The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

14 The Essential Rothbard
MAN, ECONOMY, AND STATE:
ROTHBARD’S TREATISE ON
ECONOMIC THEORY
Rothbard soon attracted the attention of the William Volker
Fund, at that time the leading group that gave financial aid
to classical-liberal scholars. It commissioned Rothbard to
write a textbook, suitable for college students, which would explain
Human Action in simple language. He wrote a sample chapter on
money and credit that won Mises’s approval. As Rothbard’s work
proceeded, the project turned into something much larger. The
result, the two-volume Man, Economy, and State, was a major treatise,
published in 1962, and, one of the most important twentiethcentury
contributions to Austrian economics.
Mises recognized the book’s importance. Reviewing it in The
New Individualist Review, Mises called it “an epochal contribution
to the general science of human action, praxeology, and its practically
most important and up-to-now best elaborated part, economics.”
15 Mises, as any student of his work knows, was a formidable
critic; for him to say this about a book is genuinely remarkable.
Rothbard was entirely in accord with Mises’s endeavor to
deduce the whole of economics from the axiom of action, combined
with a few subsidiary postulates. In much more detail than
Mises had done, he carried out the deduction; and in the process,
he contributed major theoretical innovations to praxeology.
His view of praxeology differed in a subtle but substantial way
from that of Mises. Rothbard thought that we directly grasp necessities
in the empirical world. Not only do we see that human
beings act: we at the same time understand that this is a necessary
15Ludwig von Mises, The New Individualist Review (Autumn, 1962):
41.