Contribuições de Murray N. Rothbard - Economia (3):

o Tratado "Man, Economy and The State - Power and Markets"

Está presentemente, a ser colocado online em HTML no Mises Institute. Tem 1544 páginas. No prefácio, afirma como objectivo fazer um verdadeiro Tratado (completo e desenvolvido em cada tema), na velha tradição da Economia.

Ludwig von Mises: "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 knowlege will have to take full account of the theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard."

Justin Raimundo resume o seu trabalho: "The author of 20 books and more than 1,000 articles, Murray N. Rothbard has been a mentor and an inspiration to the partisans of liberty since the early 1950's. If he had written only Man, Economy, and State, it would have been enough to secure him a permanent place among the luminaries of libertarian thought. As it is, the astonishing range of his writings, from economics to ethics to history to political journalism, reveals the mind of a polymath, so unlike the modern intellectual's narrowness of vision that the two seem representative of different species. He is comfortable everywhere, and just as capable of turning out a knock 'em-sock 'em political polemic as of writing the magisterial Man, Economy, and State."

No prefácio de Rothbard:

One of the unhappy casualties of World War I, it seems, was the old-fashioned treatise on economic “principles.” Before World War I, the standard method, both of presenting and advancing economic thought, was to write a disquisition setting forth one’s vision of the corpus of economic science.
(...)
Since the brilliant burst that gave us the works of Wicksteed (1910), Taussig (1911), and Fetter (1915), this type of treatise has disappeared from economic thought, and economics has become appallingly fragmented, dissociated to such a degree that there hardly is an economics any more; instead, we find myriad bits and pieces of uncoordinated analysis.

Economics has, first, been frag­mented into “applied” fields—“urban land economics,” “agricul­tural economics,” “labor economics,” “public finance economics,” etc., each division largely heedless of the others. More grievous still has been the disintegration of what has been confined to the category of “economic theory.” Utility theory, monopoly theory, international trade theory, etc., down to linear programming and games theory—each moves in its sharply isolated compartment, with its own hyperrefined literature.
(...)
I think it fair to say that, with only a single exception (Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action), not one general treatise on economic principles has appeared since World War I. Perhaps the closest approach was Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, and that was published far back in 1921. Since then, there has been no book of remotely as broad a scope.
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This book, then, is an attempt to fill part of the enormous gap of 40 years’ time. Since the last treatise on economic “prin­ciples,” economics has proceeded a long way in many areas, and its methodology has been immeasurably improved and strength­ened by those continuing to work in the praxeological tradition. Furthermore, there are still great gaps in the praxeological corpus, since so few economists have worked at shaping it. Hence, the attempt in this book to develop the edifice of economic science in the manner of the old-fashioned works on its “principles”—slowly and logically to build on the basic axioms an integrated and coherent edifice of economic truth.
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Human Action is a general treatise, but not an old-style Prin­ciples. Instead, it assumes considerable previous economic knowl­edge and includes within its spacious confines numerous philo­sophic and historical insights. In one sense, the present work attempts to isolate the economic, fill in the interstices, and spell out the detailed implications, as I see them, of the Misesian structure. It must not be thought, however, that Professor Mises is in any way responsible for these pages. Indeed, he may well differ strongly with many sections of this volume. Yet it is my hope that this work may succeed in adding a few bricks to the noble struc­ture of economic science that has reached its most modern and developed form in the pages of Human Action.

The present work deduces the entire corpus of economics from a few simple and apodictically true axioms: the Fundamental Axiom of action—that men employ means to achieve ends, and two subsidiary postulates: that there is a variety of human and natural resources, and that leisure is a consumers’ good.