The Forgotten Contribution : Murray Rothbard on Socialism in Theory and Practice

This paper documents and articulates Murray N. Rothbard’s contribution to our understanding of the theory and practice of socialism. We summarize his theoretical contributions and then turn to his explanation of the operation of socialism in the Soviet Union. Moreover, we make and support the conjecture that Rothbard, writing in the 1950s and 60s, anticipated allthe major subsequent developments in the economic analysis regarding the problems of the Soviet economy and allthe major works in comparative political economy for real-existing socialism in the Soviet Union