Bryan Caplan recently blogged about “the awful” John Stuart Mill, calling him ”shockingly muddled.”
Rothbard, more than perhaps any other scholar, exposed Mill’s muddleheadedness and its likely roots. His verdict on Mill was that he was a “woolly minded man of mush” and his philosophy “a vast kitchen midden of diverse and contradictory positions.”
Rothbard’s most extensive discussion of Mill can be found in Classical Economics, the second volume of his history of economic thought.
David Gordon will be teaching an online course on that volume starting April 24. Rothbard’s profiles of Mill and other classical economists are so full and lively, that this should be one of Dr. Gordon’s most fun and fascinating courses yet!
