Preface by David Gordon

ROBERTA MODUGNO HAS IN HER scholarly career made a habit of “getting there first.” She wrote the first book in any language on the thought of Murray Rothbard, Murray N. Rothbard e l’anarco-capitalismo americano, published by Rubbettino in 1998, and she also is the author of the first Italian book on Mary Wollstonecraft’s political thought. In the present book, she has once more led the way.

Murray Rothbard was a prolific scholar, as a mere glance at his bibliography will disclose. But his published books and articles, even including those that have appeared posthumously, do not exhaust his scholarly contributions. When he died in January 1995, he left his papers and correspondence to the Mises Institute. The most important of these papers, from the point of view of libertarian scholarship, consist of reports he wrote when he worked for the William Volker Fund. In these reports, Rothbard commented on a wide variety of subjects, including economics, history, political theory, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Like Terence, Rothbard could say, “Nothing human is alien to me.” These reports often provide more details of his views on particular points than are available from his published books; in some cases, these reports raise altogether new issues.

It is Roberta Modugno’s great merit to have been the first scholar to make some of this material available to the public. After she gained access to the unpublished papers, she published (also with Rubbettino) a selection of them, translated into Italian, in 2005. The present book is the first publication of these papers in their original English.

Besides the papers, the book includes Professor Modugno’s scholarly introduction, which stresses Rothbard’s relations to the thought of Leo Strauss and Friedrich von Hayek. In addition, she has provided detailed explanatory notes to the selections.

Even experienced students of Rothbard will learn much from this book. His criticism of social Darwinism in the first selection is of classic stature; and he makes a searching criticism of Hayek on the rule of law. In his discussion of Caroline Robbins, his amazing depth of scholarship is present in full force. Although Robbins had just completed the first comprehensive study of British classical liberalism in the eighteenth century, Rothbard was able to correct and add to her findings.

The nine selections published here form only a small sample of the unpublished papers; future books will make many more of them available. But Roberta Modugno was there first.

DAVID GORDON

Ludwig von Mises Institute