Man, Economy and State - Study Guide

by Robert P. Murphy

In writing the Study Guide to Man, Economy, and State, he had his students in mind. He wanted to design a great teaching tool, one that would reach students the same way a private tutor would. He wanted to help Rothbard's magnum opus have permanent impact on their thinking.

He accomplished his goal! The guide provides a roadmap to this massive book, complete with summaries, technical notes, annotations of key contributions, and study questions. He puts it all into a manageable size, with 12 pages per chapter of the Scholar's Edition (which includes both Man, Economy, and State and Power and Market).
It is ideal for classroom use, and also for private study. Another use didn't occur to the author until after he finished it: he uses it to prepare lectures for class! He says now that he doesn't know how he taught without it before.

Murphy sought to write a teaching guide but he ended up writing a manual to Man, Economy, and State that will quickly become a staple of the literature. Would that every book of this size had such a guide (and, yes, he is working on one for Human Action too!), and would that every guide were as clear and useful as this one.

Professor Murphy is an extraordinary talent with a great gift for helping students understand economics. Now he can be your teacher too.

255 pages, spiral bound softcover

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction

255 pages, Ring-bound

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Robert P. "Bob" Murphy is an Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist.

Reviews

[Patrick S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book because Robert Murphy is one of my favorite Austrian economists and just a well round good guy. There isn't too much "Murphy-ism" here as it is more of a straight study guide. With such a difficult book as "Man, Economy and State" is, it was nice to have a review in this book of the key points. That really did help. There are some more examples that Murphy gives than is found in the original book. I would have liked to seen more examples and maybe different ways to think about the concepts Rothbard covered. Also, Murphy has study questions but the answers are not found in this book of them. As an independent learner in a non-classroom setting, this part of the book was almost useless although some of the questions have you thinking about implications of the ideas which would be good to cover. Don't look to this book to help explain more the original source but only as a review of it in a more broken down fashion with a few more examples. Final Grade - B