ABSTRACT

However, I had reservations about “mainstream” neoclassical economics. As an undergraduate economics major I was attracted to Austrian school writers such as Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, and Murray Rothbard and eagerly read as many of their books and articles as I could find (with limited understanding). During my graduate studies I was a research fellow of the Mises Institute and developed a personal relationship with Rothbard, the great libertarian polymath and the most dazzling intellectual I have ever known. I also read a lot of Hayek, working at Stanford as a research assistant for W. W. Bartley, III, founding editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. Bartley was also working on intellectual biographies of Hayek and Karl Popper, his own mentor. 1 At seminars and conferences I met leading contemporary practitioners of the Austrian school including Israel Kirzner, Mario Rizzo, Joseph Salerno, Roger Garrison, Gerald O’Driscoll, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and I became immersed in the Austrian literature, as well as the neoclassical economics and transaction cost economics that were central to my PhD program. My interests were idiosyncratic, to say the least.