By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

[I wrote the following essay for a book celebrating the 100th birthday of Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). He was a dear friend and I'm proud to be part of this thrilling book, which will appear later in print. For now you can download it: Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Houston: Papinian Press, 2026)]

My introduction to Murray Rothbard came when I was 20 and sitting in the office of my political philosophy teacher. The professor had on his shelf a two-volume blue book called Man, Economy, and State (1962). The title was so stark that I asked about it. He warned me not to read it because the author is an anarchist. Fascinating. I excused myself and hurried to the library to get the book. It consumed my evenings for weeks.

Far from being an anarchist rant, it was a detailed defense of classic economics as it existed before John Maynard Keynes, alongside insights from Ludwig von Mises and some innovative theories concerning monopoly, utility, and other matters. It was sweeping, a real treatise on economic theory for which I had become intellectually desperate.

I learned later that this book was commissioned as a commentary on Mises's own book Human Action (1949) but took on a life of its own. Reading it from the first page to the last was the beginning of a journey that would consume my entire career.

Having only known him from these early works, I had this vision of Rothbard as a towering, all-knowing, and probably terrifying intellectual force. I was beside myself with nerves when I met him some three years later (1985 or so). I was astounded to meet a short man with a huge smile who seemed to find humor in everything. Though we had never met, he greeted me like an old friend.

From then on, I treated him as a friend, and we remained close for the next ten years before his death in 1995. The phone calls were nearly daily, and the letters back and forth frequent. He remains my muse to this day. (Ironically, my time knowing him overlaps almost exactly with Hans-Hermann Hoppe's ten years with Murray over the same time period.)

Far from being a dogmatic preacher of deductive truths—he came across this way in his earlier theoretical writings—the man I knew was liberally minded, radical and curious enough to entertain a huge range of ideas, broadly tolerant of a diversity of opinion, and endlessly and creatively curious. He was an absolute joy in any social framework, like a light that illuminated the entire room. To say something that sent him into uproarious laughter was a deeply satisfying achievement. And as Hoppe and others have pointed out, he had a singular genius, unlike any other I have encountered.

Rothbard was a voracious speed reader, inspired by his unquenchable desire to know. I once dropped him off at a university bookstore to search for a parking place. Finding none, I was back at the front entrance in 20 or so minutes. I found him on a bench reading, sitting next to a stack of books. Getting in my car, he sat down in the passenger seat and was speaking excitedly about what he had found. Stopping at a light he showed me some passages, and I was astounded to see a third of the book already marked up. He had done this already with several books. I simply could not believe my eyes. He read books the way others eat fast food.

He was often on deadline with my various projects. Once the fax machine came along—he loved it once he figured out how it worked—he would send in impressive works in under an hour. I can imagine his typing ferociously to get his ideas on paper. His mind worked far faster than any technology could record his thoughts. He always had long papers already composed in his head, complete with citations, and the only limit was finding the time to type.

As for his social interactions, he had this way of extracting knowledge and information from every source. If he knew you to be an expert on mathematics or ...