Man, Economy, and State

Rothbard’s systematic treatise on economics, built from the axiom that humans act purposefully and deriving the rest — value, exchange, prices, production, capital and interest, money — step by step without mathematics. It began as a textbook companion to Mises’s Human Action and became its own restatement of Austrian theory, notable for reconstructing production and capital theory in detail and for a long analysis of monopoly that rejects the standard textbook treatment. The later editions bind in Power and Market, Rothbard’s taxonomy of government intervention, which he had originally written as the final section and which pushes the treatise toward his anarcho-capitalist conclusions.

Why it’s on the list: It sits near the end of McCord’s Austrian School Economics section, after the Mises and Hayek primary works and their biographies — the entry that offers the school’s arguments as a single deductive system rather than a set of essays.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the Political Economy part, section Austrian School Economics — a structured curriculum shared on X on March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Marked with a ☑️ on the source page. The page gives no legend for that mark, so it is recorded here literally and not interpreted.

Connections

• The Machinery of Freedom — David Friedman’s consequentialist version of the same anarcho-capitalist conclusion, in McCord’s Anarcho-Capitalism section.
• The Last Knight of Liberalism — the biography of Mises, whose Human Action this treatise was written to follow.
• Capitalism — the system the treatise analyses.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.