The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

12 The Essential Rothbard
In graduate school, Rothbard’s mentor was the eminent economic
historian Joseph Dorfman, the author of the multivolume
The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 8 a work of vast erudition.
Rothbard said of him:
Prof. Dorfman is absolutely without peer as a pure scholar in
the history of American economic thought and opinion. He
makes most historians seem like journalists. . . . Dorfman was
the first one to annihilate Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s Age of Jackson.
Schlesinger had presented Jackson as a proto-FDR, leading
the forces of the masses against monopoly capitalism;
actually, Dorfman showed that the Jacksonians were libertarian
types: favoring free trade, laissez-faire, states’ rights, and
hard money, and were pro-commerce. 9
Rothbard shared Dorfman’s passion for historical learning, and
his Ph.D. thesis on The Panic of 181910 remains to this day a standard
work. Rothbard received his doctorate in 1956; he could not
finish earlier owing to disagreements between Dorfman and Burns
about how the thesis should proceed.
As he deepened his understanding of laissez-faire economics, he
confronted a dilemma. If sound arguments showed that the market
could supply goods and services better than the State could, why
should one make an exception for defense and justice? Why here
do we face a unique situation in which provision by a coercive
monopoly outperforms the market? The arguments for market
provision of goods and services applied across the board. If so,
should not even protection and defense be offered on the market
rather than supplied by a coercive monopoly? Rothbard realized
that he would either have to reject laissez-faire or embrace individualist
anarchism. The decision, arrived at in the winter of 1949,
8Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 5 vols.
(New York: Viking Press, 1946).
9
Letter to Ivan Bierly, November 14, 1959; Rothbard Papers.
10The Panic of 1819 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).