I have read “For a New Liberty”, “The Case Against the Fed”, What Has Government Done to Our Money?" and “A History of Money and Banking”.
I now want to read “Conceived in Liberty”, “Man, Economy and the State” and “An Austrian Perspective on Economic Thought”.
Since these are larger reading projects, I want to approach them in the right order.
Can I please get some advice about what order to read these 3 works??
Thank you.
If I were you; I wouldn’t read Conceived In liberty; because it’s not really a good history as far as I know.
MES is probably his best contribution to economics, so I would focus on that on.
His history of economic thought isn’t that great either; a bit sloppy.
Definitely read Man, Economy and State with Power and Market next. If you haven’t read that or Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, you probably don’t know nearly as much about Austrian economics as you might think you do.
“I now want to read “Conceived in Liberty”, “Man, Economy and the State” and “An Austrian Perspective on Economic Thought”.”
Depends on what you are interested in…
History / political philosophy - Conceived in Liberty
Austrian Economics - MES
History / Austrian Economics - Aus perspective on econ thought.
There isnt really any right order.
What do you mean by “it’s not a good history”? Are the facts wrong or something else?
What, specifically, do you consider sloppy in this book? I’ve only read the first book, but I thought it was great. Admittedly, it’s not all correct, but nevertheless a valuable read.
Jonathan, are you copy and pasting from a text editor? Because it’s screwing up the formatting of the page. When you are posting, please click “Source” and remove all “
Daniel,
as far as I know, I’ve heard it being criticized as being (1) factually wrong in some occasions and (2) doing a bad job at interpreting history. But it’s only what I’ve heard: I’m not a historian, nor do I care much about the book in general. If you like it: feel free to like it.
Jonathan,
Rothbard does a very bad job contextualizing and presenting the views of some philosophers - e.g. Hegel and Smith - which means that I can’t trust him overall. His criticisms of the views his expounding is interesting, but he’s not doing a good job at presenting the views of the people he’s attacking. So it fails as a history of economic thought, imo.
By who? I’d like to read their criticisms.
How so? Please link me to the criticisms.
Given that you haven’t read the books, and thus, don’t have firsthand knowledge of whether the criticisms of the books are accurate and, furthermore, that you don’t care much the books in general, I don’t see why would recommend to someone that they not read the books.
Daniel,
they were mouth to mouth conversations, so no links can be provided. As far as I know; there is no criticism available of Conceived in Liberty; mainly because Rothbard wrote it outside the historical profession. That fact alone should make you weary of the book in general: we don’t expect a book that hasn’t been reviewed by peers to have no mistakes, I don’t see any reason to make an exception for Rothbard.
I have no problem recommending a book based on positive reviews in my environment and I have no problem recommending not to read a book based upon negative reviews in my environment.
But feel free to think otherwise.
I would however note: reading the book isn’t sufficient to be able to judge the historical accuracy of the book, for obvious reasons. It’s necessary, but not sufficient.
That’s one huge appeal to tradition.
Well, obviously.
I wasn’t talking about the historical accuracy of the books. I was talking about the accuracy of the criticism about the books.