The following story is part of Walter Block's Autobiography Archive.

Reflections on Becoming an Austrian Economist and Libertarian, and Staying One

by Peter Boettke
by E. C. Pasour, Jr.

I am flattered that Walter invited me to contribute to this list of reflections on how one became a libertarian. Like most things in life, there is a simple answer, and a complicated one. The simple answer is that in 1979 I ended up at Grove City College and was exposed to the lectures and then writings of Dr. Hans Sennholz. Within a very short period I was a convert to the principles of the private property order and saw government as more the source of problems than the solution to them. Sennholz pointed me in the direction of the Austrian school of economics and I decided to become a professional economist. But everyone at Grove City was exposed to Sennholz’s wonderful lectures in classes and a few times every year in our morning church obligation. His lectures sang to me from the first time I heard them and unlike many of my classmates I loved the tune. So much so in fact, that I decided to become an academic economist.

Why Sennholz’s lectures resonated with me is something I’ve thought about for close to 20 years. To be honest, his lectures made sense to me because they fit with lessons I had been taught by my father and my athletic coaches since I could remember. Simple lessons about the dedication to individual excellence and the personal responsibility one must take in achieving success or experiencing failure. Competition I was taught brings out the best in us, and Sennholz seemed to me to be simply applying that lesson to economic life. My father is without doubt the greatest influence on me. He was not an intellectual, but he was a staunch individualist. He was an independent businessman and a great outdoorsman who was probably more comfortable on the ocean deep-sea fishing than in doing anything else. In his youth he was a standout athlete (tennis and basketball) and then served in the US Army Aircorp during WWII. He spent the last 18 months of this episode in prisoner of war camp in Germany. While he was proud of this service to the US, my father refused to take advantage of any of the benefits due to him afterwards (GI Bill, etc.) and even later in life when financial hardship hit he refused to take advantage of any government help available to him. He believed that you were responsible for your own life and should not be beholden to anyone else. I cannot say whether my brother and sister got the same lesson from my father, but that is one of the lessons I got from him – create your own opportunities in this world and capitalize on them. If you fail to capitalize or your project fails, look in the mirror and bear the responsibility. My Dad thought sports taught you these lessons, and that they were vital to leading a successful life. As he often said to me, "I was not put on this earth to praise you, but to raise you." My father respected excellence and encouraged his children to excel in whatever endeavors they engaged in – "The cream will rise to the top." Though he was not an intellectual, my father respected academic success and encouraged it in me.

Academically speaking I was a late bloomer. I was not very studious in high school and instead devoted myself to athletics, and in particular basketball. I practiced basketball for endless hours throughout my teenage years. The only books I read were basketball stories and my choice of colleges was limited to those schools where I was expected to play basketball. After graduating from high school I worked that summer at Lehigh Valley Basketball Camp in Pennsylvania and then headed off to Thiel College in the fall of 1978 with the idea of majoring in education so I could coach high school basketball upon graduation. I found only two courses of value at Thiel College – a philosophy course (which I took pass/fail), and a philosophy of education course where we read Plato’s Republic. My basketball playing that year ended early in the fall with a broken ankle and the injury would reoccur in the spring as I was trying to recover from the first break. My first year of college was one of disappointment and disillusionment. As a boy from New Jersey, the rural Pennsylvania town of Greenville did not possess the charm to me that it did to many of my classmates. I didn’t find my classes illuminating. Basketball wasn’t working out on several fronts – the team was lousy, and my injuries prevented me from achieving goals I had set for myself. My disillusionment with Thiel College was compounded by the death of my maternal grandfather who I was very close to, and my homesickness for New Jersey, family, and especially my girlfriend (now wife) Rosemary. One of the assistant coaches, Glen Salow, who had played for the Christian Fellowship team of Athletes in Action, noticed my depression and took me on as a special project. He would visit me in my dorm room, talk basketball and cajoled me to attend Bible Study classes with him. He realized well before I did, that my future would not be at Thiel College. He convinced me to try to transfer to Grove City College and he communicated with the coaching staff of the basketball team at Grove City, and a faculty member he was friendly with through Christian Outreach, Reed Davis. My decision to transfer to Grove City College was solidified when Rosemary decided to attend the college as well. So I transferred in the summer of 1979 and began college over again that fall as a freshman at Grove City College – my grades at Thiel were not exemplary and except for the intervention of the coaching staff I never would have been admitted.

Reed Davis taught my mandatory course in Religion and Philosophy and both the reading material and his engaging style caught my imagination and sparked an interest in me in thinking abstractly and seriously about pressing issues of the day. Through Reed I was introduced to the writings of theologians and philosophers. We read classic works like St. Augustine’s City of God as well as more contemporary works like Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (we also watched the video series) and Michael Polanyi’s Science, Faith and Society. In high school I found history, biology and geometry to be of interest, though I didn’t exert much energy into pursuing those interests at that time. At Grove City I started to realize that if I exerted a little bit of effort to read the material, the material became more (not less) interesting.

I also had my first course in economics. Being introduced to the logic of economics was a truly transformative experience for me. The summer before I headed off to Grove City College I had held a job digging pools for a short stint (before switching to a job at a factory producing electronic parts for communication systems). This was the summer of 1979, and there was a gasoline shortage. In order to fill up the truck to go on our jobs, we had to wait on long lines or siphon gasoline from one truck to another. During the first week of economics a supply and demand curves were drawn on the board explaining why there was a shortage of gasoline (because of the artificially low government set price) and I was hooked. Economics explained the world to me. I was also that semester introduced to the writings of Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt and Ludwig von Mises. For Christmas that year I gave my father a copy of Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose. I still was more concerned with athletics and social life, than academics at this point. My ankle injuries would continue to plague my basketball playing at Grove City, but during my rehabilitations I discovered a new sports outlet – tennis (a sport my Dad had introduced me to as a young teenager but which I did not take to at the time), and I ended up playing on the tennis team at Grove City all four years and worked at various tennis jobs in the summers throughout college (never again digging a pool, or working on an assembly line). Moreover, I enjoyed an active social life in my fraternity and would serve as president my senior year. As I look back on my years at Grove City, however, it was during that first year that I became overwhelmed by the arguments in economics and philosophy. My career goals shifted over the next few years from high school basketball coach, to sports agent, to academic economist. After a trip to the Foundation for Economic Education in the beginning of my junior year, Sennholz invited me to join his graduate seminar, which I did for the last 3 semesters of school. I was the only undergraduate in that seminar as the other participants were all studying under Sennholz for advanced degrees through the International College in California. In Sennholz’s seminar we read Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Eugen Bohm-Bawerk and of course Ludwig von Mises. I did my senior year project on the methodenstreit and, in particular, the relationship between Max Weber and Mises. During this time I also started to become aware of the Austrian movement outside of Grove City College.

The Mises Institute was founded during my senior year of college, and a PhD program at Auburn seemed promising. Through the Institute for Humane Studies and in particular Walter Grinder (a Grove City College alumni himself) I found out about the program at George Mason University and of course all of us who wanted to study Austrian economics knew about the New York University program under the direction of Israel M. Kirzner. I also consulted with Bettina Bien Greaves at the Foundation for Economic Education. So after graduation from Grove City College, I decided to forgo law school (which I was set to do to pursue my career as a sports agent) and instead took a job teaching tennis at a local tennis club in New Jersey and prepare for the GREs and head off to graduate school in economics the following year. Oh, I also got married that summer to my high school and college sweetheart and this past June Rosemary and I celebrated our 20^th anniversary. (We also have two wonderful boys Matthew and Stephen and live in Fairfax, VA).

By the time I graduated from Grove City College, I was deeply committed to Austrian economics and especially the teachings of Ludwig von Mises, and the political philosophy of libertarianism as found in the writings of Murray Rothbard. Between college and graduate school I also had a fascination with the writings of Ayn Rand, though even then I was more impressed with her novels than her philosophy. I had read Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard and of course Sennholz. I also read Milton Friedman (who I loved) and F. A. Hayek (who I hated) at the time. My copy of The Road to Serfdom still has broken binding because of when I threw it across my dorm-room at Grove City after reading an argument by Hayek on why immunization by the government was an acceptable policy. Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable was a particular favorite of mine during my college days, as was For a New Liberty. Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State was my economics bible even more so than Mises, but that was because at the time I thought of the book as the true ‘Mises made easier’ version for serious readers. I aspired to understand Mises; I thought I understood Rothbard. Hayek, to me, was a sell out. My appreciation of Hayek as a scholar and as a defender of the liberal order would only come about after reading Law, Legislation and Liberty during my first year in graduate school. I followed that up with his Studies and New Studies collections and I was persuaded that Hayek was more important as a thinker than I had been giving him credit for being.

In 1984 I started graduate school at George Mason University and worked at the Center for the Study of Market Processes. Richard Fink arranged a fellowship for me and I was assigned to work with Don Lavoie on the Center’s publication, Market Process. At Grove City College, I would often voice my opinions about policy positions or methodological issues in the social sciences, but except for rare occasions I did not spend any time discussing these topics with my fellow classmates. I would instead state my opinion and then get out of the conversation. The fact that I can vividly remember the few heated discussions I had with my classmates and teachers is testimony of their infrequent nature – e.g., with R. C. Sproul, Jr. (son of the well-known protestant theologian) about Misesian apriorism, with classmates over the environment in a senior seminar on Values and Technology, and with Dr. Sennholz on the libertarian position on abortion. I was rather opinionated in these debates and wasn’t in them to engage the other party, but to preach to them the gospel of truth as I saw it. During a particularly heated debate with my parents one time while driving, my father pulled the car over and looked at me and simply said "Who the hell is this Professor Rothbard you keep talking about?" I replied that he was a professor at Columbia (I didn’t know he just received his degree from there) and my father said something like "It figures, only someone at Columbia could think such crazy thoughts." On another occasion I told my future father-in-law that FDR was the worst president and that it was because of him and the people that voted for him that my generation had their liberties increasingly stripped away. As you can imagine, no matter how correct I might have been in my stance these sorts of debate tactics were not very successful. I had neatly divided the world into those who were evil, those who were stupid and those who agreed with me.

At George Mason this would all change. I was surrounded by people who had read more than me, knew more than me, and were more comfortable arguing their position rather than just stating it. I was completely enamored of Rich Fink, who, like myself, was from New Jersey. He possessed a tireless energy and a dynamic personality. I was at the same time awestruck by Don Lavoie, who I thought a scholar of the first-rank (it was his Journal of Libertarian Studies article on the socialist calculation debate that persuaded me to study with him at George Mason). My first mentors at GMU, however, were fellow students, in particular, Roy Cordato, Karen Palasek (Roy’s wife), Wayne Gable and Deborah Walker. With these students I could discuss ideas and learn what the latest arguments were for a free society. Roy and Karen ran a reading group where we read The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, and they were the original managing editors of Market Process, and guided me through the ropes as I took over as managing editor. Through Wayne and Deb I also got on the Cato Institute softball team and through that I met the different libertarian activists downtown – Ed Crane and eventually David Boaz and Tom Palmer as well (though they didn’t play softball with us). Through Roy, I met Sheldon Richman. I also was invited by Walter Grinder to attend the summer seminar in Austrian economics sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies at Marquette University, where I met for the first time Israel Kirzner, Mario Rizzo, Gerald O’Driscoll, and Roger Garrison. It was at this seminar (where I spent much of my time with Grinder and Martin Anderson, then of IEA, drinking beer, playing pool and talking about economics and libertarianism) that I became convinced that I could do Austrian economics for a living. My association with the Institute for Humane Studies would grow closer over the next few years as I was a summer fellow for 2 years (including 1 where Ralph Raico was the program director) and attended several seminars and then eventually became a faculty member in those seminars. Grinder and Leonard Liggio were very influential on me, both in terms of their suggestions of research projects one could explore and the way one should interact with interested students to build an academic community of libertarian scholars. I cannot say enough about these two men and the work they did for young scholars such as myself in the 1970s and 1980s.

Working closely with Don Lavoie on Market Process also put me in contact with all the leading Austrian economists at the time as I would be reading their books and writing to them to get book reviews or essays to be published in this publication. I was fascinated with the socialist calculation argument since I first read Mises back in my freshman year at Grove City College and Lavoie’s 1985 books on the calculation debate and the application of the Mises/Hayek argument to contemporary public policy were being completed and published my first two years of graduate school. Don became my mentor and close friend. His deep love of the ideas in Mises and Hayek was contagious. Don organized reading groups in economics and philosophy. Moreover, we talked constantly about radical libertarianism. Don’s death in 2001 was a tragic loss to his family, his former students, and the community of scholars interested in liberty and Austrian economics.

It was through our working together for Don Lavoie, and our shared interest in the socialist calculation debate, that I formed my closest friendship in graduate school with David Prychitko. Dave and I did not meet immediately in graduate school, but by the mid-term of microeconomics we became study-buddies and after that we essentially became inseparable. A year later we brought Steve Horwitz under our wings and along with Don Lavoie formed the core of a group who met almost daily to discuss philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas. It was an amazing period for me and one that I have sought to recreate for my own students (however imperfectly) ever since. Dave, Steve and I took full advantage of our time at GMU in the late 1980s and we studied with James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Kenneth Boulding, Tom DiLorenzo, Viktor Vanberg, and Michael Alexeev, in addition to Don Lavoie, Jack High, George Selgin, Don Boudreaux, and Karen Vaughn at the Center for the Study of Market Processes. We also got to know personally Ludwig Lachmann, during his annual visits, and also developed professional relationships with Donald (now Deirdre) McCloskey, Arjo Klamer, Bruce Caldwell and in my own case Warren Samuels. These individuals were tremendously instrumental in our careers because they engaged us not as graduate students, but as colleagues early on in the process of research and writing. As a result Dave, Steve and I all left graduate school with multiple publications under our belts besides our dissertations, a network of professional contacts in the fields of history of thought, comparative systems and Austrian economics, and tremendous self-confidence that we were going to make positive contributions to economic science and the broader libertarian project of changing the world.

It was also during our time at GMU that we met Murray Rothbard at several events sponsored by the Mises Institute at its office in DC. Rothbard was perhaps the most engaging personality I have ever met in academia. Certainly he was the funniest, and also someone who seemed to combine a joy of life with a seriousness of intellectual purpose that is unrivaled in my experience (though Kenneth Boulding shared this characteristic with Rothbard to a considerable extent). By the time I met Rothbard I was far too heavily under the influence of my professors at George Mason and what I was taught about the way a young Austrian and libertarian professor had to make their arguments within the contemporary academic landscape to be influenced by Rothbard’s criticisms of that approach. But I was not impervious to his wit and charm – and it is this wit and charm, combined with the brilliance of intellect that I remember from my first reading and then meeting him that I constantly think about when I teach from the writings of the great Murray Rothbard. I was not fortunate enough to have met him when I was totally engrossed in his work as an undergraduate, but I was privileged enough to sit for his lectures on the history of economic thought, spend time with him in casual conversation over dinner one night in DC, and at a party at Roy Cordato’s house in Maryland and on another occasion, to actually debate him in the pages of The American Libertarian, see him lecture to a group of libertarians in Michigan, attend his 60^th birthday party, and the memorial service for him in NYC after his far too early death. When I first started teaching (and even today) I would listen to tapes of Rothbard lectures and try to imitate his ability to combine theory, history and jokes to convey the principles of economics to those who are innocent of its teachings.

I finished graduate school in 1988 and joined the faculty at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. At Oakland I had the good fortune to meet Edward Weick, who stumbled into my joint graduate/undergraduate course in economic history the first term I was teaching there. The books I assigned in that class were Robert Higgs, Crisis and Levithan and Mises’s Theory and History. Ed ate up the material. Ed is a successful businessman in the investment field and possesses a probing mind. During his MBA program at University of Michigan in the 1970s, Ed had to read Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty and this led him to study the ideas of the liberal economists, such as Mises and Friedman, and try to integrate their teachings into his practical understanding of the world. From Ed I have learned a great deal about the art of using Austrian insights to interpret the contemporary world of business and politics. Austrian economics is not just books and abstract ideas to Ed, but living ideas that are very relevant to the everyday world. We have stayed close over the years, and he has been a great friend and perhaps the primary reason I have not just succumbed to purely ivory tower antics in my academic career.

Oakland was a good first job. The department was collegial and put a premium on publishing in the professional journals. I was able to do that and in 1990, I had the great opportunity to join the faculty at New York University and work with Mario Rizzo and Israel Kirzner. I consider the 8 years I was associated with New York University to be my real education in Austrian economics. Grove City introduced me to these ideas, and George Mason allowed me to pursue the study of them, but it was under the watchful eyes of Israel Kirzner that I really learned Austrian economics and classical liberalism. Being at NYU exceeded all my expectations. In 1992-1993 I had the opportunity to spend the year at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University as a National Fellow. It was an absolutely amazing year, as I got to know scholars such as Robert Conquest, Gary Becker and Milton Friedman and also engage in many friendly conversations with Bill Evers and Robert Hessen. But, it was also during that year that I realized how much I missed not being at NYU with Rizzo and Kirzner. Libertarianism might define my political convictions, but Austrian economics is my passion. When I came back to NYU in 1993 I was determined to make the most of my time left at NYU with Rizzo and Kirzner in learning and promoting Austrian economics. I scaled back my interests in Sovietology and comparative political economy (not completely) and devoted most of my research and teaching interests for the next few years to history of the Austrian school and the methodology of the social sciences. We started Advances in Austrian Economics, a book series with New York University Press under the title The Political Economy of the Austrian School was launched, and I took over the directorship of the Austrian Summer Seminar (the same program I had attended as a student at Marquette). We also started a senior fellows program at NYU that brought in Joe Salerno, William Butos, Sanford Ikeda, Young Back Choi, and Roger Koppl as fixtures at the Austrian Economics Colloquium on Monday afternoons. The lunches (at Mario’s choice of restaurants within Greenwhich Village) and the seminars during those years were among the most enjoyable regular intellectual experiences of my career.

In 1997 I joined the faculty at Manhattan College and retained a Senior Fellow status at New York University (and even an office in the department, out of which I edited Advances in Austrian Economics). In 1998, however, my wife and I made the difficult decision for us to leave the New Jersey/New York area and relocate our family to Virginia where I joined the faculty at George Mason University. 1998 is also the year I was named the editor of The Review of Austrian Economics by Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Through the generous support of various foundations and individual donors I have been able to establish various activities at GMU that support Austrian economics and libertarian research. At GMU I have great colleagues to work with in this regard, from Walter Williams who was the chair when I was hired to Don Boudreaux, the current chairman; Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan are two of the most knowledgeable and interesting economists I know; Richard Wagner, Charles Rowley, Jim Bennett, Karen Vaughn, David Levy, along with James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock and Vernon Smith all make GMU the best place for someone of my interests to teach and conduct research in Austrian economics and libertarianism. In recent years we have also hired Alex Tabarrok, Larry Iannaccone, and Russell Roberts to add to the GMU staple of economists who make the place not only by far the most free market department in the world, but also the one with the most variety of scholarly interests and styles of research. Perhaps the best part of GMU is the students we attract to our program. I have had the good fortune to work with an outstanding group of students since coming to GMU – Edward Stringham, Ben Powell, John Robert Subrick, Virgil Storr, Scott Beaulier, Chris Coyne and Peter Leeson to name but a few of those who have devoted themselves to Austrian economics and are pursuing careers in research and teaching. Others such as Veronique de Rugy (at CATO) have found their home in the policy world and are making a name for themselves in that arena. I also work with the Mercatus Center to develop a research and teaching program in the comparative political economy of world development and globalization. It is an exciting time for all of us at GMU and we look to the future with excitement and confidence that our cause will win out.

I became a libertarian because of one professor who introduced me to a set of ideas and books that I had no idea even existed before I took his classes. For that I will always be grateful to Dr. Sennholz. I also greatly appreciate those who took the time to nurture someone like myself – from Walter Grinder and Bettina Bien Greaves, who both encouraged me to attend graduate school in economics; to Don Lavoie, who devoted more time than I deserved to teaching me while I was in graduate school; to Israel Kirzner, who spent endless hours teaching me by example on how to be a professional teacher and researcher in this profession. It was because of these individuals that I developed into a professional economist and college professor.

In return, I now try to give back to my students as much as I possibly can. I tell them all that they should never lose their deep commitment to libertarianism, but instead use it as a tool for research productivity. The profession of economics demands that they present an argument at a certain level of sophistication and I try to convey to them that the harder they are on their own arguments the stronger those arguments will become. They should try to be sophisticated if they want to succeed in this business. But I also tell them constantly that they must never forget why they decided to become an economist in the first place – they must retain that youthful enthusiasm for the ideas of liberty. It is sophistication and enthusiasm that will win this race. It is my sincere belief that we have a great group of young "runners" now entering the race and that future victory is not just likely, but inevitable.

September 8, 2003

Peter Boettke [send him mail] is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the Deputy Director of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy. Boettke is also the Research Director of the Global Prosperity Initiative at the Mercatus Center. He is the author of The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism (1990), Why Perestroika Failed (1993), and Calculation and Coordination (2001).

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