That said, I would have to agree with Gordon’s implicit judgment that Murray towered above most figures of the postwar American Right. Part of the reason is that he wrote so much about so many topics with genuine insight, and even if one hesitates about embracing the entire package, pieces undeniably shine with brilliance. That is because Murray knew so much, from econometrics and advanced mathematics to American history and formal philosophy. By virtue of his voluminous publication and his cognitive excellence, it was inevitable that he should have produced works, and fragments of works, that have permanent value. He was also a maverick, happily incorporating the historical research of talented leftists like William Appleman Williams into his critique of the imperialist phase of the American managerial state. And of course Murray was profoundly suspicious of corporate capitalists and their participation in the construction of an American welfare state. Although a stern defender of the market economy, Murray had no qualms about favorably citing Marxists on the alliance between big business and big government.

Let me provide three examples of where my thinking was transformed permanently by Murray’s work. Although his treatment of the Great Depression was only part of Murray’s larger investigation of earlier American economic crises—e.g., those of 1819 and 1837—and his revisionist study of American business cycles, it stands out in my mind as the most definitive refutation of the disinformation about American capitalism and the supposed wonders of the welfare state provided by our establishment historians. Murray shows that everything this group has said about the causes of the Depression, the inactivity of the Hoover administration, and the reasons for economic recovery afterwards is a lie intended to justify tighter government administration of the economy. The energumen in this case was in fact Hoover, who made the economic adjustment that was taking place after 1929 worse by doling out ill-considered loans and endorsing the inflationary spiral that the Federal Reserve had initiated in the early 1920s. Most importantly, Rothbard documents his arguments, which are never overstated, with voluminous statistical charts showing the expansion of government spending during the Hoover administration. He also stresses that the New Deal did nothing to change these harmful trends, with its farm subsidies and price-distorting handouts.

Another lesson that I learned from Murray’s work, and one that influenced the writing of my book After Liberalism, was how transformative the Progressive era was for American politics and society. (The economic historian Robert Higgs, who revered Murray, stresses the same point in his penetrating tome Crisis and Leviathan.) If one is looking for an example of the indissoluble identification of popular government and public administration, Murray observed, then the early twentieth century and the “reforming presidencies” of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are a suitable starting point. Murray was particularly useful to me in his discussion of the Wilson administration and in his painstaking demonstration of how Wilsonian progressives used war, and the opportunity for mobilization that it provided, to expand the scope of “democratic” government.

Much of what I had been taught as a graduate student about the bellicose, statist thinking of the imperial German government created by Otto von Bismarck was even truer of the later progressive administrations in the United States. Wilson and his followers simply pushed forward to a new level of control what Europeans had begun in their efforts to modernize their bureaucratic regimes. American historians and journalists have been hypocritical in their unstinting praise of Wilson and FDR for repressive and collectivist practices that they condemn in less explicitly left-of-center governments. Whatever forms modern public administration took in the earlier period were arguably less, not more, extreme than the ones that they would later assume in the twentieth century. The fact the term “democratic” has been attached to the American experiment, a practice that would have horrified the founders of this country, has not rendered the wartime government of Wilson any less illiberal.

The third lesson I took from Murray is that social democracy and its “liberal democratic” welfare state variations may be more harmful for Western societies than the policies of communist regimes. Europe survived communism. The Soviet garrison-state empire, which our journalists and academics predictably whitewashed, has collapsed. But the more gradualist approach to bureaucratic statism in the West has not been rejected; and it continues to enjoy a support system in the U.S. that embraces the two national political parties, the administrative-educational class, and the media. Whence Murray’s witty observation: “It is the Mensheviks, not the Bolsheviks, who threaten us the most.” That is to say, it is the expanding welfare state, one that intervenes pervasively into social and family policy, that constitutes the most dangerous threat to constitutional freedom.

Despite his attacks on “the state” as such, and the ingenious arguments he constructed against its claims on the individual, arguments that David Gordon examines with precision, Murray was aware that the modern democratic welfare state is unique. It can reconstruct social relations and redistribute earnings with remarkably little opposition; and its claim to govern in the name of equality and its use of modern surveillance techniques make it difficult to check. It nurtures the illusion that the people are in charge because party oligarchies arrange periodic elections and because the administrative state creates proliferating social programs while skimming money from the top. One of Murray’s more inventive students, the German social economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, has argued in his book Democracy: The God That Failed that lovers of ordered freedom would do well to consider a return to monarchy. After all, kings were only concerned that their families live well in a state that they would pass on to their children. Modern democracy is an exercise in expanding patronage carried out by rotating party elites and by parasitic public administrators. Murray, to his credit, encouraged such irreverent thinking about the type of government that “democratic” administrators and overreaching executives have bestowed upon us.

Although young readers are urged to read Murray Rothbard in the original (his prose is truly engaging), David Gordon’s biography provides a fine introduction to this feast of ideas. Gordon lays out his subject’s major insights as an economist, ethicist, and historian. The biographical sections are also well worth reading, and it is hard to absorb them without feeling enormous affection for both Murray and his wife and helper of many years, JoAnn. On the purely human level, these two friends were heads and shoulders above most other people I have met in this lifetime.