PREVIEW

Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard (Book/ Hardcover)

Product Overview

These memos by Murray Rothbard, written in the 1950s and early 1960s, were kept under wraps for fifty years. They were commissioned by the William Volker Fund and concerned most every important thinker and book of the period. Through them, Rothbard provided guidance for the publishing and philanthropic efforts of the Fund itself, which was the main flame for liberty in these dark times.

Rothbard’s writing is deeply insightful, brazenly honest, and penetrating in every way, as he treats every subject from strategy to historical scholarship. These memos have never before been published, and they provide a different perspective on the mind of a great and pioneering thinker.

The William Volker Charities Fund was a philanthropic organization established by the William Volker Company of Kansas City, Missouri, a western furniture distributor. Loren "Red" Miller, a municipal reformer who had fought the Pendergast political machine, becoming in the process a dedicated friend of laissez-faire liberalism, became acquainted with William Volker and converted Volker and his nephew, Harold W. Luhnow, to the cause. By the late 1940s, Luhnow, as head of the Volker Fund, undertook to subsidize libertarian scholarship in those dark days of triumphant New Deal corporatism and overseas adventurism.

Luhnow provided funding for Ludwig von Mises at NYU and for Friedrich von Hayek at the University of Chicago. With dedicated staffers such as Herbert C. Cornuelle, Richard Cornuelle, Ivan Bierly, and others, the Volker Fund provided much needed support for the small number of rising libertarian scholars. Alongside a handful of other free-market organizations, the Volker Fund played an indispensable role in the post-war free-market revival.

Rothbard began his consulting work for the Volker Fund in 1951. This relationship lasted until 1962, when the Volker Fund was dissolved. A major part of Rothbard's work consisted of reading and evaluating books, journal articles, and other materials. On the basis of written reports by Rothbard and another reader - Rose Wilder Lane - the directors would decide whether to undertake massive distribution of particular works to public libraries.

About the Author(s)

David Gordon is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He was educated at UCLA, where he earned his PhD in intellectual history. He is the author of Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Exploitation, Freedom, and Justice, The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, and Critics of Marx. He is also editor of Secession, State, and Liberty and co-editor of H.B. Acton's Morals of Markets and Other Essays. Dr. Gordon is the editor of The Mises Review, and a contributor to such journals as Analysis, The International Philosophic Quarterly, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, and The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.