publication in 1962. There are many good reasons behind the decision. One is that Rothbard’s book was a landmark contribution to the revival of Austrian economic thought after World War II.

World War II and the subsequent cold war created a climate in which state prestige was at a high watermark. In these circumstances, most economists saw their role as one of advising governments on how best to organize, regulate, and plan “national” economies, whether to win wars or to provide social justice. The minority of economists who resisted the spirit of the age undermined themselves with compromising arguments resting on theoretical premises that they shared with their opponents. From both a free-market and an Austrian standpoint, such defenses of the free society and market economy were very unsatisfactory.

Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action (1949) had made a dent in the monolithic edifice of statism but were nonetheless chiefly appreciated in the ranks of what Rothbard called the Old Right movement. Hayek’s book had drawn forth a stream of violent criticism from New Dealers and their academic allies, while Mises’s treatise had met with a combination of summary rejection, puzzlement, or silence from the academic world. Rothbard set out to address the intelligent reading public’s ignorance of or indifference to Austrian economics with a textbook, which would, as he wrote to Alfred D. Chandler, “be one of the few, if not the only, non-collectivist book suitable for the college level” and “would be the only one to apply Misesian methodological principles, which demonstrate that historical facts cannot ‘prove’ any theory.” ...

Vist Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market Misese.org Website

This online edition is Copyright © 2004 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, second edition, Scholar's Edition. Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama 36832. The entire text is available in both PDF and text version. In addition other study tools will be added as they become available.

BOOKS BY MURRAY N. ROTHBARD:

A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2002.

America’s Great Depression. Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1963. Reprinted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000. This, the 5th edition, has an introduction by Paul Johnson.

An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Vol. 1: Economic Thought before Adam Smith. Vol. 2: Classical Economics. Aldershot, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1995.

The Case Against the Fed. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994.

The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1991. This essay originally appeared in the volume In Search of a Monetary Constitution, edited by Leland B. Yeager. Harvard University Press, 1962.

Conceived in Liberty. 4 vols. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1975. Reprinted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999.

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, 2nd ed. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000. Originally appeared in Modern Age (Fall 1973).

The Ethics of Liberty. Atlantic Highlands: N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982. Reprinted by New York University Press, 1998.

For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1973. Revised edition with a preface and new first chapter, retitled as The Libertarian Heritage, by Collier Books, 1978.

The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School. Vol. 2: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1997.

The Logic of Action Two: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1997.

Making Economic Sense. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1995.

Man, Economy, and State. Los Angeles: Nash, 1962. Combined in this present edition with Power and Market to form the Scholar’s Edition of Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2004.

The Mystery of Banking. New York: Richardson and Snyder, 1983.

The Panic of 1812: Reactions and Policies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962.

Power and Market. Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1970. Combined in this present edition with Man, Economy, and State to form the Scholar’s Edition of Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2004.

What Has Government Done to Our Money? Colorado Springs, Colo.: Pine Tree Press, 1963. Reprinted 4th edition by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1990.

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