Rothbard, Murray (1926–1995)

Murray Rothbard, a libertarian economist, political philosopher, historian, and activist, strove throughout his life to craft a systematic approach to liberty covering all the disciplines of the humane sciences. He was of central importance to the American libertarian movement because of both his writing and scholarship and his personal outreach to young libertarians. Many young libertarian writers and activists from the [Page 442]1960s and 1970s credit Rothbard as a key influence, both intellectually and personally. He combined in one body of writing most of the intellectual concerns and approaches that defined the modern American libertarian movement: anarchism based in an Aristotelian natural law ethic, an Austrian/Misesian approach to economics, the promotion and extension of the 19th-century American anarchist tradition as exemplified in the writings of ...