Repurposing Mises: Murray Rothbard and the Birth of Anarchocapitalism

Abstract:This article examines how Murray Rothbard, though he claimed to follow Ludwig von Mises very closely, ended up making a number of radical leaps that Mises never did. It argues that Rothbard constructed anarchocapitalism by repurposing Mises's economic theory. First, whereas Mises responded to interwar socialism, Rothbard redeployed his mentor's economics in response to the militarism of the right-wing. Second, whereas Mises defended the market as a consumers' democracy against ideas about economic democracy, Rothbard developed an anti-democratic view of the market in response to the egalitarianism of the counterculture. These differences in context account for the distinctiveness of anarchocapitalism.