Remembering America's most radical and definitive modern libertarian intellectual.

Today is the centennial of the birth of Murray Rothbard. While he was alive, Rothbard was the most significant direct influence both on a wide range of individual libertarian scholars and activists and on the major institutions that constituted the American libertarian movement in the second half of the 20th century. He was key to the functioning of the Volker Fund, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Libertarian Party, the Center for Libertarian Studies, the Cato Institute, and the Mises Institute.

Rothbard's intellectual goal was to forge a systematic approach to liberty, covering all the humane sciences—his particular specialties were economics, political philosophy, and history. He was a dedicated economics scholar and teacher, as well as a polemicist and movement builder. Most young libertarian writers and activists who arose from the 1950s through the '70s credit Rothbard as a key influence, both intellectual and personal. For a time in the 1960s, per movement lore, the American libertarian movement was both forged and contained in his New York City living room.

In the 1950s, Rothbard formed a student gang of libertarians, Circle Bastiat, and helped the libertarian philanthropic organization the Volker Fund vet books and intellectuals for their value to the libertarian cause. In the 1960s, he launched both a huge foundational economics text (Man, Economy, and State, 1962) and a highly personal zine (The Libertarian Forum) to cover libertarian movement thoughts and activities as they unfolded. (In that same decade, he tried to forge an alliance with the then-rising New Left through his short-lived journal Left and Right.) In the 1970s, he allied with the oil industrialist and philanthropist Koch family to help create an academic revival of the Austrian economics tradition he advocated, helping launch both an organization for scholarly meetings, papers, and journals (the Center for Libertarian Studies) and one focused more on of-the-moment policy analysis (the Cato Institute).

...read more at reason.com