Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt of an article originally published on the author’s Substack on August 17, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Here, with a few comments on each, are the top ten books that have influenced me in my career as an Austro-libertarian economist. I will not make substantive comments about each. Rather, I intend to personalize my impressions of each and indicate what they have meant to me.
1. Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action heads up my list. I remember, fondly, well, in an embarrassed sort of way, one of my earliest days in the movement. I was in Murray Rothbard’s house, who had recently converted me to the anarchist position, and I saw a picture of Mises on his wall. I challenged Murray: “Why do you have a picture of Mises on your wall; he’s not an anarchist, he’s a statist?” Murray just smiled gently at me and said that I would understand one of these days. I feel so embarrassed now that I was such an idiot then, but I suppose confession is good for the soul. One of the great benefits of being associated with the Mises Institute is that I get to go to a week-long seminar where a bunch of us, old timers and young new scholars, chew over this book. It is a very exhilarating experience, to say the least. As a result of these seminars, plus reading on my own, I must have gone through Human Action, oh, maybe, a dozen times in my life. I haven’t read it through each time, but, boy oh boy, do I get something from it every time I look at it. I don’t like to brag, but I actually met Mises. I attended the very last seminar he gave at New York University. He was very weak then, couldn’t speak up, could hardly hear the questions put to him, but what an honor to have actually been in the same room with this giant of liberty and rational economics. The Mises Institute also organizes a week-long seminar during the summer devoted to the study of this book.
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2. Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State is a close second for me. Indeed, the decision as to which one comes first, and which one comes second, HA or MES, was an exceedingly difficult one for me to make. It is similar to me to the choice between Bach and Mozart, my two favorite composers. To me, there are few greater pleasures than reading either of these two books while listening to the music of these two composers. I first started reading MES in the early days of my association with Murray, in about 1966. It was a schizophrenic experience. During the day I would read this book, and at night I would go over to his house to play Risk, to gossip, to cackle … and to seriously discuss economics, politics, history, philosophy, and pretty much everything under the sun. My weirdness manifested itself in the following way: I couldn’t understand why this great man would condescend to have anything to do with young, worthless me. I was a student for goodness’ sake, never having accomplished anything; he was to Austro-libertarianism what Bach and Mozart are to music. So, I resolved I would try to become worthy of being in his august presence. How? By being hypercritical of him. (Don’t ask; I was a weirdo. I still am in some ways, although at least some of my rough edges have been knocked off through time.) I am amazed that he had so much patience with me. Looking back on this experience, I now see that all he wanted to do was, amazingly, be friends with me. I guess I just wasn’t ready for that in those years. Happily, later on, I was able to accept his friendship. I can’t fully explain what it meant to me to be an actual friend of Murray Rothbard’s for decades. It doesn’t get much better than that.
3 and 4. Rothbard’s For a New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty. I don’t know why, but I always viewed these two books as part of a larger one-volume set—similar to the amalgamation of Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market. One explains what liberty is all about in a philosophical way, the other how it would work from a practical point of view. I was especially taken with Murray’s evisceration, at the end of The Ethics of Liberty, of the views of Isaiah Berlin, F.A. Hayek, and Robert Nozick. Probably, if I were to be accurate, I would mention three or four others of Murray’s books in my top ten. But, I am nothing if not a believer in affirmative action, in this case for other scholars who have influenced me. Obviously, my own career is modeled, to the best of my ability at least, on Murray’s example. I have been sometimes called “a pale carbon copy of Rothbard.” It was meant as an insult, but I take this as the highest form of praise possible.
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5. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is my fifth most influential book, but she is by far my favorite novelist. (My second favorite is Chaim Potok). This book was first published in 1957, and more than 50 years later, it is still selling like hotcakes. Atlas Shrugged is to be credited with converting more people to libertarianism than any other book. Heck, more than any other ten, twenty, and maybe one hundred books. Random House-Modern Library once surveyed their customers to ascertain their favorite books, and, you guessed it, Atlas Shrugged took the very first place out of the hundred mentioned on their list; astoundingly, three others of her publications also made the top ten. They also polled their employees, but nothing written by Ayn Rand appeared anywhere on that top hundred list. (I thank Mike Peinovich for directing me to this URL.) I first read Atlas in 1963, when I was 22 years old. I read it straight through—except for that horrid Galt speech; I simply couldn’t put it down. Since then, I have read it every 10 years or so, at a more moderate rate, but I still get a lot out of it every time. Some people, libertarians even, criticize Atlas Shrugged as simplistic, one-dimensional, poorly written. As far as I’m concerned, the words she wrote fairly leap off the page at the reader, grab him by the throat, and never ever let go. This is a magnificent novel…
Discover the remaining books on Walter Block’s list here and explore what other Minding the Campus contributors are reading and reviewing here.
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