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

New Edition, with new introduction!

Murray N. Rothbard's great treatise Man, Economy, and State and its complementary text Power and Market,
are here combined into a single edition as they were written to be. It
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 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.

This new edition will take your breath away with its beauty and
quality. It's remarkable that a book this thick could lay so flat and
be so durable with super-solid binding. It somehow turns out not to be
unweildy. Get it with the Study Guide and you will have what you need.

The captivating new introduction by Professor Joseph Salerno that
frames up the Rothbardian contribution in a completely new way, and
reassesses the place of this book in the history of economic thought.
In Salerno's view, Rothbard was not attempting to write a distinctively
"Austrian" book but rather a comprehensive treatise on economics that
eschewed the Keynesian and positivist corruptions. This is what
accounts for its extraordinarily logical structure and depth. That it
would later be called Austrian is only due to the long-lasting nature
of the corruptions of economics that Rothbard tried to correct.

For years, the Mises Institute has kept it in print and sold
thousands of copies in a nice paperback version. Then 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 immediately became 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. From Rothbard, we learn that economics is the science that
deals with the rise and fall of civilization, the advancement and
retrenchment of human development, the feeding and healing of the
multitudes, and the question of whether human affairs are dominated by
cooperation or violence. 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. REVIEWS
As the result of many years of sagacious and discerning
meditation, [Rothbard] joins the ranks of the eminent economists by
publishing a voluminous work, a systematic treatise on economics.... An
epochal contribution to the general science of human action,
praxeology, and its practically most important and up-to-now best
elaborated part, economics. Henceforth all essential studies in in
these branches of knowledge will have to take full account of the
theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard. --Ludwig von Mises
It is in fact the most important general treatise on economic principles since Ludwig von Mises's Human Action in 1949…. --Henry Hazlitt
Man, Economy, and State is Murray Rothbard's main work
in economic theory. It appeared in 1962, when Murray was only 36 years
old. In it Murray develops the entire body of economic theory, in a
step by step fashion, beginning with incontestable axioms and
proceeding to the most intricate problems of business cycle theory and
fundamental breakthroughs in monopoly theory. And along the way he
presents a blistering refutation of all variants of mathematical
economics. The book has in the meantime become a modern classic and
ranks with Mises's Human Action as one of the two towering achievements of the Austrian School of economics. In Power and Market,
Murray analyzed the economic consequences of any conceivable form of
government interference in markets. The Scholars Edition brings both
books together to form a magnificent whole. --Hans-Hermann Hoppe

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In 1972, this book was selling in hardback for $130-$150 in current
dollars. So the scholar's edition, which includes Power and Market, a
great index, plus improve layout, is about a fraction of the cost of
the original, for a far better product.