|Peter Boettke|
This will be old news to many of you, but when I was a graduate student Dave Prychitko, Steve Horwitz, and Deb Walker attended a series of lectures by Murray Rothbard in the history of economic thought. Rothbard was not only an intellectual historian, but an economic and political historian. He often would blend these various branches of history together in his narratives. Ideas have economic and political historical context, and economic and political events had ideas behind them.
He was an engaging lecturer and a bigger than life personality. Meeting him was an experience one doesn’t ever forget, and same with listening to his lectures. Soon after I attended his history of economic thought lectures, Laissez Faire Books was selling tapes of his lectures on economic and political history from the Civil War to contemporary times. I gobbled these up and would listen to them as I started to teaching so I could use examples that Rothbard so easily drew on to illustrate principles of economics. Then in 1988, when I moved to Oakland University in Michigan and was assigned to teach American Economic History, I listened even more intensely to his presentations so I could borrow liberally from his lectures to help me design the course.
These 1986 lectures are available online. Linked below is the lecture on monopoly — listen, learn and enjoy.